After breakfast around 08:00, my hosts and their friends left for a Sunday boat trip. I packed my stuff and performed some bike maintenance before leaving myself. It was already too late when I noticed that I forgot my fleece jacket in the bathroom of the now locked house. Well, I still have my bike jackets and will eventually get it back. So that’s not a real problem.

Besides chaintenance, I had to come up with a new solution for the lost end cap of the bike stand. The tape-only solution did hold for around a week. This time, I put some string around the bike stand to increase its diameter, and put a plastic bottle cap at the end before taping everything together. This should do for a while.

The day went by, the usual things happened, grocery shopping, and some chats with people along the road.

I passed Luleå.

For days I haven’t met or seen another bike traveller. This should change today, when I met a nice guy who was on his way from the North Cape back to Schwerin in Germany. He was on the road since April, paused at friends in Finland, sold his bike and built a new one from recycling parts. He tried to manage without spending too much money, had a fishing pole and a wooden bow to make fire. He also told me that there’s a lot good food to gain from the containers behind supermarkets, like 50 kg perfectly fine salmon in one case.

The day could have been another perfect ride, until I was about to leave Råneå behind for the last 30 km to a camp site in Töre. At this moment, the Shimano Alfine 11 gear hub failed me. No gear would kick in, and there was nearly no transmission from the pedals to the back wheel. I checked the cable, tried loosening and tightening the axis, but nothing would help. The Internet couldn’t help me either. This is one of the worst failures that could happen: It’s not fixable by me, it’s a rather high-end part that not every vendor has in stock, it’s hard to exchange, and a replacement costs around 400 €. So hopefully the gear hub can be somehow fixed.

Now, I was stranded in Råneå, and it was getting cold and dark. I googled and asked around for a room or camp site, but there was none. I couldn’t really get anywhere, because I had become a pedestrian. No trains, just a central bus station, where nothing would depart until the next day. I didn’t want to wander outside the city and camp in the wild, when I would have to get back the same way again. Neither did I want to put up my tent in a public park. So in an act of despair I decided to just ask someone if I could camp in their back yard, and maybe use their bathroom. Once again I got lucky, and found a nice women who let me camp in her garden and use her shower. We had a nice chat with her and her neighbour, and she looked up a contact for some local bike guy who might be able to help me. So that’s plan A for tomorrow. Plan B is to get back to the next big city with a bike shop, Luleå, by bus.

At least this didn’t happen in the middle of nowhere, where this could have meant 3 days of pushing the bike until the next town. I hope this is not the end of my trip.