The Arctic Circle

Today we reached the Arctic Circle!

Literally on the Arctic Cirlce

The drive from Trondheim to Fauske was another absolutely gorgeous one…I can’t believe how beautiful it is up here…there are constant woooow’s and look-at-that’s coming from the car at every turn. So far the roads have been completely clear but the surroundings are covered in foot upon foot of crisp snow and this evening we saw a herd of reindeer!

Nothing too disastrous held us back today…just a couple of minor annoyances, oh and we drove into Hell but that’s just a small town up here!

This morning we weren’t able to open Maxi’s petrol tank…we tried and tried and WD40′d it and tried and tried and it took almost 45 minutes to get it to budge…fairly irritating since we are only filling the tank up half way each time. Also, about 150 miles from Fauske we were faced with a traffic jam resulting from an accident that had happened earlier in the afternoon. Luckily we arrived at the scene no more than 20 minutes before the road was cleared and we started moving again. It turned out that some of our fellow rallyers had left really early that morning and had been in the jam for 2 hours!

John is loving the driving down all the crazy, bumpy wee roads in Northern Norway.

Maxi has been doing really well and likes getting up to 80 mph. Since low Norwegian speed limits don’t fit too well with ridiculously long daily drives, we have decided to pretend that their speed limit signage, which is in KM, is actually in Miles! ‘Oh sorry Mr Norwegian policeman, whatever do you mean we were going too fast? Kilometers…what are they?’
Overtaking on small mountainous roads can be pretty fun too and as encouragement for Maxi when trying to get him to accelerate as fast as possible he shouts things like, ‘Come on Maxercise’ and ‘You can do it Saxy Maxi’ Quite hilarious although it does appear to work! A couple of the other rallyers have commented that when they are driving behind us it sounds as though they are behind a tractor and we are noticing that day by day Maxi is getting louder. Despite this though he’s running well!
Tomorrow we’re headed for Tromso and many more miles (or kilometers) of more jaw droppingly beautiful scenery I’m sure….