The Trip to Oslo

We woke up in Copenhagen ready for another day on the road but first decided to make a quick stop at The Little Mermaid statue in Hans Christian Andersen’s home town. Unfortunately, and quite comically, it turns out that she is no longer gracing the shores of Denmark but is in fact currently at the Danish pavilion of the EXPO 2010 in Shanghai.

We then headed in the direction of Sweden across the spectacular Öresund Bridge that we had recently watched a show about on the Discovery channel. Whilst the show explained the massive feats of engineering that went into building the bridge, it failed to mention that once completed it would cost punters half the price of their rally banger to cross it!

Today’s mission was to reach Oslo before it got too late so we blasted through Sweden, stopping only for petrol and to take photos outside IKEA. Yes, we know we’ve visited numerous IKEA stores back in Scotland but there is something strangely exciting about seeing a store in the motherland.

Half way to Norway we started to get a little worried about Maxi. He was backfiring and stalling and Oslo was still a long drive away.  We stopped at a gas station to see if we could figure out what was wrong and while we were there, we spotted a Google street view car filling up.

Google Street View car in Sweden

We struggled with Maxi all the way to Oslo with the feeling that he just wasn’t sounding right and hoped that when we reached our hostel in Oslo, there may be someone with more car knowledge who could help us out.

Arriving at our destination we were welcomed by lots of other rallyers and their tricked out cars. Up until now we had only caught a glimpse of a few on the road so it was nice to see everyone together. We found out that one of the guys is a mechanic, told him what had happened and showed him what we thought it might be. He said that it probably wasn’t that but he said we would be fine if we just kept giving Maxi plenty of gas. Him and his second driver had lots of fix ‘em up stuff in their boot and said to keep with them on the road to Trondheim the following day in case something went wrong.

In the evening we took a tram into Oslo’s centre, hungry for something to eat. Amazingly we came across a little take-out cafe which sold gluten free curry and rice so we each had a little box (very tasty!) before having a couple of drinks in a downtown pub with fellow rallyers.  We only had a couple as Oslo is the most expensive city in the world.

Tomorrow we’re off to Trondheim via a stretch of road touted to be “the best drive in the world.”