North Cape tour

On Friday 29th June, me (Peter Jones) and two friends from Sheffield, Frank Norman and Andrew Hizzard, began a 5000-mile motorcycle tour through Europe. We rode to Newcastle and caught a ferry to Bergen (Norway), arriving on Saturday evening and starting the almost 2000-mile ride north to the North Cape.

The roads were quite narrow and winding so progress was slow but the spectacular scenery was the best I have ever seen anywhere, mile-high mountains climbing vertically straight out of the mile-deep fjords. The unusually warm weather was melting the mountain glaciers and creating huge waterfalls down the mountains. Some of the waterfalls were falling so far they just turned to mist. All this managed to take my attention off of the increasing pain of saddle-sore which seemed to have set in after 3 long days of riding for about 10-12 hours a day.

On day five we entered the Arctic Circle and stopped at the visitors centre. The weather was still lovely and warm; I sent out a few postcards and had a look at the stuffed polar bear on display, which was stood on its hind legs and was about 10 feet tall! But with 700 miles still to go we had to press on, the terrain was beginning to look more barren now as we headed further north and there was very little traffic.

But even on these desolate roads I managed to nearly hit a suicidal reindeer which bolted from nearby trees straight into my path. I cleared it by about an inch. Then on the seventh day we rode the long stretch to the North Cape. This was the coldest part of the trip, with gale-force winds from the Arctic Ocean. But soon we were there. At 71 degrees longitude we were at the most northerly point in Europe, which felt great. But we didnt stay too long because we still had over 2500 miles to ride on our return journey.

The return journey we had planned was a long journey through seven more countries: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany and Holland. This was quite an arduous journey, made worse by the wet weather we were now encountering. But nights spent in the cities of Helsinki, Tallin, Riga, Hannover and Amsterdam more than made up for it.

All in all, Norway was by far the best place we visited and thanks to colleagues at work we raised over £500 for Cancer Research UK.