Hi all My Husband and I are travelling to scandanavia with a 4 wheel car & caravan on 02--9-12 to 11-10-12, Harwich to Esbjerg crossing. we hope to visit Denmark, Norway & Sweden but know very little about them. we would like to see the Northern Lights,(but are willing to ditch the car & van to take an excursion by train, plane or cruise.) nothing too pricey though. Also woud like to take in the Fiords. We do not want to spend all the time driving, approx 200 miles a day every 5 days or so. We need as much info/help on the following please_
routes to take & places to visit? what weather can we expect? do we need Snow Chains? What about the Tics in Sweden Which is best for mobile phone to buy a pay as you go?or sim cards?
thank you in anticipation Gonkie
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Unlikely to see northern lights in September/October, more likely in winter.
Any excursion to the north is pricey, especially in Norway. Train is possibly cheapest. "Norwegian" are the budget airline, you need to book well ahead for the cheap fares.
Very unlikely to be snow, but possible in the far north of Finmark. Locals use winter tyres rather than chains.
You are too early for the "compulsory winter tyres" period.
Weather will be starting to get chilly in the north, but otherwise is much like UK. September can be very nice.
However, in Norway in particular, the summer holiday season is short. Quite a few sites are only open June/July/August, so by September/October your choice of sites might be a bit limited. Certainly by October.
Site prices vary, £20-£30 is normal. Lots of sites in Denmark meter the electricity. Many sites all over Scandinavia charge extra for showers.
Look at whether an ACSI card would be of benefit.
Routes are covered in some previous discussions. Norway and Sweden are very "long", distances are huge, so if you want to limit time spent driving I suggest you stay south of Trondheim.
For phone....how much are you likely to use it? We have a "global sim", several different ones available, credit never expires on ours, but about 37ppm to use. Receiving calls is free.
We have ours for receiving calls but otherwise use our UK sims to send/receive texts. Family know not to ring us on UK number.
Local SIMs can be purchased for around £10-£15, but do you really need one?
Pack plenty of basic foods, Norway in particular is very expensive.
We budget £65 per day for costs, though this includes ferries and insurance/breakdown, as well as fuel, sites, food and sightseeing.
Hi Jennifer thank you very much for all the info, regarding the Northern Lights, we read in a Caravan club mag that September to April 2011 to 2012 were predicted to be the best times! We thought we may be risking it going to Norway any later on with the caravan!
I have checked your site reviews & notice you dont have any for Scandanavia, can you recommend any nice places to visit? we do have Camping cheques and ACSI card, we will probably spend more time in Denmark due to the Northern lights looking less of a possibitity.
Thanks again
Don't forget to leave a review of the French and other European campsites you have visited!
Northern Lights - you could be lucky that early. I saw them one time in August in Iceland. I wonder if there's anywhere on the net that predicts these things?
Camping Card - you'll definitely need it. The one time we camped there every site we went to in Denmark wanted to see it.
Denmark recommendations - I presume you've already got Copenhagen on the list but as I haven't been since I was a boy I can't make any specific recommendations. But from more recent visits, Ribe is a lovely old town, but most of the towns and cities have some nice old spots in them and getting around them is not too difficult (eg we went to Kolding this last time and quite nice old centre) I seem to remember Odense being quite nice as well. Aarhus has Den Gamle By which is a living museum of old buildings collected together and is well worth visiting. Just around the coast from Aarhus is Ebeltoft which on a flying visit I thought was one of the nicest seaside towns I had seen in Denmark. My sister lives in the "Lake District" (between Silkeborg and Skanderborg) and it is a very attractive area - lakes, woods and HILLS, which you won't get in many other parts. For attractive coastal scenery the drive all the way up the west coast from Esbjerg is good and if you make it all the way to the top at Skagen you can see where the waves meet coming from two different directions which is interesting. This is all a bit random and just a few vague thoughts!
To be honest a lot of Denmark is a bit "samey" to me - all very attractive but tends towards neat, flat scenery - all very nice but one area can be a bit like another. I suspect you will find that Sweden and Norway are far more dramatic and varied in the scenery.
There is someone from Denmark on the forum though offhand I can't remember who they are but I'm sure they can offer some more (and better!) advice.
