Driving in Norway

Southwest part of Norway. We drove 1,100 kilometers in 3 days, which is only 700 miles. This sounds like a small amount to drive per day, but there is the catch. If you like sightseeing and enjoy driving next to fjords to see beautiful water and mountains, you will be driving roads that are nothing like highways.

These roads have very strict speed limits, many cameras, and are occupied by many cars with drivers of different skill levels. In many places the roads are so narrow that you have to let traffic heading in the opposite direction through before proceeding. If it is raining, the fog is sometimes so thick that it’s hard to see 20-30 yards ahead.

Now, where was the fun? The roads! There are no straight roads next to the fjords. They all consist of endless turns. A majority of the turns are blind, so it’s impossible to predict or calculate the apex and the speed you potentially could carry through it. Only rarely you see 2-3 open turns that you could drive through with a technically correct line. It was good practice for slow-in and fast-out.

It was 1,100 kilometers of endless joy of guessing, enjoying the right decisions, and powering out from each turn. There were numerous tunnels, ranging from 50 miters to 7 kilometers, slow drivers, which are not that simple to pass on those roads, and other advantages. The last thing that’s worth mentioning was that we filled up the car only once, at the end of the trip. The small Volkswagen Golf did not want to accelerate well, but purred nicely and took us all the way without asking for more diesel. I would not say that a rental is the fastest car in this case, but obviously it was the most efficient one.


%d bloggers like this: