A day of regeneration works wonders. Through the first kilometres, I thought my legs don’t feel recovered at all, but this changed quickly. In the end, I did 25 km/h on average over 165 km with that heavily packed travel bike. With 1000 height meters, it wasn’t a flat stage either.
Riding 25 instead of 20 km/h makes an hour difference in moving time for 100 km.
A last view of the Baltic Sea’s coast at the camp site before heading inland. The stage started around 11:20.
The way went along wide rivers and lakes.
Landscape and vegetation change the further north and upcountry the road takes me. The first trees change their colour, as if the summer suddenly ended and autumn begins.
The weather conditions were perfect again, up to 26 degree Celsius and little wind.
A motivating milestone was crossing the polar circle today. It’s marked by a sign at a not too clean parking lot along the road. Now I’m officially in the north.
Finally, after all these days I saw larger animals – a bunch of Reindeers.
They are not really impressed by cars. They stood on the road and watched this one stop before moving on.
When I arrived at the camp site, I mixed up my routine and showered first, put on long cloth and a cap, and then put up the tent. This makes it easier with the mosquitos – less sweat to attract them and less open skin. I talked with two Finnish hunters, who spent the day in the woods. They seemed pretty annoyed by the mosquitos too. They told me they’re waiting for the first night below 0 degree Celsius to end the plague.
On this camp site, there were also lot of tiny mosquito-like blood suckers. Only around 2 mm in size, but when they bite you notice. And then there’s also another biting kind of fly, a bit smaller than a mosquito.
Speaking of annoying occurrences, today I met the first negative person in weeks. Of course it was a German, an old women who couldn’t bare the fact that I was washing my cloth in one of the kitchen sinks. Of course, I only did this in the absence of alternatives, as the appropriate facilities were already closed. “One doesn’t do that”, she said in German after trying and failing to complain in English. I shouldn’t have revealed that I’m German too.
Tonight is the last night in Sweden so I tried to plan the rest of the trip with my Swedish SIM card and mobile data. It’s 5 stages and 626 km to go. I planned along the available camp sites. So I’ll probably make the trip without having camped in the wild once. A hot shower in the evening is just too rewarding to skip it.
I still have more trekking food left than I can eat at the remaining evenings, but I try to reduce my luggage weight for the flight back. Due to me not planning the details of the trip, I was prepared to camp wild, for getting stuck somewhere along the road, or being outside civilisation for some days. None of it happened so far.
I can already say, that there never was or will be a day without a shopping opportunity. Every small town has at least a basic food store. It can be 50 or maybe even 100 km between them, but that’s no real problem. So one or two day rations for emergency situations like a major bike fail in the middle of nowhere would have been sufficient.
The current plan for returning is to take a bus from Honningsvåg near the north cape to Alta the day after completing the last stage; stay there one day and figure out how to pack up the bike and realise it, and then take a plane to Berlin via Oslo. All plane-less alternatives take at least 4 days and are most likely more expensive.