Where the light doesn’t stop.

Via Hamburg into Jutland, then the Danish bridges — the Great Belt and the Öresund — to Malmö, and from there up the Swedish east coast: the High Coast, Umeå, Luleå, Kiruna. From Abisko on, the route stops being a road and becomes a landscape. North to the Lyngen fjord, then back through Narvik and the Vesterålen to the Lofoten. The way home does not follow the coast but the Swedish interior — Arjeplog, Östersund, Sveg — then Värmland, Strömstad, the Öresund once more and down the west coast of Denmark to St. Peter-Ording.

296 kilometres a day — and on no other trip is the figure more misleading: a good half of the distance is getting there and back. Between Abisko and the Lofoten the legs are short; up there you stay put. The longest stop was three days on the Lyngen fjord, and that is where this journey stopped being a drive.

After Iceland, northern Norway is easy going: no F-roads, no fords, no four-wheel-drive requirement — the tarmac runs all the way out to the Lofoten. What asks something of you is not the surface but the width. In places the E10 across the islands is narrow enough that oncoming traffic waits in a passing place, and there can be a motorhome over any crest. Gravel only starts where the side roads turn off to the viewpoints and the farms — short stretches, but tight ones with nowhere to turn around. With a long vehicle you plan the last two kilometres differently from the first seven thousand.

In August the midnight sun is over, but the night has not come back yet. At the northernmost point the sun stood 19.4 hours above the horizon; at the southern end of the trip, 14.3 — five hours apart on the same journey. What lies in between is not darkness but a dusk that takes its time. You keep driving into the evening because nothing tells you that it is evening.

Three things are better sorted out in advance. First, the tolls: Norway has no barriers — the gantries read your plate, and if you are not registered with AutoPASS beforehand the bill follows you home. Second, the ferries: you cross from the Vesterålen to the Lofoten at Melbu–Fiskebøl; by road, the detour takes you back onto the E10. Third, fuel: on the way home through the Swedish interior the stations lie far apart and are often unmanned card machines. None of that is a drama — unless you come at one on a quarter of a tank on a Sunday evening.

Norway has the most generous reputation and the clearest limit: the right to roam (friluftsloven) covers the tent, not the vehicle — driving or parking off-road is prohibited by the Motor Traffic Act. What is legal is wherever parking is legal: rest areas, lay-bys, a farmyard with permission. National parks and nature reserves have rules of their own, and on the Lofoten the pressure is such that individual municipalities have issued their own bans. Sweden works the same way — the right of access for the tent, the Terrängkörningslag for the vehicle — and Denmark is the strictest of the three: outside designated sites, sleeping in a vehicle is not allowed.

Less getting there, more time up north. A good half of the distance was the run out and back, and for three weeks that is the wrong split. Next time I would take the Swedish east coast more briskly and spend the week I save at the top: on the Lyngen fjord and the Lofoten, where the weather decides anyway whether a day gives you a picture. And I would stop planning the way home — I would just drive it when the time comes.