Country: Norway
Distance travelled:
Weather: Clear

At 7.30am the alarm went off and we staggered out of bed, having made the decision last night to move the van early. We both felt that we were parked in a fairly precarious position despite the motorhomes parked nearby. We moved into a quiet corner of the Rema 1000 supermarket carpark, Mark slipped out to buy some more bread and milk and we ate breakfast. Mark went straight back to bed, and despite a cup of coffee I soon followed.

I finally woke again at 11.30am, still feeling like I had a hangover or had partaken in excessive exercise. I can only assume it was some sort of reaction to the seasickness tablets since yesterday’s activities hadn’t been strenuous at all. I gathered up a few of the plastic bottles we always seem to be accumulating and headed back to the Rema 1000 as we were out of onions. Norway, and most of the other european countries we have visited so far have an interesting recycling system. You take your uncrushed bottles and cans back to the supermarket, feed them into a neat little machine in the wall which seems to read the bar codes, and if the supermarket stocks that product, you get a voucher to use at the checkout which discounts off your purchases. At least I think that is how it works. Unfortunately three of the four bottles I had were actually bought in Sweden. Since we won’t be going back, no use keeping them but one was Norwegian so I got 2.5kr off my onions! Don’t laugh, that’s about AUD$0.40.

We left Sortland, heading North again. Over lunch I spent some time programming the GPS with our ultimate destination as Nordcap but factoring in a few stops such as Alta where I wanted to see some prehistoric rock carvings as well as a few locations where we would hopefully find a motorhome service point. Mark quickly added in the last remaining locations for LPG since we will soon be in Finland where we are told it isn’t available. We drove on. The afternoon was punctuated by the spotting of a moose in an open area just off the road. We were past before I had time to even think of grabbing the camera at my feet.

More driving and we eventually pulled up in a rest stop just north of Bardufoss. I pulled out the washing machine to try to remedy the sock deficit and Mark cooked up some pork we had bought while in Sweden with a teppinyaki sauce and rice. Still both feeling exhausted, we lay in bed watching a little TV before we slept.

Bardufoss