A Touring Ho-lude-ay

[Sailor]

Days 0 to 3

Car prep included shiny GB badge and some light deflectors stuck where they seemed to make a difference (I don't normally get round to doing this, but I thought it was time I made an effort):-




Wait for our turn in the ferry queue:-



No photos of France, Belgium or Holland. We pass through them often enough to forget that some things are worth recording. Our home village in Germany ditto.

Days 4 & 5

Northern Germany and the tide seems to have gone out ...



... so we went on to Denmark, did a bit of sightseeing in Ribe,



stopped briefly at a famous location



and headed off to wait for another ferry, this time at Hirtshals.




(more to follow)

[Sailor]

Days 6 to 10

Stavanger's old town is lovely


although not everyone would like having a cruise liner at the bottom of the garden:-



We were going to head north across the fjords and islands, but the boat gets in at 7 in the morning and very little opens until 10. We headed east instead. We wanted to avoid towns.

Good, if narrow, roads took us above the tree line ...



... and then into the snow.



They took us to beautiful picnic sites ...



... across bridges, tunnels connected straight onto bridges and even tunnels with roundabouts in the middle:-



We particularly loved the waterfalls.



Eventually, we got to the place we'd be staying at for a few days. This is a view from the garden.





(to be continued)

[honda-hardy]

wow, just wow. you lucky sod, id love to do a road trip in my lude, but with the 2 kids, wife a dog and all the luggage, a little impractical. however, i just bought a roof box and a roof rack for the accord and lude, so its a possibility now.

[wurlycorner]

pics
Looks like a fantastic journey.
Love that underground roundabout! A little more elegant than westferry

[Merlin]

Awesome stuff!! I always wanted to take the Lude for a tip in Europe.

[bb1boy]

wow, just wow. you lucky sod, id love to do a road trip in my lude, but with the 2 kids, wife a dog and all the luggage, a little impractical. however, i just bought a roof box and a roof rack for the accord and lude, so its a possibility now.

...cram everyone and everything into the roof box and cruise in solitary luxury?

Great pics mate, I particularly like the waterfalls!

[Sailor]

Days 11 to 14

The lack of darkness had thrown our body clocks out and we left it all a bit late to find accommodation once we set off south again. We decided to keep going, dip through the tunnel under the Oslofjord and join the motorway system, hoping for a Scandinavian version of a Travelodge. We got to the tunnel at about midnight. It was closed until 5 in the morning. A picnic area full of trucks showed us the way. Two people can sleep in a Prelude ... albeit fitfully.

Sweden was a series of funky harbours,



ruined castles,



and decent beaches.



There was just the Oresund Bridge/Tunnel to go now and we'd be back in Denmark.




(nearly done)

[lxstuart]

I stayed in Ribe when I was in Denmark, lovely place.

[Sailor]

Days 15 to 18

The Lude had been running well, but the island of Fehmarn is flat, so we considered adopting alternative transport
(for about a second).



We moved on to mainland Germany. For the first time since Stavanger, we braved the wonders of a city. We went to Luebeck, a grand place with oodles of history.



Our final stop before getting the ferry home was in France: Douai. Whereas Luebeck is unique, Douai feels more like a good exemplar of an historic French town. Still, it has its moments, not least in the rare flashes of Art Nouveau among the mediaeval stuff.



But the French must have known our Brit-registered car was coming, or why else would they have arranged for the weather to change?

[Sailor]

Some thoughts on the trip

The Roads
1. We kept to country roads where we could and almost never found a surface as bad as the Hampshire average.
2. Norwegian roads aren't generally as steep as you find in, say, Switzerland or Austria. We went from sea level to 1250m in about an hour and only had to drop into third or second for tight bends.
3. We reckon we went through over 80 tunnels. Somewhere around 200km was spent underground.

Other vehicles and drivers
4. Scandinavia seems to be full of camper vans.
5. We saw very few exotics outside of Germany. One Ferrari and perhaps 8 Porsches in all. I caught a glimpse of something I thought was Maserati. Then I saw another one in more detail, then another: 6 x Tesla Model S, all Norwegian registered.
6. One of the guys at the wedding had a lovely red El Camino. He admired the Lude but didn't reply when I offered to swap.
7. No one I asked had seen a Prelude in Norway before, although they all knew what it was.
8. Drivers in Denmark and Norway tend to keep to speed limits. They assume you're doing the same, so can pull out of side roads when you wouldn't expect them to in the UK.

Our Car
9. We covered nearly 3500 miles in all, and probably didn't average even 40 mph despite 2 high speed autobahn runs.
10. Vtec was used only a handful of times, usually to dovetail on to a busy motorway from a slip road.
11. We managed 32.1 mpg. The best full-to-full was 36.1 and the worst 28.8.
12. The engine didn't miss a beat and the car was trouble-free with 2 exceptions.
13. A slow puncture left us with a flat on the morning we were due to leave Norway. The tyre got us home. I knew that 12v pump would come in handy one day!
14. 4WS stopped working on the last day. I re-set it OK once we got back.

What we learned
15. A £750 car can be a good one.
16. Carrying tools & bits can turn out to give you nothing but extra weight. (except for a pump).
17. Never go to France without a paper clip.