Travels with Spaniels: A trundle around Trondheim, and the road to Hell

Trondheim, Norway's third city. It even sounds remote. And in Norway it's considered the north, just as Manchester is to Londoners, despite being less than half way up the United Kingdom. There is a sleeper train from Oslo, which would otherwise be a 500 km drive. Trondheim is at the top of Norway's bulge. From here on, we are travelling through a much narrower country, rarely far from the border with Sweden, and we are still less than halfway from the top.

A quiet country churchyard

We had left our overnight lay-by early, unable to walk the spaniels from there. We stopped soon after in a small village and explored the quiet lanes, admiring the picturesque wooden houses and stopping to get water for the dogs in a sleepy graveyard with an unusual octagonal church. We wanted to be in Trondheim early, as we'd decided to pay to use the town centre motorhome parking, and we'd read that its 50 spaces soon filled up.

It would cost us 260NOK, (£26) but with the free site closed down there weren't many options.

As I drove into the city in the late morning, Nick read out snippets of information about it. It had pretty much been destroyed by fire at regular intervals from the Middle Ages on, so we weren't expecting to see much in the way of old buildings. Handy tourist maps at the parking site suggested a stroll around the central island, so we set off after lunch. It turned out to be a lovely walk around an elegant town, taking in the harbour along the fjord, then the riverside walk, the northernmost gothic cathedral in Europe, and fabulously colourful warehouses, shops and houses. Apparently the frequent fires had led to a ban on flammable materials being kept on the city side of the river, so warehouses had spring up on the opposite bank, with shops and living accommodation at their rear. Many of these are still there, and the Bakklandet district was a delight.

Houses in Bakklandet, almost in the centre of Trondheim

It's a measure of how small Trondheim is, that we saw the occupants of both of the vehicles with which we'd shared the lay-by the night before. Walking towards the harbour a woman hailed us, and we immediately recognised their dog as belonging to the Czech couple who'd been sleeping in the car behind us. After a laugh and a wave they started to move on, at which point Nick suddenly shouted out: "Great band!" The man and Nick were both wearing Led Zeppelin tops! The next morning I went for a run, and in a quiet car park in a residential area overlooking the fjord I spotted the French family who were squeezing themselves into a VW camper van, and with whom we'd spent a few minutes in the lay-by extolling the many virtues of France for motorhomes. Trondheim will also go down in our diaries as the place we met our first British motorhome travellers since Antwerp (well, one was actually a New Zealander). They stopped by our van for a chat and we exchanged tales of our travels, and discussed the merits of Chausson vans, as they had one too.

A gentle stroll around Trondheim

We decided to avoid the road to Hell

The next morning we took advantage of what's rumoured to be the most northerly laundrette in Norway, a fifteen minute walk from the motorhome. Some shuttling backwards and forwards was required to get everything washed and dried, but by noon we were pretty much ready to go, and Nick went back to get the van, picking me, the washing and the spaniels up from the side of the road. As we stopped for lunch just outside Trondheim, we realised that the price of fuel had dropped below the magic 15 NOK a litre marker, so we filled the tank. A little later we stopped in Steinkjer, just over the 64th parallel (64 degrees north) to fill up with LPG, and get milk and a few other essentials. Tonight we have stopped in a lovely little carpark, well off the main road, near some Stone Age petroglyphs, and are luxuriating in being empty of everything we need to be empty of (toilet cassette, grey water, recycling) and full of everything else (fresh water, fuel, LPG, clean clothes). It's a good way to be facing the next leg north. Arctic circle, here we come.