After spending my first day in Norway sleeping, I roll out of bed and down the hill to the National Day parade. Norwegians are dressed up in their finest traditional clothes or their best suits, everyone is waving a flag, and the sound of a drum corps echos throughout the city. Everyone is out. I hear a Swede complain that Norway is just so much more crowded than where she lives.…
What the hell am I doing? I'm sitting on the floor of the Bergen airport at 1am trying to reattach my rear derailleur. I've done this dozens of times before but my sleep and food deprived brain can't make sense of the problem. I google "how to install a rear derailleur" and "what should a rear derailleur look like" and watch several videos before my free wifi disconnects. Eventually I get…
I've become a bit of an expert at reading travels blogs over the last few years and I find that there are a few levels of detail and most blogs focus on one of these levels. Some are practically turn by turn directions of a location, some are more thematic, and others are in the weeds of their tools. As someone looking for inspiration I am drawn towards the thematic posts,…
When I mention to people that I'm going to ride my bike around Scandinavia this summer the first question they usually ask is if I'm going alone. When I say yes the reactions tend to be split. The first group reacts somewhere along the lines of, "that's awesome and I wish I was that brave" while the second is closer to "aren't you scared that something bad will happen to you."…
This post may contain affiliate links. Scandinavia is one of the most expensive regions of the world but seeing it by bike is one of the most economical ways to see the region and, from what I've been reading, one of the best ways to experience the region as Scandinavians do. Camping most nights and foraging when possible will reduce the cost of this trip significantly. It doesn't hurt that I…
tl;dr I'm heading to the North Atlantic for the summer! I bought my first adult bike when I was 22 because although I loved walking I just didn’t have the time to walk everywhere. It was February in DC and in order to get to my yoga teacher training class I either needed to walk an hour and a half in the cold slush, take public transit for roughly half an…