Having practically ran to the car rental place in Tromso Tuesday morning to avoid being late, we took control of a small black VW Up and drove out into the driving snow. Initially headed out of the city simply to find a place to sit for a bit we decided to continue on our road towards the city of Alta more out of curiosity than anything else. For anyone attempting the drive I can recommend two things. Firstly, if the weather forecast tells you driving conditions are difficult then you should consider going another day. The road at times looked somewhat like this:

And that wasn’t even the worst bit – for a couple of nervous minutes we were guided purely by the poles at the side of the road.

We also owe a great debt of thanks to the Lorry driver who helped us out when we got lodged in snow not far from Alta – first by pushing, then by taking control of the car and showing us the correct way to manoeuvre when stuck with one wheel sunk deep into snow.

The other observation we made is that the E6 has some rather nice resting places for someone living out of their car. The nicest we found was this one just before Hatteng by Storfjord which had heated toilets, interesting information about the region and a covered picnic area, perfect for lighting up the Trangia and cooking something nice.

Others we stopped at were just glorified lay-by, but they are frequent, and no one seems to mind you having a good nights sleep in them. However be prepared to be woken up by a snow plough driver should you sleep late as we discovered the next day. As he explained in broken English, we had been there a long time and he just wanted to check that we weren’t dead!