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 hour and walk another half hour, or get a bike and ride for half an hour, mostly downhill. It worked to my advantage to live uphill from most things because I could always find the motivation to get home but didn’t need to find that reserve while trying to talk myself into going to work in the morning. As soon as I got that bike my relationship with the DC metro area changed. Suddenly I could go anywhere at anytime. I was no longer a slave to the metro schedule and places that I didn’t know about became new favorites.
It wasn’t long before I realized that this freedom could take me anywhere. At the time I was considering going to grad school in Sweden so I was taking Swedish lessons; I took a semester of Finnish as well because I thought there would be sauna-ing but stopped after a semester when it turned out to be actual language lessons in a room temperature classroom. In these lessons I learned about allemansrätten, or “everyman’s right” which allows one to use the land in a reasonable respectful manner, thus opening the possibility of a long bike ride across Sweden under the midnight sun.
I never went to grad school and I never made the trek to Scandinavia but the idea of riding under the midnight sun without a destination always lingered in the far back of my mind. In 2016 when my friends Lauren and Jay biked around Iceland, the idea came roaring back to life. At the time I was in a job I really didn’t enjoy but I wasn’t in the right headspace to take a long bike trip. I took a weekend trip to Iceland that October and loved it. Once I found myself a new job I started planning so that I had something to focus on while office bound.
I alternate between needing control over my daily life and completely ceding it to the universe. This is my way of controlling the fact that I have no control. This mindset works well when traveling, and very well when traveling solo by bike. There are days when you see no reason to keep moving and having a target in mind is the only reason you get dressed and mash your pedals all day. Sometimes you see something that you just have to investigate and suddenly the whole day has disappeared. I like to think I’m still in control but I know I never have the final word.
In a place that is notorious for wind and rain I figure that planning to travel slow will be more practical than planning to knock out big miles every day. I have been reading about the area and looking at maps to try to find things that I do not want to miss and I’m not worrying about the spaces in between. If you have any can’t-miss recommendations please send them along.
So much of travel is about the journey and not the destination. I have already learned a lot on this adventure before I’ve even set off which I’ll share in the coming weeks. I am all too aware that sometimes you don’t make it to your intended destination so I am focusing on being present everyday by tuning into my surroundings, listening to my body, and learning how to work with the environment instead of conquering it.
