Week 6. 5th July 2025 to 11th July. Gudvangen to Stavanger – 230 miles
Saturday, 5th July 2025. Gudvangen to Ringøy – 52 miles
The bad wet weather is with us once again… It’s raining. It’s that horrible sticky rain that soaks you just by looking at it! Hayley’s health has deteriorated since last night; she’s not well.
We are still leaving today, though. We did think about another night here in Gudvangen to help her recover, but we feel we need to get to a pharmacy. We do a full van service and head off towards the town of Voss, not far away, where they have an LPG filling station which has just been repaired. After the fill-up, we next head to a small mall to do some shopping and to find a pharmacy for some kind of over-the-counter remedy. Norway is not like the UK. Almost everything has to be by prescription, and they only offer paracetamol and ibuprofen.
It’s decided that Hayley will do an online doctor consultation, so we are waiting in a car park for the video call to take place. At 2:30, we call the doctor, and she says she will email us out a prescription to take back to the pharmacy, after 10 minutes it comes through…. it’s for paracetamol, which we already have. Looks like Hayley is going to have to tough it out.
Still, the rain is falling, visibility is awful, and it’s a bit on the chilly side. We are heading for a campsite in the town of Ringøy, not very far.
To get there, there are the usual long tunnels that the Norwegians do very well; however, two of them have a twist… They have a roundabout in them. How novel, a tunnel with a roundabout.
It has been a long day with not much progress, 50 miles today, and we have seen nothing except a car park and a pharmacy. We arrive at the campsite, which is grass. We have already witnessed a van’s front wheels spinning, let’s hope we don’t get bogged down tomorrow.
Another early night for Hayley, poor thing, after watching a bit of Netflix. She can’t stand it anymore. Bed by 8…
Sunday, 6th July 2025 Ringøy – Day 2
Not a good day today. Hayley is very poorly today. She has the Flu, but it’s nasty. She didn’t sleep well last night because of body aches and fever, and at 2 am, she’s up, in pain, coughing and just restless.
We decide to move on, but halfway through the preparation to go, she is desperate to lie down and needs to go back to bed, so Del resets everything for her to return to bed, we will stay here again tonight.
The weather is calmer today, with no rain, but everything is wet, very wet. Del manages to get out now and again for a walk for some fresh air, but his main job today is to look after Hayley. Poor thing.
Monday, 7th July 2025 Ringøy to Herand – 25 miles
Hayley wakes up this morning feeling a bit better and can sit up, so we decide that we will move on today. She ventures outside the van for the first time since arriving here and discovers that the place is beautiful in the morning sunshine.
Today we are going to a town called Herand, as tomorrow we hope (Hayley being well enough) we can see Steindalsfosseen – a waterfall that you can walk behind. We set off for the ferry at Kinsarvik and take the 30-minute hop across to Utne.
From there, it should be a short trip to the harbour where we have planned to stop. When we look at our large map of Norway, it’s very hard to tell which roads are wide and which ones are narrow. It is the latter. It’s one track most of the way around sharp bends, with passing places along the route. We average about 20 mph.
The harbour park up is great, good value with all amenities and a fabulous view.
Around the corner is an ‘honesty supermarket’. At 5 pm, the staff go home, but you can still shop if you scan your debit card as you go in. You are then left to shop, pay for your items and scan yourself on the way out.
After a simple dinner, Del sits outside in the sun with a well-deserved wine. He’s worked hard looking after H these last few days. Tonight she is in bed early again.
Tuesday, 8th July 2025 Herand to Ølensvåg – 94 miles
It’s a lovely place here, we like it very much. Today, we are setting off on a bit of a waterfall tour. Today also marks the definite turn southwards for Denmark. With only a week left in Norway.
Hayley today is still not good; in fact, she thinks that she has gone backwards a little. She’s not in a good way.
We pack up and set off after a full van service and head for the town of Jondal for a short ferry across to Tørvikbygd, from there it’s a short drive to Steindalsfosson. It’s an impressive water wall that reaches out so far that you can walk behind it.
We have arrived at the waterfall parking and it’s busy, but we manage to spot a lady preparing to leave, and boy did she take her time in doing so…! The walk from the car park is short, and the view of the waterfall is spectacular. Amazing, and in the sunny weather we are having, it looks fabulous.
The walk-up isn’t too far. We get to walk behind the torrent and pop out on the other side to view it from a viewing platform.
However, Hayley is tired and breathless, it was all a bit too much of a walk to the platform, so we head back to Jess for the drive back to the ferry to return to Jondal.
