Saturday, 20 July, 1996 -- Camping in the wild - Vedum

Early morning after a sleepless night in the  wilderness.

As we had feared we did not sleep much that night. It was moist and the tent was not big enough for the three of us. If you happened to fall asleep you were soon woken up by a passing car or truck. Since no one slept well at all we all decided to get an early start of the day, why make the misery any longer? And besides we had a long way to drive, so it was just as good to start early. As soon as we got out of the tent we were immediately attacked by very aggressive mosquitos who seemed to be very pleased to have the three of us for breakfast. We could not stand still for more than a couple seconds at a time, so we ran back and forth while packing up the tent, getting our bikes ready and eating a very improvised breakfast. Must have looked rather funny. Either way, I counted to 60 mosquito bites.

We continued on road 42 going east as we figured it should be the shorter alternative compared to take E39/E18 which follows the southern coast line. I am not so sure it was the faster alternative. However it would give us a much more fun and interesting drive this final day of our trip. Pretty soon we came to a halt at a small gas station. Not to fill up on gas, but to clean up a bit and brush our teeth and stuff like that. We felt rather unfresh after the night in the tent. In a few minutes we were back on the road again and tried our best find the smartest (=shortest) way home.

Stefan taking a nap in the ditch.

After a couple hours the lack of sleep last night started to make itself known and pretty soon I had a hard time keeping my eyes open. That was of course not good at all, it was straight out dangerous. So we had to make a few extra stops even though we did not really have that extra time to spend. At one of these stops I thought that the nearby ditch looked more like a very comfy bed, so I laid down for a little nap. I was so tired I did not even bother to take off my helmet, so I guess it must have looked kind of funny. My travel companions of course made sure to take a picture of this without me noticing it.

We kept going on the smaller road 42 for quite a while until we came to Arendal where we got on to road E18 instead. Now we picked up some speed as we moved on northeast. We were still mighty tired though. Somewhere along the road in a smaller town (no one remembers exactly where) I was driving first in line as a very inviting lawn got my full attention. I turned on my right blinkers and turned off the road on to a small parallel road and drove back to that nice looking lawn. We stopped, parked the bikes and took our helmets off. No one said a word. That was not necessary. We all knew what was up. Nap time!! In the shade of a few trees we laid down on the grass... ahh, wonderful! It was nice and warm and we all fell asleep within a couple of minutes and got a very well needed rest. We spent about an hour on the grass before we decided to go eat at a restaurant we had spotted as we turned off the main road. We still had quite a ways to go, it would be evening before we were back home again. It was now around 3 PM so we were hungry and could as well eat here.

Our hamburgers were delicious and with new found strengths we continued our journey northeast. Now we drove nonstop to Horten where we caught a ferry over the Oslofjord to Moss, and then we did not have much farther to go before we came back to Sweden, which in turn meant another three hours before we were finally home. The only thing that happened during the last stage of our trip was that traffic came to a stand still due to an accident ahead. Since we were on motorcycles people told us we should just drive past the long line of cars, but we thought it could be nice with a little break. Soon enough we were on our way again and before we knew it we sat on the ferry across the Olsofjord.

Pretty much rested and ready to go we continued south on road E6 towards Sweden. It almost felt strange to be back on known grounds again, and it felt more and more strange the closer to home we got. Just 24 hours ago we had been on the Lysefjord and hiked to the Pulpit Rock enjoying magnificent views. Now we were almost home again, 1,628 miles later, so it felt kind of "empty". It had been an unbelievable week in Norway. This had been our first trip to this motorcycle paradise, but we all had a feeling it would not be our last...