Monday 21 May 2007
It was 51°F outside sunny and fine. We filled the water tank using Ola’s bore water.
Vebeke said it would have a slight clay colour but it looked wonderful to us. We actually used it all the way into Russia. Ola and Vibeke were very kind and generous hosts and it was great to see them again.
We were off at the respectable hour of 9.25 am following road 35 then E16 past Hønefoss. The landscape was typically Norwegian. Beautiful green fields, coloured houses with everything neat and clean, all reflecting the high standard of living of Norway.
Even though this area is reasonably flat, we soon zipped into a tunnel over a kilometre long. Pip marked it as number 24 since we had left Stavanger.
The Garmin GPS with the Scandinavian road map was fantastic.
We looked up the local attractions and it came up very quickly with the Fram Museum. One click of the ‘direct to’ button and we were given directions on how to get to the museum. The museum was located about 15 minutes away in Oslo.
We parked in the open air car park. We not only saw the extraordinary boat, The Fram, that Roald Amunsden had used in the Antarctic, we also saw, parked outside, The Gjoa – the ship that Amunsden had used for the first voyage of the North West passage. The Fram is all under cover with excellent interpreted signs in four languages including English.
Leaving the museum we passed large marinas and the city buildings of Oslo, through a tunnel on highway E18, and then headed towards the Swedish border. The GPS told us it was 522 kilometres to Stockholm.
We drove through green farms with red barns at Grenda and at Ramstad we could see the ramps leading into the barns where the animals sheltered during the winter.
We came to a tollbooth requiring a 20 Kroner coin. Unfortunately, we did not have the coin so we drove through – maybe we will get the bill via Alaska and Wilbur O’Brien in a few months time!
Just before the Swedish border, we stopped at the little town of Ørje as the map showed there was a canal museum. The museum was closed but the canal structure was fascinating. We spent half an hour walking up and down the locks and enjoying the area.
At the border there was a friendly Swedish customs man standing on the road. He asked us if we had anything illegal or anything to declare. He did not want to see our passports or any documentation at all. He then said in good English, “you can go”. Oh, it would be great if every border was as easy.
Two kilometres further on in the town of Töcksfors we stopped at a modern shopping centre similar to a Westfield in Australia. Dick bought a special screwdriver that has a particular type of Allen key head so we can drop down the fibreglass coupling around the battery pack. We had found that with the batteries left uncharged for six months in Scotland, they now would not take a charge and it meant that they would only run the inverter for four or five minutes before the voltage would drop and the inverter would switch off. This was quite a nuisance. To solve this problem we ran the motor of the car, however we were trying to work out whether we could replace or fix the batteries.
We had to do some food shopping but Dick got impatient and did not want to buy much so we left after about 20 minutes – Dick hates shopping so next time Pip is going to do the shopping on her own!! We were now on E18 heading towards Stockholm.
We noticed that the roads had improved in relation to the average speed compared to Norway. The Norwegians had said to us that they could never understand why their roads were not as good as other countries in Scandinavia. Of course, Norway has high mountains and narrow valleys so you cannot have roads of such high speed. The surface of the Norwegian road is as good in comparison to anywhere in the world, however, they are narrow and windy and speeds have to be low – this is good because you can enjoy the top scenery.
In Norway we seemed to sit on about 70kph sometimes 80kph. In Sweden, we were sitting on 90kph perfectly happily and with a high level of safety. It was 56°F outside as it started to rain. We had been testing the front fuel tank. We found that the front fuel tank would give us 737kms – we think this is about 5kms per litre.
Coming through Karlstad, we picked up the peak hour traffic as it was 4.00 pm and road works delayed the traffic. After 15-20 minutes, we were outside the town and moving at speed again. There were huge road works going on, obviously millions of dollars were being spent in removing the hillsides and curves to speed up the traffic.
At about 5.00 pm the rain stopped and we were driving through very green and productive farming areas.
Big factories beside the highways and big Ikea stores dotted the landscape – We always thought Ikea was an Australian company started on the highway at Pymble in Sydney!!!
As we passed through the town of Örebro, the GPS kept coming up with a message that there was another route. We misunderstood this and stuck to the original route, which ended up taking us to the north of the Malaren Sea instead of the more direct route to the south – this did not matter as we enjoyed the scenery. We passed through the town of Köping then Västeras.
At 7.35 pm, we stopped for the night at a service station at Ekolskrog.
This appeared to be about 60kms from Stockholm. It was obvious there were going to be no problems with spending the night there, as it was a nice secure place where many trucks were parked. Once we pulled the blinds up on the Earthroamer, no one would have any idea we were inside anyway. Dick turned on the TV and we watched Swedish television, some in English as we cooked dinner.
567kms Today 17,041kms Total since Anchorage, Alaska
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