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This is Paolo Schiannini’s version of his Scandinavian trip that he took with his son and daughter-in-law.

"After many years talking about it, I finally decided to take my trusty steed Rudolph (K100RT) and son 'Christmas' and his wife Nikki (his pillion for the trip and companion in life) on the pilgrimage to the Motorcyclist's Mecca.

So at the tender age of 68 years, three months and 29 days old I took the motorway to Verona where I was going to put Rudolph on a train to Hamburg.

It proved to be an inauspicious start - The only respite from the rain on the ride from Milan to Verona proved to be five minutes of hail.

The railway journey was going better until Rudolph's clutch cable decided to snap when I tried to leave the train. After a well chosen rosary of select words, I called the breakdown truck which took me to the BMW dealership who kindly replaced the cable for 'only' 70 Euros (a quick re-cap of the earlier carefully chosen words)

My first scheduled stop was in the beautiful town of Lubecca where I spent two nights with some sightseeing in Germany before heading up through Denmark to Gothenburg in Sweden where I met son Christmas and Nikki who were arriving from the UK on the ferry.

We were invited to stay with some Icelandic friends in their summerhouse which was in a completely remote location in the middle of the forest.

Son Christmas' GPS proved impotent and we arrived late and wet but our spirits were raised after some good wine and a roast reindeer supper round the wood fire.

We were so happy here that it proved impossible to leave in the morning and so a second day was blissfully squandered.

Finally it was time for the big push to the North. We decided to take the road which skirts the Gulf of Botnia.

Unexpectedly, the sea is almost always out of sight but this does nothing to spoil the beautiful landscapes we see, flattened by glaciers tens of millions of years ago and populated by dense pine forests and silver birch trees.

Here and there I see rocks which, being a geologist, I know to be millions of years old as they have been polished by the ice flows. Their colours vary from black with white or grey streaks to a deep red.

For long stretches the roadside has these reddish colours and the overall effect is stunning.

The few houses we see are all wooden and are painted brick red. We were to see these throughout Scandinavia. We also saw the sun again and this stayed with us for the whole of our time in the North. The ride was transformed into pure joy.

At the end of each day we stop in one of the many campsites and hire one of the little wooden cabins which are plentiful throughout Scandinavia.

They always have some bunk beds, a two-ring stove, electric light and a table and chairs where we have our dinner after a cocktail aperitif of our own invention called "arctic sunset" (the recipe for which is highly secret!).

They often also have a fridge and other amenities.

The journey through Sweden went smoothly and we saw our first reindeer as we crossed over into Finland. It was lying in the middle of the road and was totally undisturbed by our motorcycles.

It did give us a brief glance, but it knew that it was us who were trespassing in its world. We later discovered that all reindeer behave this way and are totally indifferent to cars and horns.

We could have taken a slightly longer road and gone through Rovaniemi where that impostor has his base and I could have unmasked him once and for all and show the world that the real Father Christmas was, but we decided to press on to cross the Arctic Circle near Juoksanki.

From here onwards the vegetation changes, the forests thin out and the trees are shorter and fewer species survive at this latitude. It was not long before we were to be surrounded by the tundra.

The most perceptible change though is that darkness only lasts for a couple of hours at night and for the rest of the time we are surrounded by a beautiful light which has wonderful soft pastel colours which dissolve into a milky white on the horizon. It is almost impossible to describe, but now I know why people say that once you have seen it you will never forget it.

We continue North through Norway through the tundra. It's not the frozen desert that you find in the Siberian tundra because we are blessed by the warm current from the gulf but all the trees have disappeared and only a few shrubs cling on to the rocky lake filled landscape.

Rudolf is happy as we are surrounded by reindeer. We notice that as the volume of traffic decreases, the proportion of bikes increases. Obviously people were on their way to the motorcycling Mecca or on their way back from it.

Motorcycles greet each other in a more purposeful way as we all know why we have crossed on these roads.

Night time no longer exists and having daylight for 24 hours is nothing short of magical.

We set up camp in Russenes, a mere 200km from North Cape with a view of coming back tomorrow as we don't think there will be much to do once we have got to the northernmost point and taken a few tourist photos. How wrong we turned out to be...

North Cape (or Nordkapp) is on the island of Mageroy which you reach through a tunnel which goes 226m under the sea. The tunnel is absolutely freezing.

We get to the famous metal globe monument on the cliff side and take our picture. More recent monuments have been erected which we carefully ignore and we gave the tourist shop a cursory glance before escaping at the sight of the huge ship full of (in this instance) Japanese tourists who were being escorted here in a convoy of huge yellow busses.

Turning our backs on the land and looking out beyond the cliffs to the immense expense of sea we felt we had arrived at the Ultima Thule of ancient legends - the island beyond the edges of the known world.

We came back through Honningsvag where we saw some tourists climbing onto a small motorboat. Nikki, Fil and I all looked at each other as the same thought passed simultaneously through our collective brain.

We found the tourist office and finally managed to obtain a phone number for someone who had a boat in Skarsvag. With the necessary arrangements made we doubled back on ourselves and headed to the charming village of Skarsvag (which is only a few kms from Nordkapp!).

At around 11pm we are met by our guide who we initially think is trying to rip us off by hiring two boats but he explained that if the fog came in we would never be able to outrun it in just one boat. Nikki went in one boat with our guide and I went in the other one with my son.

The sea offers no protection and the spray we kick up when we hit a wave is freezing, but this does not bother us as we are in full bike kit. Puffins fly past us just inches from the water's surface.

At midnight we are at the junction of the Barent's sea and the Arctic Ocean, significantly further north than Nordkapp and our guide decides it's time to do some fishing! It was miraculous. In no more than a couple of minutes we had four cod longer than my forearm.

It is two o'clock in the morning before we are back on dry land and we still have 200km before we are back at camp.

We ride back exhausted but enthralled and bathed in a light that is not of this world.

We start the journey south via the Vesteralen and Lofoten islands which prove to be irresistibly beautiful. A trip out on a boat from Ardennes takes us to sea some whales and we lose time here too easily.

The ferry back is only a few days away and so we cut short the intended route of coming back through the Norwegian fjords and head inland to the main road. As we head south we are re-united with some old familiar things such as darkness, traffic and rain.

The rain followed us onto the ferry and all the way from Newcastle back to Cambridge where work called and the trip was over for Son Christmas.

Nikki however swapped bikes and came back to Italy with me in an attempt to eek out the trip just a little longer.

Every now and then people say to me "wow - you did a motorcycle trip like that at your age, congratulations.”

“I am very pleased to have done it but I wouldn't say I was proud of it, except for one thing - the fact that I did it with my son who had first planned it and then done the trip with a good friend who happened to also be his father.

"I've made lots of mistakes in my life but at least I now know that as a father I did pretty well."

Check out this week's MCN, available from Wednesday, August 1, 2007 to read all about Paolo's son's account of their venture.