From Jondal, our drive will take us south through 20 km of tunnels to another waterfall called Latefossen, very impressive, but we can’t stop, the carpark is full, but Hayley gets us some photos from the passenger window.
The last waterfall for today will be Langfossen. More tunnels to get there. This time there is parking and a place to buy an ice-cream.
This one is a real roar of a waterfall, big and noisy. Hayley is feeling the chill being so close, we are very close to it, and it gives off a lot of spray.
It’s getting late, and Hayley is now feeling really ill again. We need to stop somewhere and have something to eat. After a few more tunnels, we are heading towards a spot near the town of Ølensvåg. There is a campsite there that has a great view of beautiful hills and mountains to your left and a massive oil rig to your right! Let’s see.
The roads are good here in Norway, but some of them, as we have said, can be narrow, but very narrow. Twice we have had a tap on our wing mirror in Norway, but not from locals. Some ‘foreign’ drivers are scared to get to the edge of the road and end up forcing you off the road on your side.
We are approaching a road where the centre line disappears, that’s always a clue, the road may not look narrow, but it is. We approach a car that does move over, their wheels almost off the road, allowing us to pass, even though our wheels are just as close to being off the road. No problem, we wave and pass.
In the distance, there is a van approaching, quite fast. Del moves to the edge of the road as much as he can, then… BOOM! Our mirrors collide, smashing the small lens for the indicator and cracking the housing and leaving our blind spot mirror swinging in the breeze.
It was bound to happen one day on these roads. We drive to the next pull-in to survey the damage. The lens is smashed. The indicator still works, and the movable mirrors in the housing both work once reset. Not bad. Del snaps the housing back into place, and with a couple of clicks, it’s all back into shape. The sacrificial cover we had on top is now in pieces on the road.
Suddenly, the driver of the van appears behind us. We shake hands and say hello. He’s Turkish on a courier mission via Germany. He has sustained similar damage to us, the lens and a cracked casing. Fortunately, we have a dash cam, and we pull up the movie. It clearly showed the car before him well over, while Del is also well over, followed by his van approaching with a good half meter between him and the edge of the road on his side. He didn’t move over enough for the space of the road and the size of the oncoming vehicles. Del couldn’t go anywhere except forward! The wheels are on the edge already!
We are impressed that he came back to find us. He was also very sorry after seeing the dashcam footage, but in the end we agreed that, as it would be complicated and probably more costly to get the insurance companies involved, that we should look after our own expenses. For us, the lens is 10 quid and 70 quid for the fancy sacrificial covers that campervans stick on their mirrors, for this very purpose. We will just have to superglue the casing underneath, and no one will ever know. We shake hands, agree to drive with care and go on our way.
By now, we really have had enough and arrive at the campsite with the beautiful hills on the left and the oil rig on the right, just as described.
A long, long day. Hayley is not feeling her best, and the mirror incident has just made her day worse. Del gets to work waterproofing the damage, then gets on with making some dinner.
Time for bed…
Wednesday 9th July 2025 – Ølensvåg to Vikevåg – 52 miles
It’s very quiet this morning. Hayley’s health has not improved, so today we are going to find a doctor. First, we pack up, perform a service, and drive to a local pharmacy to purchase a COVID-19 kit and obtain the telephone number for a local doctor.
The Covid test is negative, so Del asks the pharmacy to call the doctors for us, who have asked us to attend whenever we are ready.
Fortunately, the surgery is only a short 4-minute drive. We are seen very quickly by a doctor as soon as we arrive and check in with reception. A blood test is taken straight away, a CRP test, which looks for any inflammation in the body, which comes back clear.
The doctor is very rigorous and checks everything, blood pressure, breathing and blood oxygen. Everything is in good order. The diagnosis is flu with a bad cough, which we kind of suspected. She suffered with intense aches and fever on Saturday and Sunday, and what she has been left with is a very nasty cough, wheezing and a general feeling of being unwell. So not Covid, nothing serious, just the after effects of a very nasty case of the flu. Despite asking the doctor for some strong meds and stuff to make Hayley sleep, she prescribes a herbal medication that we have already purchased. A visit to the doctor and the chemist here in Norway is not the same as in the UK. What we would do for some Night Nurse!
In a Norwegian chemist, you can only get Paracetamol, ibuprofen, vitamins and other very low-level drugs. If you go to a UK chemist, there are shelves full of cough remedies. Not here. You can only get 1 type, and it’s herbal. Anything else has to be prescribed by a doctor, and even then, they are very, very cautious. One pharmacy told Del that antibiotics are rare here; they have them, but the doctors hardly ever prescribe them as they do in other parts of the world. It’s all very different and can be a point of frustration, as we found out.
