The alarm was set to 07:40. Around the same time, the familiar sound of a rustling plastic bag caught my attention. But it wasn’t me causing it. Some animal had stolen the waste from the tent’s entrance area. I didn’t see it though, as the sound of me opening the zippers to get a look outside must have spooked it.

Also, the outside didn’t really look like getting up. So I got back into the tent and slowly started preparing the day by eating the first 1000 kcal.

When I was about to head for the showers, a tent neighbour from Germany approached me and we started to talk. He, his son, and another boy, maybe a brother or friend, were on a bike trip from Stockholm to Umeå, where the son would stay and enrol at the local university. The other two would leave their 50 Euro bikes there, for the son to sell, and return by plane. While I sometimes feel a bit over-equipped, they were the opposite. They managed with one pair of small bike bags each. The father stated: “I’ve just taken one pant and three underpants.” But they had a navigation device and a bike computer taped to the handlebar of one of the bikes. Like me, they had a lot of luck with the weather. All in all they were a pretty relaxed bunch, and their bike trip a nice way to spend some time before saying goodbye to each other for studying abroad.

When I packed up, I noticed a change in the shape of my tent.

Well, that’s not good, a part of the frame broke.

There wasn’t any storm or accident that could have caused this. I assume it was pre-damaged from another trip. Some years ago, in Norways’s Rondane national park, the tent had to endure a storm that heavy, that eventually part of the frame had broken. I guess today’s failure is a late consequence of that. Fun fact: the tent was tested with a wind machine, it was stable until 100 km/h and went flat at 120 km/h wind velocity.

I hit the road at 11:30. The first kilometres felt surprisingly well. It seemed that both, my mind and my body, were eager do make some distance.

In the area before Umeå, I even catched up with a road biker and had a chat with him while riding over 30 km/h for a while. At this bridge in Umeå I made a photo and navigation pause.

Guess who I met there five minutes later. Right, the three guys from the camp site. For them it was the end of their journey, for me half time of today’s stage.

In Umeå, I shopped at Lidl and headed on. Umeå seemed like a really nice university town to me, worth spending some days under different circumstances.

The unity of body and mind continued, and kilometre after kilometre went by quickly. At some point the old question arose again: E4 or not E4. Here’s the situation I faced. The red dotted line is the official bike route.

The solid red line is the route I took. Yep, I did it, I put on the high visibility vest and I rode the E4. It was late, and the bike detour seemed too absurd to take it. There wasn’t too much traffic at this time, and no barrier between the lanes, so cars could easily pass by.

At the camp site, I fixed the tent frame by disassembling it, moving the broken segment as much to the end as possible, where it has less lateral force on it, and then stabilised the joint between the broken side and the adjacent segment with a piece of repair tube. There’s no picture, since I was under heavy mosquito attack. Note: do things that have to be done outside the tent in the morning.

While putting up the tent, a familiar face approached me. The husband of a German couple I met and chatted with after checking out the camp site in Sundsvall. They are on their way to the North Cape too, but with a motor home. They paused here for a day. We continued talking, and they invited me for a tea and breakfast tomorrow morning. So I have another reason to get up early.

Today’s dinner: pancakes with some fruit stuff I found in the infant section of the supermarket. The normal Swedish apple sauce was unbearably sweetened.

The plan for tomorrow is to reach Piteå. According to my estimate, that’s at least 130 km by bike.