Country: Norway
Distance travelled:
Weather: overcast clearing to sunshine but windy all day

At about 2.30am this morning I woke, and peaking my head out the skylight above us, found that some of the cloud had cleared and the sun was clearly visible. On its way up again I assume. I admit to being rather lazy here and instead of getting dressed and taking a camera outside to get a decent photo, took a shot with my phone to show Mark. Then I went back to sleep.

I didn’t rouse again until after 9am at which point the heater got a workout as the clouds had rolled back in again and there was a definite chill to the air. We went through our usual morning activities and were on the move by 11am. It was a short drive from our park-up to the Lofotr Viking Museum where we were planning on spending the day. Incidentally, the Viking museum is the location we were heading for last night listed in Autoroute as a carpark tolerating overnight parking. I thought that most of the bitumen was on too much of a slope to allow for comfortable overnighting without using ramps but there was some level ground which may have been suitable.

The Lofotr Viking Museum is where the largest Viking age house ever discovered is located. The actual building location is mostly an oval mound but they have built a reconstruction of the building nearby and it is surprisingly large. There is a good video presentation showing what happened to the last chieftain there (he moved to Iceland) and a supurb display of other archeological discoveries made at the same time as the building footprint in 1983. There is a very clever audio guide too. They give you the control in your preferred language and when it is pointed at sensors near the displays it plays the relevant audio for you.

They have a reconstruction of one of the Viking longboats we had seen in Oslo on site as well. Visitors can have a try at rowing but the excursion wasn’t available while we were there so we tried the throwing axes and some archery with longbows instead. They also have some wild pigs so I got to indulge my pig fascination some more. There was a large adult, the sow presumably, and a group of small striped piglets but I could see no obvious way to smuggle one out to the BBQ unfortunately. They didn’t look terribly wild but were definitely more like the pigs in Asterix and Obelix than the pigs we had seen while on the narrow boat in Oxford.

Once we had finished in the museum grounds, we had our lunch and headed off to our evening destination of Henningsvær. The drive though this part of the Lofotan Islands was very pleasant as we finally had sunshine this afternoon and the fjord waters we drove beside were a lovely range of blues contrasting with the green of the lower hills. The tops of the mountains were still shrouded in cloud however and the wind was still gusting strongly, so much so that as we came over the high narrow bridges between islands, the van shook and Mark had to grip the steering wheel firmly.

Eventually arriving at Henningsvær, we were unsurprised to see quite a number of motorhomes as this is also listed in Autoroute as a carpark tolerating overnight parking. Unlike the location at the museum, the whole area is level though. Slotting ourselves into a corner, we stepped out for a walk through this rather attractive location. Like most Norwegian fishing villages, the buildings were mostly an ochre colour and built so close to the edge of the inlet that many required stilts. In some cases they were completely supported over water. Unsurprisingly there was more fish drying in long racks on a high promontory fully exposed to wind and rain. And birds and bugs. How appetizing.

Despite the sunlight, the first we have seen for a number of days, the wind still had quite a chill in it. By the time we made it back to the van, a number of motorhomes were leaving but we aren’t the only people still parked here. We are wondering if those who departed prefer camp sites and showers to windy carparks. The clouds appeared again about 10pm dulling but not darkening the evening sky and we battened down the hatches to spend another night in our wind-shaken van.