We finally get away and move further south. We had a bit of truck bullying today. The speed limit here, for the most part, is 50mph or 80 km/h, more or less. We always try and keep to the speed limit if it’s safe to do so but today it isn’t fast enough. We have a very large Scania truck with a double trailer, probably 52 feet long, barreling down on us, flashing at us and driving so close he is almost on our bike rack! The speed limit is 60 kph where we are, with warnings of cows and deer crossing the road as well as the roads being very twisty. He might be used to the roads, being a local, but the tactic is very unprofessional and dangerous. It’s the second time this has happened to us in Norway.
We are in a very watery, islandy bit of Norway, so a 25-minute ferry crossing is required to get to an island where we will stay the night (oh, and the truck driver that bullied us to get past is on the same ferry, so he has achieved nothing!).
It’s a small marina with space for 6 campervans. 15 minutes later, we are parked up, it’s a lovely spot, very peaceful.
Different scenery but very nice, all the same. We settle in and get outside with a cup of tea. We have had better weeks, and this week has kind of tarnished the whole trip. We shall see, we have two weeks left.
Thursday 10th July 2025 – Vikevåg to Sokn – 5.6 miles
Despite another night of hardly any sleep, for both, Hayley does feel a little better today and manages her first decent breakfast in days. We are not moving far today, 10 minutes down the road, in fact. The idea is to check into a campsite for 2 nights and give H another day to recover so we can go to Stavanger on the bus.
Del has a quick work Teams call, and then we set off. The scenery around here is interesting, very different from the north with its steep fjords, glaciers and big lakes. Here we are travelling through islands on the west coast, mostly connected by bridges and of course tunnels, this time under sea tunnels.
We are at the campsite, Camping Sokn, on the island of Sokn, and set up our pitch. It’s a busy place, and it now seems the school holidays are in full swing, so the place will be almost fully booked tonight. We have an easy day today. Hayley is still recovering, and now Del is dead on his feet. After doing some laundry and having a nap, we have dinner outside in the sun. H cooks tonight for the first time in almost a week.
It’s a beautiful sunny evening. Bed early… Again…
Friday 11th July 2025 – Sokn day 2
We both slept well, but for Hayley, it was the best sleep she has had in 7 days, so she woke up this morning feeling much better; however, as the morning goes on, she declines a little. She has the most awful chesty, noisy cough, which comes on in fits and she’s also very tired despite sleeping.
We are going to go to Stavanger, which is only 30 minutes away by bus. We have breakfast, get cleaned up and showered and set out.
Stavanger is the oil capital of Norway. In the late 60s, they discovered oil here, kept it to themselves until the 70s and 80s when they started to extract oil and gas. The government in the 80s created a wealth fund. The current value of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, also known as the Government Pension Fund Global, is approximately $1.8 trillion USD. It is the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. What a pity the UK didn’t do the same when we started to extract oil at roughly the same time. There is a good website here that tells you all about it.
The town of Stavanger is very pleasant. It has a lovely marina with the usual collection of fancy restaurants and souvenir shops.
They do get cruise ships stopping here, so the prices are high for simple things.
For example, we pay £26.00 for two single-sliced bread open sandwiches and one coffee…! There is a very nice old town just up the hill away from the marina, which we stoll through, all very nice in the afternoon sun.
The town itself is clean and tidy in parts, but there are a few streets that look like they may have been forgotten. We find this whole Norwegian oil thing fascinating, so we go to the Norwegian Oil Museum. Sad innit…? But no, it’s fascinating.
They could have done with putting a few more explainers in along the way about how some things work, but we found it fascinating and has given us something else to research on the internet with the help of YouTube. The stuff involved in getting oil and gas out of the seabed is staggering, not only the technology, but the cost is unbelievable.
We are on the 5:10 bus back to Sokn and the campsite. At the bus stop, there is a huge carpark and camper stop, and parked up there is a Thai takeaway.
We are both feeling a bit tired again, so Hayley decides to get a small dinner to share of spring rolls, fish cakes and a pad thai to take back to Jess.
It’s another lovely warm summer night here in Sokn as we eat our takeaway outside.
Tomorrow we will move on. We don’t know where yet, but we have a ferry booked on Tuesday from Kristiansand to Denmark for the last 9 days of this trip. The trip has been good, but we have had better weeks than this week for sure.
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