As we came closer to Norway, the flat farm fields of Sweden changed to rocky wooded hills. Just before reaching the border, we stopped to fill up with gas at the lower Swedish prices. The station was located in a large shopping center where the parking lot was full of cars with Norwegian license plates. We also counted twenty motorhomes there. Everyone was stocking up at the lower prices. We bought just a couple of things at the grocery store, but the guy behind us had eight 2-lb. packages of ground beef.
We are now back on Norway’s toll roads. There were no tolls in Sweden or Finland, but in Norway you drive through toll cameras every 20 miles or so. If you are going to travel for several weeks in Norway as we did, it is necessary to set up an account with a credit card: the Norwegian authorities then charge a couple of hundred dollars to the card and subtract the toll from that amount every time we drive past one of their many cameras. If necessary, they load more money into the account. Eventually--well after the end of your travels--they refund what’s left over. We had set up an account before we began driving through Norway at the beginning of this year’s trip; later, we had to set up a second account before our return into the country a second time. As a result, we have no idea how much tolls have cost us, because it will take a while before the Norwegian authorities reimburse our credit card account.
We stopped for one more day (two nights) in Oslo. The campground was much less busy this time, we had no problem finding an electric hookup . . . and our view of the city wasn't blocked by other campers.
Also, getting to the campground this time, from the south and east, was a whole lot easier than approaching from the west and through the city had been a month ago. But if you are going to spend only one day in Oslo, don’t make it a Monday: anything worth visiting is closed.
On Tuesday we drove our final lap to Lillehammer.
At Lillehammer's Olympic ski jump.
Along the way we found two more caravan stores that didn’t have RV antifreeze. We thought we were about to buy a large quantity of the world’s most expensive vodka (taxes on alcohol here being very high). But David read an internet help site on which the answer to winterizing a cabin cruiser’s water system involved “plumber’s antifreeze”; at about the same time, someone suggested we speak to a plumber about how people in Norway winterize water lines in a summer cabin; we did, and were sold 3.5 liters of a concentrated, non-toxic, lightly tinted liquid we are supposed to dilute with a liter of water.
To celebrate, we then spent the day giving Rover a much-needed bath and interior cleaning.
We have travelled 3538 miles, and after we have returned home and added up all our kroner (both Swedish and Norwegian), euros, rubles and dollars, we will post a final blog entry in early September.