I flew to Nor­way direct­ly after fin­ish­ing the Ice­land hike. I had intend­ed to hike the length of Norway/Sweden fol­low­ing the crest of the Scan­di­na­vian Moun­tains from Trom­so in the north to the south­ern coast either around Bergen or Sta­vanger. On the flight from Ice­land I real­ized that I dras­ti­cal­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed the mileage and I had a good friend’s wed­ding to attend back in New York in a few weeks. So I start­ed off doing real­ly big miles for the first week to see if I could still squeeze in the intend­ed route. After hik­ing well over 300 miles the first week, includ­ing back to back 57 mile days, I real­ized it wouldn’t be pos­si­ble in the time­frame that I had. On that note, I’ll tell a short sto­ry. My sleep sched­ule was messed up all sum­mer because of the mid­night sun and it nev­er real­ly get­ting dark. So when I decid­ed I would need to push it to see if I could still make it I was hik­ing big mileage days from the start and 20 hours a day. After 6.5 days of that, I real­ized that I still wouldn’t be able to make it, but my birth­day was that day and I had town and real food with­in 20 miles it was only 12PM. I could make it for din­ner on my birth­day, but then a dark thun­der­head moved in and I decid­ed that I would stop and set up my tent and wait it out and move on after since I had some time and wouldn’t miss din­ner. Any­way, I set up my tent, got in, and prompt­ly fell asleep. I do not even remem­ber hear­ing any rain or thun­der (but it def­i­nite­ly poured because every­thing was flood­ed the next morn­ing) and I woke up 16 hours lat­er in the exact same posi­tion that I had fall­en asleep in. 

Any­way, when I real­ized that I couldn’t make it the entire way I picked out a bunch of places that looked like they would be the high­lights and hiked in those places for 3 to 7 days instead and did a few more tech­ni­cal hikes that were slow­er going. This was awe­some and com­plete­ly changed the feel of the trip. I still cov­ered good ground and got to see a lot of real­ly beau­ti­ful place, and I prob­a­bly even saw more of the real­ly nice places than I would have. So this all worked out real­ly well and I had a great time in Nor­way and Swe­den. One thing to keep in mind though, it is VERY expen­sive. I def­i­nite­ly lost some weight because I wouldn’t buy near­ly as much food as nor­mal at the town stops. 

View Nor­way in a larg­er map