My good friend from home, Leanne, decided to join me on my Norway trip so I was thrilled. We have done a lot of travel together in the past and we both travel well together. We started out in Oslo because that seemed to be the cheapest flights by far! We knew we needed to rent a car and we had the crazy north region of Lofoten in our sights. We decided to just go for it and drive there.
As I flew into Oslo I immediately felt like I made the wrong choice. It was dark and rainy and there was no green so I felt homesick. I knew Norway would be cold. I met with Leanne and I had got in so late that nothing was open so I couldn’t get a data card…it had been 6 hours without wifi people. We hopped a shuttle and got a upgraded SUV instead of a mini car (AMAZING CHOICE). We drove a little off the beaten path to a pull out and slept in the car for the night. It was quite comfortable in the car. We woke up to an inch of snow. I had no wifi and it was snowing… I was being a baby but I wasn’t too happy.
We drove to Oslo to find phone cards. Okay so have you ever tried driving in a country’s biggest city with only a map? No siri google map… and a different country. How did people travel before phones!? We managed not to run down any people or crash into any trolley trains and we got our phone SIMs. Super cheap in Norway if you are wondering. 6GB was about $80.00 CAN. We got some groceries and headed on the road for the 24 hour drive to Lofoten.
Driving and car camping was pretty fun and I got over being homesick very quickly. Leanne and I had so much fun cooking dinners in the camp stove and we watched movies on Leanne’s phone that she had previously downloaded. We managed to get to Bodo Ferry to Lofoten two days later. We witnessed a four hour pink sunset on the night ferry to the islands. It was still light outside when we arrived at 1am. I was completely blown away.
It was nothing like I have ever seen in my life. Mountains cascading out of the ocean. Jagged ruthless peaks towering high above us surrounded by blue ocean. I have seen many beautiful places but this one blew me away like no other. The last time I felt like that was maybe when we were in the Assiniboine in Canada.
We spent the next week touring all around the islands. We met a German man who invited us to climb a mountain which we gladly did. We enjoyed a hike to a white sand beach and took in sunset by a fire. We climbed a mountain at that beach the next day.
After our activities in Lofoten we were going to stay the following week but the rain came and it was not leaving. So we decided to head south to do Pulpit Rock. Trolltunga was closed or we would have done that as well. On our way down we went through Sweden which was pretty cool because we saw hundreds of Reindeer.
We stopped at this place called Aurland and had the most amazing camp site ever over the sound. It was beautiful. We scored big not expecting that one. We then got to Pulpit rock and had a pretty sour time to be honest. There are mountains of people there and when we camped up there nothing changed. Some rude French women woke us up at 4:30am with their yappy dog. I had to edit them out of all my pictures because they wouldn’t move for us (it was 5:30am at this time). My mat also got a hole in it so I slept on rocks…woo! I was happy to get out of there. It was time to head home at that time.
Norway is so amazing and yes very expensive but you can make it affordable living out of a car if you choose. It was one of the most beautiful places I have visited.