10/08/2025
We are finally just days away from embarking on the trip to Norway that we’ve been promising ourselves for some time.
Twice it’s been postponed, van issues stopped us going in 2019, then Covid and the desire to be close to our parents. The lure of work and an income didn’t help either.
But things have settled into a “new normal” and we’re ready for a long trip. Work still features, but can be done on the move, adding a little extra money to the kitty. Our winter trip was a good test, both of my ability to work on the road and of our new van. We are off.
Preparations
We have been preparing ourselves for this trip for some time. More detail on those preparations in future blogs but in brief they were:
- More van modifications, mostly for storage
- Choosing a route to Norway
- Sorting out a toll tag and ferry pass to get discounts on the roads and ferries
- Getting weighed and making sure that we are staying under our “Maximum Authorised Mass”
- Updating our van insurance to ensure we had enough miles to cover such a long trip
- Sorting out our travel insurance
Preparing for packing
Our Route to Norway
We have decided to take a fairly standard route to Norway
Devon → Dover – 269 miles – 6 hrs
We set off from home at a very reasonable mid morning time after finishing our packing and giving the flat a good clean and tidy. We’d been packing for several days so there was little chance that we would have missed something. Still we always get that feeling that something has been forgotten and the first few miles of the trip are spent checking passports, phone and wallet several times over.
After a fairly slow drive – an overturned car on the M5 southbound caused a rubber necking delay – we stopped for the night at Canterbury Park and Ride. The motorhome parking had about 60 vans of all nationalities spread out between the official parking, the official overflow, and other random spots in the large car park.
We treated ourselves to a couple of drinks in the Old Gate Inn at the entrance to the carpark, sitting in the sun and relaxing knowing we had two more days of significant mileage ahead of us.
Canterbury Park and Ride
Dover → Calais Ferry
We used Irish Ferries for our crossing as it had a nice 10:15 crossing that allowed us to get some fuel and get checked in with enough spare time to make a leisurely breakfast and pack our bags to take aboard the ferry. Paul ended up missing out on breakfast as he got chatting to the driver of the van next to us who was off to Sweden for a Motocross event. My eyes glazed over at the talk of motor sport.
Ready to board the ferry
The ferry was pretty standard for a channel crossing but unusually for us we were travelling in the school holidays and boy could we tell! The lounge rang with the sound of children in all emotional states. I’d just managed to get the hang of blocking the noise out when we reached the French coast.
It was lovely to see Calais being enjoyed as a beach resort. It has a bit of a tarnished reputation due to issues with migrants but a lot of money has been spent to try and entice people back.
Calais → Ahlhorn – 378 miles – 7hrs 10mins
Now we had a long long drive to get to the northern tip of Denmark. This journey would take us through five different countries; France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. Being mostly on motorways we didn’t really get a cultural appreciation of all of the countries. Unless service station culture is your thing.
We hit one major snarl up on the Antwerp ring-road, otherwise the journey was pretty straightforward. I made the mistake of reminding Paul that there was no official speed limit on German autobahns and he insisted on testing the van’s capability. Fortunately for me there were very few sections of unrestricted road, and anyway, the van might be nippy but it was no match for some of the super speedy cars. We needed to stay super alert to the fast cars that suddenly arrived behind us, seemingly from nowhere.
We stopped in Germany just before Münster to fill up with fuel. For the first time we encountered a fuel station that wouldn’t take foreign cards. Luckily notices were plastered all over the pumps in multiple languages so we didn’t fill up before realising (we didn’t have enough cash to pay for a full tank of fuel). The next fuel station was straightforward. Paying at the pump seems to be very rare in Germany but at least I got an opportunity to use my GCSE German.
We didn’t have a stopover in mind for our first night. We set ourselves the challenge to cover half the distance between Calais and Hirtshals in the first day, but after getting off the ferry after midday that was a pretty tall order. Paul decided he’d had enough shortly after our fuel stop and I got looking for a good spot to stay.
As always we seem to hit a stopover desert when we start looking, but a little further along our route I found some parking at Ahlhorn; three spaces near the train station. We were the only people there when we turned up at 8pm although another motorhome did turn up a bit later. It was an ideal stopover, easy to find with amenities in close proximity and FREE. The potential for boy racer activity never materialised, we had a few youngsters in cars drive past us to the end of the road, but they soon disappeared elsewhere. Word must have got around and so we had a peaceful night.
Ahlhorn → Hirtshals – 417 miles – 9hrs
Ahlhorn had electric hookup available – €1 for 2kWh. We woke up to find that the supply was still working which was a welcome surprise. It seemed a small price to pay to conserve our gas. Unfortunately the waste disposal and water supply were out of order.
Our morning wake up call was a screeching freight train running past at 6:30. A little early for our liking but it got us up and moving, firstly to the supermarket for a few groceries and then to top up our fuel.
We continued our tarmac-fest with more motorway driving past Bremen (where we had quite a few holdups) and Hamburg. Lots of people had wanted us that the traffic around Hamburg could be horrendous and suggested all sorts of detours, but we must have been lucky. There was a lot of traffic around Germany’s second largest city but we kept moving. We gave the clean and tidy German motorway rest stops a thumbs up especially when compared to the stop we’d made in Belgium the day before.
The Danish border is just past the town of Flensburg so we escaped the motorway briefly to fill back up with fuel as Denmark has a very expensive reputation. This detour meant we were caught out by the border crossing, wondering why the speed limit had dropped to 40kph and only realising we were crossing into Denmark as we drove through the old border post at Kruså.
Finally in Denmark
The Danish seem to be making major improvements to the majority of their motorway so the final part of our journey was a bit of a slog of lane closures and reduced speed limits. We finally made it to Hirtshals at about 5pm. It had been a long day but it was great to know we had finished that long drive.
We know we have many miles of driving to come when we get to Norway but not under the duress of a ferry booking.