My last day in Norway dawned bright and fair, which made a nice change. I packed up my tent and camping gear and set out for the fishing spot I had been told about the previous evening. And what a beautiful spot it was! A short walk through the woods brought me to a sandy cove surrounded by rocky headlands reaching out into the sound. I rigged up with a soft plastic bait rigged on a jig head and started casting around from the rocks, seeking out the deeper channels. I was conscious of time pressing, because I had to be at the ferry by about noon, and I reckoned it was at least a 45-minute ride. I did a pretty good job of covering as much water as I could reach, but to no avail. Disappointing, but that is the way it goes with fishing sometimes.

And in many ways, that was the end of my 'adventure' -- the rest of the trip back home was pretty mundane and uneventful. Ferry from Kristiansand to Hirtsals in Denmark and then endless motorways through Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, back to IJmuiden and the ferry back to Newcastle.

I discovered along the way that the best car to follow on the motorway is a Skoda Octavia estate -- almost no turbulence behind them, in contrast to vans and, surprisingly, some apparently more-aerodynamic cars, even Aston Martins.

And I also discovered that the pockets of my jacket (BMW GS Dry) are not waterproof, at least not enough to withstand a downpour that would have looked at home in the monsoon. My fault, really. All the way through Finland and Norway, I had worn Rev'It waterproofs over my Hein Gericke Gore-Tex trousers and BMW jacket when rain was threatening, but I had decided to risk it when black clouds rolled up when I was only about 50 km from my planned stop-off point in the Netherlands. Without warning, the skys opened and rain came down in stair rods, bouncing about half a metre back up off the road surface and turning the roads to rivers in a matter of seconds. Within seconds my jacket and trousers were soaked to the point that there was no point in stopping and putting on waterproofs, even if there were somewhere sheltered to do so -- which there wasn't. So I just carried on to the hotel I had booked and took shelter there. Fortunately, neither the jacket nor the trousers had let water through; they were soaked but had kept me dry. And also fortunately I didn't have anything in the pockets that mattered too much; the receipts from fuel stops had turned into papier mache, but that was about the worst of it.

That was the last of the atrocious weather -- I had clear skies and fair weather for the last two days, which made a nice change.