Day 6

Nordkapp to almost Tromso

320 miles


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I woke up drenched in sweat in my insanely bright tent at 6.11 and decided to get up as more sleep was unlikely.  A breakfast of biscuits and water set me up for the first 20 minutes or so and I was on the road at 7. 

 I had a lovely swooping ride through the nordkapp and back to the mainland via a 7 km long tunnel, I didn't bother setting the sat nav as I was heading for the E6 and it's pretty much the only road.   


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This turned out to be a mistake as one of the nav functions is to tell me how far the next petrol station is on the route planned, if you don't enter a route it won't tell you.  I wasn't too concerned when the fuel light came on, petrol has been plentiful for the whole run so far.   
But as the range remaining ticked down from 50 miles to 5 miles I began to worry, so I checked the nav and discovered that I was between petrol stations that were all over 20 miles away.  
The miles remaining countdown hit 0 at 180 miles on the tank full, but I still had 20 miles to go til the next fuel stop.  
I tried the fuel saving trick that's almost worked before, keep it in a high gear and use a little throttle to maintain speed then pull in the clutch to roll as much as possible.  
As I trundled along at 40 mph in top gear I wondered how long the AA would take to get to me, and quietly regretted the fun I'd been having early on in the day.  
After a very fraught 20 miles on a bike that was now sounding slightly different I managed to get to the petrol station, and got 19.97 litres into the 20 litre tank. 

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oops


   I decided that I wanted a nice hotel for the night so headed towards Tromso as it's the biggest town in the area.
 I was doing well taking my time and keeping mostly to speed limits when 3 BMW GS with Ukranian plates passed me like I was standing still. 

  So I tagged onto the back of the group and had a great hour or so making good progress.  I then ended up leapfrogging them for the rest of the day.


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   As I rode down the coast the scenery got more and more spectacular, I must have spent hours taking photographs and being frustrated by the lack of places to stop. 
 Then the sat nav (with 50 miles to Tromso) told me to turn right and take the ferry.  Turns out that the fastest route involved 2 ferries and at least 2 more hours, and it was already after 5 PM and I'd been on the road 10 hours and was about ready to stop

After a bit of deliberation I decided to keep riding, and stopped after an hour or so at a campsite with huts. As I wanted a shower and toilet in my hut I got a big one with 2 bedrooms and a kitchen. And blackout blinds, bliss!
It was more a wooden bungalow than I hut, and at £130 a night about the same as a hotel would have been.

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  When I pulled in there were the three Ukranian BMW bikes. It's a small world really, I had a chat with the riders and they're attitude towards the speed limit was that it didn't really apply to them!

I got a giant pizza from the on site takeaway and on the way back to my hut noticed that there were a bunch of Harley Davidson bikes parked at the one next door. I kind of expected hassle from the riders as there were all wearing cut off jackets with patches on their backs, but they turned out to be really cool and gave me some great routes for further along my journey. 

One thing I did struggle with was getting food during the day. In the UK petrol stations have become little supermarkets and you can easily buy lunch there, in norway a lot of the petrol stations are unmanned or only really sell nasty hot dogs. I had intended to buy food in shops but sandwiches go off on warm days as the luggage turns into a small oven.

20160712_173617811_iOS Amazing pizza that I mostly inhaled after missing lunch.