Trip report : Norway in the truck camper
Well, we had done a lot of stuff in our own country in our truck camper the past couple of years, and a lot of foreign travel in rented campers, so time to get our little camper on a ferry and oversea...
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Sunday - Heading for the coast
It was a pretty quiet night, though you could just about hear some traffic on the main road on the other side of the gorge, especially the one truck that descended the gorge using its exhaust brake.
Once back on the highway we pulled into a dump station about 1km further up. Having dumped and filled with water Sally asked if there was somewhere she could empty the rubbish bin in the camper. I looked around, there was a dumpster next to a truck weigh-bridge. I walked up there and noticed that although the weigh bridge office was closed, the weight display was illuminated.
So on a hunch I drove the camper around and onto it. It was working. For the first time ever I was able to get a weight of the truck with camper loaded, and with a full tank of diesel and water. With some manoeuvring I was able to get both a front and rear axle weight, and to check them the weight of the whole rig.
My truck has a 2500 lb payload according to the manufacturer (excluding driver and a tank of diesel). My Shadow Cruiser has a weight plate claiming 1400 lbs. I have uprated tyres and airbags fitted, although I only run the latter at 10 psi, otherwise the truck is tail high and the ride is too hard.
So, subtracting the truck's empty weight, guess how much this 1400 lb camper and all our stuff weighs?
2800 lbs :R
I would have said it was a lot lighter - the truck goes very well with the weight in, but then these modern variable geometry turbocharged diesels tend to mask the weight the truck is carrying.
On the plus side, at 9:30 AM the solar was reporting 6 amps coming in, so that all helps the sick battery.
We looked at the road map. We could continue down the road we had been taking - it was a nice road, but it was the main north-south road and was busier than the roads we had got used to.
But the map showed a small side road that climbed up the side of one of the mountains, diverging from the main road, then crossing the top before dropping down to a peninsula from where we could get a ferry back to the main coast road. This looked like a better bet.
We were soon rewarded with a lovely road with great views and, if it had been later in the day, plenty of quiet and scenic boondocking spots:
We took a detour up a narrow side road towards a dam and found a nice little lake at the top where we stopped for a break:
Later the road descended through a gorge and we stopped again to do a short walk along a trail on the opposite side of the gorge. However we found tape across it closing it off - but we decided to ignore that, being irresponsible people. I reckoned that this was to keep regular tourists from having an accident and probably wasn't aimed at people used to rock climbing.
Though we did reach a point where we didn't fancy going any further:
Back down at sea level we followed a fjord and found another nice waterfall:
Having headed down the seaward side of a peninsula I was expecting to pick up a ferry across to Sand, which looked like a nice little coastal town. However, upon arriving at the ferry jetty I found this:
I really didn't want to have to go all the way back over that mountain to the point where we pulled off the main road early this morning.
There were no signs announcing the end of ferry services or where to go instead. In fact the sign posts to Sand had pointed down to this disused ferry terminal.
So I fired up the 4G mobile hotspot and the laptop. The Norwegian transport websites didn't say anything about the Sand ferry - well they did, they still showed details of the ferry route. But a look on Google Maps seemed to show a road crossing the fjord further to the south west.
So we took a gamble and headed in that direction, conscious that if we were wrong we were increasing our return journey distance by every kilometre we drove.
After a few miles the road suddenly looked brand new and veered away from the course of the road shown on the GPS, before heading into a new tunnel - this looked promising. Soon the tunnel opened out onto a bridge crossing the fjord, before entering another tunnel on the side we wanted to be on - what a relief.
Rather than return to the main north-south road we turned right and hugged the coast of the fjord, then crossed another bridge onto an island where the road map showed a picnic spot by the coast. Exactly where the map showed we found it and took residence for the night:
And it had a nice view:
We went for an evening walk around the corner and found a nice little community of houses on the coast, with little boats serving those with offshore properties:
Stay tuned for more southerly travel...
It was a pretty quiet night, though you could just about hear some traffic on the main road on the other side of the gorge, especially the one truck that descended the gorge using its exhaust brake.
Once back on the highway we pulled into a dump station about 1km further up. Having dumped and filled with water Sally asked if there was somewhere she could empty the rubbish bin in the camper. I looked around, there was a dumpster next to a truck weigh-bridge. I walked up there and noticed that although the weigh bridge office was closed, the weight display was illuminated.
So on a hunch I drove the camper around and onto it. It was working. For the first time ever I was able to get a weight of the truck with camper loaded, and with a full tank of diesel and water. With some manoeuvring I was able to get both a front and rear axle weight, and to check them the weight of the whole rig.
My truck has a 2500 lb payload according to the manufacturer (excluding driver and a tank of diesel). My Shadow Cruiser has a weight plate claiming 1400 lbs. I have uprated tyres and airbags fitted, although I only run the latter at 10 psi, otherwise the truck is tail high and the ride is too hard.
So, subtracting the truck's empty weight, guess how much this 1400 lb camper and all our stuff weighs?
2800 lbs :R
I would have said it was a lot lighter - the truck goes very well with the weight in, but then these modern variable geometry turbocharged diesels tend to mask the weight the truck is carrying.
On the plus side, at 9:30 AM the solar was reporting 6 amps coming in, so that all helps the sick battery.
We looked at the road map. We could continue down the road we had been taking - it was a nice road, but it was the main north-south road and was busier than the roads we had got used to.
But the map showed a small side road that climbed up the side of one of the mountains, diverging from the main road, then crossing the top before dropping down to a peninsula from where we could get a ferry back to the main coast road. This looked like a better bet.
We were soon rewarded with a lovely road with great views and, if it had been later in the day, plenty of quiet and scenic boondocking spots:
We took a detour up a narrow side road towards a dam and found a nice little lake at the top where we stopped for a break:
Later the road descended through a gorge and we stopped again to do a short walk along a trail on the opposite side of the gorge. However we found tape across it closing it off - but we decided to ignore that, being irresponsible people. I reckoned that this was to keep regular tourists from having an accident and probably wasn't aimed at people used to rock climbing.
Though we did reach a point where we didn't fancy going any further:
Back down at sea level we followed a fjord and found another nice waterfall:
Having headed down the seaward side of a peninsula I was expecting to pick up a ferry across to Sand, which looked like a nice little coastal town. However, upon arriving at the ferry jetty I found this:
I really didn't want to have to go all the way back over that mountain to the point where we pulled off the main road early this morning.
There were no signs announcing the end of ferry services or where to go instead. In fact the sign posts to Sand had pointed down to this disused ferry terminal.
So I fired up the 4G mobile hotspot and the laptop. The Norwegian transport websites didn't say anything about the Sand ferry - well they did, they still showed details of the ferry route. But a look on Google Maps seemed to show a road crossing the fjord further to the south west.
So we took a gamble and headed in that direction, conscious that if we were wrong we were increasing our return journey distance by every kilometre we drove.
After a few miles the road suddenly looked brand new and veered away from the course of the road shown on the GPS, before heading into a new tunnel - this looked promising. Soon the tunnel opened out onto a bridge crossing the fjord, before entering another tunnel on the side we wanted to be on - what a relief.
Rather than return to the main north-south road we turned right and hugged the coast of the fjord, then crossed another bridge onto an island where the road map showed a picnic spot by the coast. Exactly where the map showed we found it and took residence for the night:
And it had a nice view:
We went for an evening walk around the corner and found a nice little community of houses on the coast, with little boats serving those with offshore properties:
Stay tuned for more southerly travel...
