My route which involved a few bus rides FAQs How can you sleep with all that light?Why Scandinavia? Why Finland?How do you have so much time to travel as an American?Isn't San Francisco a really expensive place to live?What surprised you the most?Are you glad to be back? One question I expected to be asked a lot, because it gets asked everywhere else I travel, why are you traveling on your…
Failing to plan is planning to fail. I've always understood that on some level but I never felt that I did anything that required advanced planning. Nothing to plan for means you can't fail at planning. I think I expected the ride out of Bergen to be like most things in my life where I've succeeded: there's one main road, someone points me down it, then I get there. I can…
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…
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."…
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…