Day 23 - Not the best one!

The rain stayed off during the night but started when we got up. As I suspected we drove only 500m to the main 3 road after leaving our wild spot by the gorge. This route led us south beside a large river, Glomma, before we turned off on Google’s best route, signposted Lillehammer. As soon as we turned off we encountered a sign saying it was a private road costing 170 NK. It would have been too much of a detour to go back so it was another gravel single track road for an hour. Of course it didn’t save time at all as google didn’t know it was in poor condition and full of twists and turns. It was all forest at first then higher up we got more open land with beautiful autumn colours. Further on we came upon another sign, saying vans were 210NK for that bit. By now the gravel was very rough and jaggy. When we stopped for a comfort break Mr C discovered we had a slow puncture. We were 24 miles from Lillehammer. We had intended to stop in Sjusjoen en route, for a walk, as we used to go X-country skiing there - it has grown a lot and of course I didn’t recognise any of it without snow. I remember a gorgeous ski down to Lillehammer past the Olympic ski jump and through a steep field which only Carol and I managed to get down without falling over. This time we limped in with the van. We could have been stuck 20 miles up on the tundra. Maybe now we’ll be sticking to proper roads.

Google redeemed itself by finding us the tyre centre with the best reviews. They were on lunch break so we had ours too then at 1pm a young Polish man came out, took away the tyre after showing us the nail we’d picked up, then 30 minutes later we were on the road again, minus 700NK. Impressive Scandinavian efficiency!

It’s sunny and so much warmer down here. We haven’t found Norway as good as Sweden for the provision of grey and black waste disposal and getting water. Sometimes there’s a black waste dump but not the other stuff. This time we got water but there was no dump. Of course, it’s all relative and heaps better than UK where usually you need to be on a site for any of it, whereas here it is free.

We did 170 miles today and are now parked up just by lake Hurdalssjeon about 40 minutes north of Oslo. We’ve had a couple of miles walk along the lake and back and that’s it for the day. The boys are counting down the days till they pick up Sandy on Sunday.