The Arctic Highway

We rose with a great sense of anticipation of our impending Lofoten adventure; at 10:00 we were to set off with Nina on a ‘road trip’ up the E6 ‘Arctic Highway’ then on to Vesteraalen and the Lofoten archipelago. We had breakfast at the hotel and followed, where Nina joined us ready for the off. Before departing Bodø we headed to a local cafe’ favoured by Nina for coffee and milkshakes. I had a drink known as a ‘Latte Da Vinci” – a latte with flavoured syrup (in this case Irish Cream), Chris and Nina opted for milk shakes.

We left Bodø in distinctly mediocre weather, a grey sky dispensed a steady stream of drizzle down upon the car. This didn’t detract significantly from the route; the road ahead, swooped and curved around the peaks wound through narrow cuttings and occasionally plunged into long tunnels, hewn straight out of Norway’s sturdy rock. Lakes nestled in the troughs below each peak, even near the stream many were still frozen over and covered in snow.

(Enter guest logger Nina, because Dan is down for the count with a headache)

We stopped for a snack at an ‘inn’ (somewhat similar in function to a motorway services, or the ‘Jamaica Inn’ on Bodmin moor) at Kobbelv, a waterfall overlooked by a small Troll perched in the middle, on a rock, dressed as Spiderman (or that’s what Dan exclaimed when he saw it for the first time). Hunting down a cheese cake for Chris, me and Dan settled on waffles, with me convincing Dan to try it out with the Norwegian traditional “brown cheese” (goat’s cheese). He claimed to like it, but it does have a distinguished taste. I prefer the normal cheese myself.

We continued on along the 'Arctic highway' in some shifting weather (time lapse video embeded above). At this point I had noticed some minor struggles with the steering of the car with a near constant pulling towards the right. Considering us Norwegians ride on the right side of the road, this put us close to the ditch/mountain/river/ocean at some points. Luckily I think Dan and Chris never really noticed the close-to-possible-accidents.

After having stopped for some pictures from the top of the Ulvsvaag mountain, we trundled down to a nearby gas station to check the air pressure in the tires, finding them to be at 3 Bar each. The manual in the car, which was checked to make sure I remembered correctly, says 2 Bar on each tire. Or 2.1 if you’re heavy loaded. Still, not 3. So we let out some air. And even though it heightened the friction on the tires, it did give us better grip in the sharper corners, something I had fun taking advantage of, causing Chris to cling to the overhead-handle.

Arriving at Bognes we very nearly took the wrong ferry, mostly thanks to a miss-connection up in my brain, having been used to taking each one in separate periods of my life. We were originally headed for the correct one, but I thought it was the wrong route, doing a U-turn and heading to the other. Halfway into the ferry, at the end of the line of cars, Dan managed to ruffle through the map in time to discover the error we were about to make which would have landed us on the other side of the country (though narrow, it’s still a long drive to correct). Backing up again, and trying to look professional about it and as if we knew what we were doing, we did a quick re-route back to the original ferry, being the last car to dock inside just before it left.

Arriving in Loedingen, we did a double-check on the tires now that they had cooled off a bit. Satisfyingly they had not budged on the pressure and we scurried off again happily.

We followed King Olav’s road all the way up to Stokmarknes; we posted a time-lapse photography video to youtube showing the section from the ferry landing. The video is taken at around 30 frames a minute, and played back at 5 frames per second. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMvk5SpHf1s

The boys celebratied being at their furthest most north location in the world as we entered onto the bridge taking us over to Sortland (the blue city). We even passed into another county for about five minutes on the journey.Read more