Bunces C2C & Scandinavia May- June 2015

We have three golden rules for country walking/hiking.  1. If you start off warm, you’ll definitely be too hot by the time you finish.  2. No matter how long or steep a slope, if you take it at the right pace you can make it.  3. Heather always wants to go further/higher/for longer than me.   A circular walk presents no problem, when you’re there, you’re there.  It’s the there and back ones that can be problematic, as yet unsolved. After we’d watched and photographed the real midnight sun (at 1.00am), staying up until about 1.30 and then having a latish breakfast we decided to head up to some high ground to look for alpine plants. The road up was fine with patches of snow as we climbed.  This was a service road for a dam at the top but then we came to a tunnel with a notice saying we could use it at our own risk, so naturally we carried on.  This tunnel was not for the claustrophobic, being narrow with exposed rock sides, going quite st...

In the absence of newspaper headlines along the lines of “Plucky Elderly English Couple in Whale Watching Boat Tragedy” or “Brits in the Drink”, you’ll gather that all passed off safely for us on the ‘rib’.  About a dozen of us decked out in flotation suits and life jackets waddled across to the boat looking like a Teletubbies day out at the seaside.  The important stuff was OK, I could just reach my binoculars and camera but other than that I could hardly move.  We set off at a fair lick into open water heading as far as I could tell in the direction of Greenland.  “Greenland” being a Viking estate agent’s marketing slogan.  Just look at a map, it’s so cold they can’t even be bothered to put a u after the q’s in the place names.  Anyway off we went.  The whales feed in deep underwater canyons some way off the coast and being air breathing mammals have to come to the surface to breathe.  They rest on the surface for a while with their...

We end up driving along the Baltic for a day or so but we don’t see it except on a detour.  This northernmost part is the Gulf of Bothnia, a sea which freezes for about five months every year.  Now we head NW away from the sea towards the Arctic Circle, Kiruna and the Norwegian border.  The Arctic Circle on the road where we cross it has a café, a sign and a line of white painted boulders stretching away for fifty yards or so.  Not too tacky but of course the circle moves over time just as the magnetic pole does and the marked ‘Arctic Circle’ is about a kilometre south of the current actual arctic circle.   It’s a bit like the old stopped watch which is right twice a day but the café and sign won’t be in the right place until the year 22,000.  I can hardly wait. Just a few miles further on at Jokkmokk, we stop at a very rural and unpretentious campsite where we choose not to have electricity and therefore get a spot right on the edge of a love...

We’re now over halfway between the most southerly and the most northerly parts of Sweden which is a very long way and it is now starting to feel more remote, empty and untamed.  Malmo in the south to Kiruna in the north is about 2000 kms (approx. 1250 miles) by road.  That’s about the same as Calais to Lisbon but we did 1000 kms to get from Dunkirk to Malmo on top of that and we plan to drive home too.  Yes, it’s mad. Coming up through Denmark we had a close encounter of the stone hitting windscreen kind.  It was very low, nothing apparently happened and we carried on driving, but then three or four days later I noticed a large chip and a crack along the bottom of the screen.  We marked the end of it with some insulation tape and annoyingly it grew an inch a day.  So while our insurance company assure us that it won’t shatter and it’s our choice whether to get it fixed now or when we get home, we don’t know if this is illegal in Sweden or Norway or...

It’s the Dunkerque run and as we cross, an announcement comes over the tannoy.   Just ahead of us and off to port are the little boats on their annual pilgrimage, on this the 75 th anniversary, to commemorate the Dunkirk evacuation.  About 30 or so tiny boats, looking as if they would be more at home on a lake but the same type of craft that managed against all the odds to help evacuate 340,000 allied troops in 1940.  Bear in mind that the estimates were that about 50,000 troops might be saved and you can gauge the effect this had on our war effort. First stop it’s the French supermarche to stock up on stuff, well alcohol mainly, to offset the notoriously high costs in Sweden and Norway.  A few days later we were to read that we had far more than were allowed into Norway (a non-EU country).  The allowance is something like 1 litre of spirits and a couple of litres of wine each.  We have about 20 bottles of wine, 30 of beer and 2 or 3 of spi...

Well, we’ve started our three and a half month trip away from home in our van with the only two definite points of ‘the plan’ being the cross channel ferry each way.   Quite enough planning by our usual standards I think.  There are of course lots of indefinite ‘like to do’ stuff, some of which has now been ticked off because we started in England. This trip will be much less of a rich experience than our backpack ones because we are pretty well self-contained with our own transport.  We’ll meet far fewer locals, they’ll be no bus station fun and games and even the other travellers we meet will almost certainly be of the less adventurous type.   Caravan Club members some of them  –  nuff said ?  So while I’ll do my best to pick up and write what I think will be interesting things, there will be fewer of them and so I shall write these notes less often. Our main ‘like to do’ was to finish walking the 200 mile Coast to Coas...