Atlantic Ocean Road

Where it sits. The Atlantic Ocean Road is an 8.3-kilometre section of County Road 64 on the coast of Møre og Romsdal, running between the villages of Kårvåg on the island of Averøya and Vevang on the mainland in Hustadvika municipality. It does not follow a coastline so much as hop across one: the route strings together a chain of low islands and skerries — Kuholmen, Lille Lauvøy, Store Lauvøy, Geitøya, Eldhusøya, Lyngholmen, Ildhusøya, Flatskjæret, Skarvøy, Strømsholmen — on causeways and eight bridges. North of the road lies Hustadvika, an unsheltered stretch of the Norwegian Sea with a long record of shipwrecks; south lies the calmer Lauvøyfjorden. The carriageway is 6.5 metres wide with no hard shoulder, and in a westerly gale the sea washes over it.

The engineering. The line was first proposed in the early twentieth century as a railway, and the county council even selected this outer route in 1921 before the plan died. Construction as a road finally began on 1 August 1983 as a municipal project, moved to the national roads administration in 1986, and opened on 7 July 1989. Twelve named windstorms struck the works during construction. The signature structure is the Storseisundet Bridge, a 260-metre cantilever bridge whose curve, seen head-on from the approach, appears to end in mid-air — the image that has sold the road ever since, and the reason it is nicknamed the drunken bridge. The three Hulvågen bridges add 293 metres, the Vevangstraumen Bridge 119, the Little Lauvøysund Bridge 115. The road cost 122 million kroner, a quarter of it to be repaid by tolls over fifteen years; traffic was so much heavier than forecast that it was paid off by June 1999 and the toll removed. It was voted Norwegian Construction of the Century in 2005, named the world's best road trip by The Guardian in 2006, and formally preserved as a cultural heritage site in December 2009.

On screen. The road has been a fixture of car advertising for decades — more than ten manufacturers have shot commercials here, usually in bad weather — but its highest-profile appearance is No Time to Die (2021). A second unit worked here in June 2019, filming a driving sequence with a helicopter and a camera car as Bond's brown Aston Martin V8 Vantage crossed the Storseisundet Bridge. The car is a piece of continuity for the series: it carries the registration B549 WUU, the same plate as the V8 driven by Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights (1987). In the finished film the sequence supplies the Norwegian leg of Bond's journey to Madeleine Swann's country retreat. It is worth knowing what is real and what is not in that stretch of the film: the woodland car chase that follows, with Bond driving off-road as Primo's men close in, was shot around Aviemore and the Cairngorms in Scotland in July 2019, and the frozen-lake flashback that opens the film was shot at Langvann in Nittedal, some 400 kilometres south-east of here.

What you actually see today. Four rest areas and viewpoints are built into the route. Eldhusøya carries a raised steel walkway that loops around the island above the vegetation, designed as part of the National Tourist Routes architecture programme and usable by wheelchairs, with a service building and café. Askvågen, a short way east on the connecting road, gives a wide sea view from a concrete platform. Geitøya has parking and a viewpoint and is the departure point for boats to Håholmen, a restored fishing station on its own island. Anglers fish for cod and coalfish directly from the bridges and skerries; seals are common, and whales are seen offshore in autumn. The Kvernes stave church on Averøya, dating from the fourteenth century in origin, is twenty minutes away and makes the obvious cultural stop.

Timing and weather. Summer gives near-endless evening light and the calmest crossings, but the road is at its most characteristic between late September and November, when Atlantic swell breaks across the causeways and photographers gather at Storseisundet with long lenses. Storms can close the road outright; the same waters showed their character in March 2019, when the cruise ship Viking Sky lost power off Hustadvika and had to evacuate passengers by helicopter. Winter is often snow-free at sea level but icy on the bridge decks.

Getting there. Kristiansund is about 30 kilometres north-east, reached from Averøya through the 5.7-kilometre Atlantic Ocean Tunnel opened in December 2009, which dips some 250 metres below sea level. Molde lies an hour to the south-west, and both towns have airports with connections to Oslo. Driving the road takes ten minutes and a proper visit two to four hours. Public transport is sparse; a hire car, motorcycle or bicycle is effectively required, and cyclists should be aware of crosswinds on the bridge crests.