Cycling Norway, properly paced.

British cycle touring grew up on the National Cycle Network, the Coast to Coast (C2C), the Way of the Roses, the Hebridean Way. The form is well understood: a settled route, a string of small inns, a pannier load, a few crossings by ferry, a meaningful drink at the end of the day. Norway works on broadly the same principles, but the geography pushes everything higher and slower. You are riding along the rim of a working fjord, hopping between islands by the Norwegian coastal route (Hurtigruten), or pedalling the surface of a nineteenth-century post route that nobody else has bothered to find.

The country has ten official National Cycle Routes maintained by Statens vegvesen, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration. The most internationally known is Mjølkevegen, the 250-kilometre Milk Road that runs from Vinstra in Gudbrandsdalen, across the Valdres upland, and ends at Gol in Hallingdal. The Helgeland coast holds the long-distance EuroVelo 1 (the North Sea Cycle Route), which gives a genuinely uncrowded week between island groups by road and ferry. Hardanger and Lofoten round out the four core regions we cycle most often.

Traffic is the part most British riders are surprised by. The roads are emptier than the Lake District in October. The big-tunnel question gets asked a lot, and the honest answer is in a separate field note we will eventually publish - in practice, the operators we work with route around the long-tunnel sections or arrange a shuttle so you ride only the worthwhile road. Each of the weeks below is bookable with a Norwegian operator we have ridden with, at the same price you would pay them directly. We do not run the trips. We just know which routes are right.