Day 08 – Gavelborg to Trondheim

Here we are again then! Day 8 of our extended Tour.

Today has seen us make an early start – we were actually on the road by 8.15am believe it or not!

The day started with a bit of local television to catch up on current affairs in the area…

Then after a very pleasant breakfast with the best coffee so far (on a par with DC's), we set off into the Swedish fog…

We flew past a few of these on our trip…

And feasted our eyes on many beautiful views such as this one…

… and this one..

…and this one…

That is actually a frozen lake in the picture…

The temperature gradually dropped the further North we went – the lowest we saw was 0.7deg C today – and we had snow too!

We passed a few of these on the way – some just casually ambling across the road without a care in the world!

We finally passed across the Norwegian border at just before 5pm…

There wasn't a huge amount of difference between the two – both were white and desolate, yet stunningly beautiful. The biggest noticeable difference was the all the signs and road markings suddenly became yellow!

Once across, we asked a local for directions to the Artic Circle, but he hadn't a clue..

So we continued on our course until we finally hit the spot marked X…

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Arctic Circle begins at 66.30 deg North. So in fact we didn't just "get" to it, we went deeeeeeep into it! Well, by .01 of a degree at least!!

Obviously very excited about reaching our destination, we headed into the town of Mo I Rana, which is the first major town once you hit the Arctic Circle in Norway.

Just to prove we were there, we took a pic of the information board!

Here are some facts about the town for your information:

As fascinating as it was, we were unable to find any kind of "Arctic Circle visitor centre", and as it was by now 5.30pm, the Tourism Information office was closed too.

So, having gone all the way there, we turned around and came back again!

Well, not quite, we did take a different route – discovering more of Norway on the way. We drove and drove. And drove.

We stopped for dinner here and had a fine Pizza…

We also gave the car its evening meal…

Then continued driving, crossing plenty of these en route…

The daylight still hadn't completely faded by midnight! This picture was taken a few miles north of Trondheim at 11.15pm

We finally made it to our Scandic Hotel at around half midnight, extremely tired but content with our days work!

So to summarize the days events; between 0815 and 0030 we have covered 868 miles, which interestingly enough is 5 miles more than we covered over the whole of the first 4 days of the Tour!

It is also 30miles further than the distance between Lands End to John O'Groats!

Without further ado, here it is then, today's complete route map.

We're both pretty tired here, so apologies if the update is a little disjointed!

Until the next one, night night!