We are leaving Norway today - we have been here a bit over a month and have seen so much. Our original plan was to stay a bit longer, but Lars needs to get down to Frankfurt to catch a flight back to Singapore and KL for some work meetings. We have checked out a number of ways to get from Norway down to Germany, and the cheapest and quickest was to take a ferry from Larvik to northern Denmark. As we need to come back in August for a family gathering, we looked into options for our return. As the return ticket was about the same price as the one-way ticket, this routing worked out well for us.
While leaving from Oslo would have been easier, the ferries cost much more. And Larvik is only about 130 km from Oslo. We spend the morning having breakfast and packing up our bags and loading them into the car. We leave the capital of Norway shortly after 11 AM. The drive down is uneventful and it takes us two hours to get to the port town of Larvik. We have a bit of time to kill, so we fill up our tank with petrol and do some shopping.
We then go and check in at the pier for our trip and while we are waiting for the ferry to arrive we have a picnic lunch. The ferry, the Color Line M/S Color Traveller arrives around 2:30 PM. They very quickly unload her and we drive on to the large ship at 3PM. As usual, the car deck will be locked during the voyage, so we need to take with us whatever we need during the almost seven hour crossing to Denmark. The ship has a length of almost 170 meters and displaces almost 30,000 tonnes.
We are lucky to find some nice seats in the sleeper seat section - the first row with a view out the stern window. The seats have a decent recline, but I would hate to have to use these on an overnight crossing. But as this is a day crossing, the seats work out just fine. It is not full in our area, so we have a few seats around us to spread out.
We do not do much during the crossing other than hang out in our seats reading and working on our journals. At times we would go up to the outer decks to take a look at the view and get some fresh air. We also spent some time in the duty-free shop picking up some things. We get some dinner from the cafeteria and bring it back to our seats to eat.
As the ship begins to approach Frederikshavn, we make our way down to the car deck and our car. We pull into the port at 10:25 PM, and our car location is fortunate - we are near the exit ramp and we are off the ship and on the road in ten minutes. Now, all we need to do is find a campsite. Some information we found on the boat indicated that there are at least three campsites in the nearby town of Sæby. So we decide to head there.
It is a short drive and we are lucky when we get there - we drive into the first campsite and it is still open (not really too surprising as they know when the ferry arrives and they must get plenty of customers from it). And they have some cabins available. Not the cheapest, but we take what we can get this late in the evening. We have a long day of driving ahead of us tomorrow, so we do not want to waste too much time tonight comparative shopping to save a few dollars. It actually is a very nice cabin, up on a small mound, and well equipped. Too bad we are not doing any cooking here. We soon settle in and head off to bed.