Blog

Dates: 24 May 2019 – 3 June 2019
Distance: 506 miles
Elevation Gain: 28768 feet
Average Min Temp While Riding: 41.5F
0 Mile Days: 1
Nights Spent Indoors/Outdoors: 4/6

The white spotted dorsal fin of the mountain porpoises through the skyline of Bodø as we leave the harbor. I felt some sadness as I left those mountains that I could only occasionally see but always feel, whose presence I outwardly cursed while inwardly admiring. Only as the ferry motors away from land on a clear day can I see how far the mountains extend, how big the glacier is. When riding, each mile blends into the next and only by taking a step back can I appreciate how far I have come.

It’s funny how much I have learned in such a short time. On a bike in stormy, low visibility conditions, I rely on my senses of smell, hearing, and touch more than usual. I can tell when I’m descending onto a seaside beach while only being able to see the road immediately in front of me. It feels different from descending into the fjord or towards a lake. The wind tastes different in each environment, the rain has a different hardness. Descending to the coast felt like returning home and I knew I had arrived at the sea long before I could see it. At elevation it is colder but the rain is soft; as you descend towards the waters of the fjord the rain begins to feel like hail even as it warms up.

The mountains are always there. I couldn’t always see them but they were never far away. They don’t seem to rise out of the sea as much as the water seem to meet them. As I slowly rode along the side of these mountains, I looked at the rocks lining the road where it had been cut. The rock layers are twisted and bent, telling a story in a language I don’t speak but I can tell that this rock has been through a lot of trauma.

The waterfalls are in full force due to the rain and they cascade everywhere they can find a path. Water pours through every crack in the rock and down boulders, smooth after years of this treatment. I know it’s low tide when the smell of kelp fills the air. I know each time I enter a tunnel, regardless of its length, the weather will be different when I exit.

I tried to wait out the rain. I came to Norway expecting cold and rain but everyone I’ve spoken with says this has been unseasonably cold and rainy. I’ve learned that each fold in the mountain is a different microclimate. Dressing appropriately for the whole day was a challenge. I needed to wear enough to stay dry in the rain and warm in the wind but have enough ventilation that I didn’t soak in sweat on a long climb or on the odd chance the sun came out to remind me that it still exists. I learned that I shouldn’t wait it out, I should come up with a plan that allows me to keep making forward progress while ensuring I stayed warm and dry.

The norcamp app was a godsend in helping me determine where I could find a Norway-cheap dry place to spend the night if necessary. Of the ten nights between Trondheim and Bodø, I spent four in a cabin. It reminds me just how important it is to me to have a small bit of land to call your own, a place to go home to at the end of the day. Days on the road I usually don’t know where I’ll sleep. Sometimes this is a good thing as I can make quite a bit of extra distance if i don’t have to stop somewhere, sometimes it’s a curse as I’m tired and just want to find someplace a little bit secluded to lie down for the night. Norway is great in that I have the right to camp (unlike the US where a property owner can shoot you if they run across you camping there) but in practice the same issues exist here as in the US: I still need to find someplace a little bit wild, with either some relatively flat dry ground or trees that I can hang from. The ground is mossy and soft, fantastic when it is dry but when it rains the forest turns into a bog. If the trees didn’t have low branches or were farther apart from each other then hammocking would be quite attractive but that’s not the case. I managed to hang one night, forcing my bike through the wet ground and hanging between two trees that were so close to each other and other trees that my tarp pitch could have been in MoMA. Generally I have settled for a small narrow bit of land that has one or two bumps in it in places that allow me to settle between those bumps that’s on gently sloping ground.

Bodø snuck up on me. It seemed so far away when I arrived in Trondheim yet everyday I saw the mileage posts count down until I didn’t even realize they were at 0 and I was whisked off on a ferry to the next leg of this adventure. Each day in the pouring rain I remembered those seemingly long night shifts I pulled delivering food in San Francisco’s winter rain and remembered that I was prepared for this. The earnings from each of those night shifts would pay for roughly one night of dry accommodation and I thought of it as a fair trade. Those nights seem so long ago now, yet fundamentally I’m still just out doing food deliveries on my bike, riding from grocery store to grocery store, delivering a big tasty meal to myself after a hard day on the bike.

I’ve learned that I need to appreciate little wins, that ten miles down the road still puts me closer to my goal than zero miles down the road. Sometimes that ten miles is all you need to get out of the cold hard rain, sometimes you only need one mile. Life here isn’t all that different from home, just a bit lonelier and quieter. Everyday I still need to drag myself out of bed and get out and moving in the world, get another day closer to the end.