It all started with an article on the BBC website enthusing about the most beautiful road in the world. I would like to drive along that, I thought. I’d have been about 68 at the time and had just acquired a motorbike again after 43 years abstinence.
The road is called “Kystriksveien”, which means Coastal National Road in Norwegian, and – not really surprisingly – is in Norway, extending along the Atlantic Coast up until Bodø.
In 1974 I was working up-country in Kenya and a perk of the job was a Yamaha DT175 trail bike that looked like this:
![](https://i.redd.it/0p517rgaj15y.jpg)
Though mine had a dent on the right-hand side of its fuel tank that corresponded with the position of my knee after I had wiped out when inadvertently driving up a drainage gully in the dark. It had also lost both its mirrors as the result of similar mishaps. In between falling off I actually managed to pass my driving test and I’m allowed to ride bikes of any size in Kenya. However, the Kenyan licence is not recognised in Europe.
![](https://blog.winnall.ch/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/img_7756-1.heic)
My new bike was a 2020 Zero SR, which I upgraded to a 2020 Zero SR/S Premium in March 2023. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the SR/S was that Bemoto, the Zero dealer in Zurich, had restricted it to 35 kW, which means that I can ride it with my A1 licence. The SR was 22 kW, so the SR/S was an upgrade of sorts, though the chances of doing wheelies on it are non-existent.
So, during the dark nights of a northern hemisphere winter in January 2023, I started to plan my round trip to Scandinavia, taking in Kystriksveien on the way. On my SR I had a range of around 200 km on a full battery. Since I hadn’t received my SR/S yet, I didn’t know what range it might achieve, so for my planning I assumed 170 km and hoped for 200.
In subsequent posts I’ll discuss the tools I used, how I planned the trip, what happened on the ground, what went wrong and what went right. The previous sentence will be enhanced with links as I add those posts.