If you're not in a hurry the Marguerite Route is worth looking out for - a route all around Denmark using mainly the smaller roads and the more attractive scenically. Doesn't take a direct line! Marked on all the road maps and by a daisy sign on the roads themselves though its worth following it on a map as sometimes its easy to miss the signs and take a wrong turning.
Sites open at that time of year: I've got a couple of camping directories for Denmark fron a few years ago and quite a few sites seem to close during September or around beginning of October - but around 20-25% are open all year. I have two directories both of which I picked up for free from sites - one from The Danish Camping Union and one from DK-Camping. I haven't looked at their websites in detail but I wonder if one or other would send you their directory?
Hi Jennifer thank you very much for all the info, regarding the Northern Lights, we read in a Caravan club mag that September to April 2011 to 2012 were predicted to be the best times! We thought we may be risking it going to Norway any later on with the caravan!
I have checked your site reviews & notice you dont have any for Scandanavia, can you recommend any nice places to visit? we do have Camping cheques and ACSI card, we will probably spend more time in Denmark due to the Northern lights looking less of a possibitity.
Thanks again
I think you would need to be very far north to see the NL in September, so it could be an expensive trip with no guarantees!
But don't let that put you off visiting Norway, the scenery is spectacular.
As you have 6 weeks, you could divide your time having 10-14 days in each county. Maybe a circular route, drive north to the top of Denmark and take the ferry to the south of Norway, then head towards the fjords/mountains in from Bergen.
Then you could head east into Sweden and over to Stockholm, then back across country to Malmo and take the bridge to Denmark, which would let you visit Copenhagen and wherever else you fancied before returning to Esbjerg. Rather than going directly to Malmo, you could detour to take in Oslo on the way.
If Sweden/Stockholm is too far, or you want to see more of Norway, you could head east and pick up the E6 in Noway and just head south to Oslo, and then into Sweden and to Malmo.
Possibly more driving that you were thinking of, but with a huge area to cover that cannot be helped. The roads in Sweden and Denmark are very good, so long distances are no problem, though of course Denmark is not very big!
The best plan is to sit down with a good map, find the interesting looking areas, and work out a suitable route.
There are very few sites in Scandinavia listed on UKCS, we haven't stayed on any of them. We used some ACSI (card and non-card) ones, some Camping Cheque, and others from the site lists supplied by the tourist boards. Many sites expect you to have the "Camping Card Scandinavia", available from the sites. They may not accept the usual Camping Carnet International.
We tend to choose our sites by where we want to be, not by facilities as we are totally "self contained", so I would not necessarily recommend the ones we used. All we need is EHU and water/waste, which is easy to find, a reasonably flat pitch is good too!
I have put reviews on ACSI for any of theirs that we used.
Things to look out for are distances from the pitches to the facilities block on larger sites, and distance to fetch/empty water. Grey water emptying is often at the toilet emptying point, or you can use the MH service area. Emptying points are often poorly signed.
------------- Jennifer
Don't forget to leave a review of the French and other European campsites you have visited!
Thanks again jennifer for taking the time to provide all the info,sorry for the delay in answering but we have been busy doing research, and planning our trip!
We have more or less decided to go via Esbjerg,Odense, Copenhagen, across the bridge to Malmo, then up the west coast of sweden taking in a few coastal areas,and Trollhattan, would have liked to visit stockholm but think it a tad too far, so we plan to head up to oslo for a few days, then up to Gol, and hopefully do a train journey from there(Norway in a nutshell maybe).We also would like to visit Bergen. We have booked a return ferry from oslo to copenhagen,and plan to spend 1 week near Ribe and Esbjerg. Things may change slightly on route but that is the beauty of canavanning isnt it?
Our route has been planned using mainly camping cheque sites(when open)
Looking forward to hearing how you got on when you get back and to reading the campsite reviews. We're thinking of doing something similar next year or the year after.
Thanks for your replies and very useful suggestions regarding Denmark it has really helped us to plan our trip!
The marguerite route sounds interesting, as does the lake district. When we stay any where we always like to drive drive around the surrounding area, so you have given us pleanty of ideas, I just hope we have time to fit it all in!!
We have ditched the northern lights idea, and will do the train journey instead.
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Topic: Scandanavia advice please
