This stage was tough, it started like yesterday ended – with climbing. The first kilometres felt incredibly slow and I wasn’t sure whether it was for the height profile or for my tired body. It took 50 km for my legs to play along as usual. Normally, the fun part of each stage starts after lunch, but not today. It might have been too heavy, I should have stuck to one litre of yoghurt for lunch.

Maybe I need a day of rest. The idea was to use bad weather days for that. But, fun fact, there are none. Every day is perfect riding conditions. Temperatures between 20 and 25 degree Celsius, blue sky, sun all the time, no rain. Today, there were some clouds in the beginning.

Interestingly though, I use a different set of clothing than for the same conditions in Berlin. Here, I add thin over-sleeves and a wind vest to the short summer set. The felt temperatures differ significantly from what the thermometer shows. When in the sun, it feels instantly hot, when in the shadow, it’s cold. When climbing slowly uphill – hot. When racing downhill – cold. So what I’m doing to compensate these frequent switches is opening and closing the wind vest, which is only wind-proof in the front. Cold: zipper up, hot: zipper down. This changes every few minutes.

There were a lot of gravel tracks today. The fine dust gets everywhere on the bike. This means cleaning at least the front and back racks, the bags, and of course chaintenance.

I arrived at the camp site around 20:30. The reception was already closed. One of the campers there showed me a wall phone with a single button for calling the staff of the place, which then told me the keypad PIN for the service building. That’s the best solution for late a check-in I have seen so far.

When I chatted with the helpful camper, he told me what many before have told me: June and July where horrible summer months with lots and lots of rain, while August is abnormally warm for Sweden – lucky me. He also told me that for at least the rest of the week, the conditions mentioned above will hold, and that I should hurry to the north cape as there can be snow in September already.

After showering, I deviated from my daily routine. Instead if using my gas stove in the entrance area of my tent to prepare dinner, I used the kitchen of the service building. Since there weren’t many guests, I could parallelise my routines. In the sink I washed my laundry while cooking my food on the stove. Plus I could watch some Swedish TV. I also used the chance to charge all my electronic devices.

This brings us to another equipment related topic: experiences with power management. The last time I used a wall plug was in Copenhagen. I probably could have managed at least another week.

Currently, the usage pattern is as follows. The smartphone charges while cycling. Depending on the ride, the charge gained over the day differs. After using the phone in the evening, and leaving it on in stamina and airplane mode during night, the ride might start with 30 % battery. When I arrive it is usually up to 50 – 70 %. Today, I was so slow in the beginning that the battery dropped to less than 15 %. So I tried turning off the display on long straight sections, which speeded up loading a lot. When doing this, I memorise the distance to the next turn, which, together with the km counter on the bike computer, allows me to turn it back on at the right moment.

The camera battery was half full, and I have a second one which I did not use so far. The Garmin bike computer gets loaded every evening at the power bank. The latter was also more than half full. When not using the smartphone display all the time, it might be even possible to load the power bank for at least half the ride, and thus become completely independent of wall plugs. Another option would be a solar panel on the bags in the back, which could load the power bank during the day. I planned this originally, but decided against it for weight reasons. In one of the early stages, I met another bike traveller who used a solar panel (2 segments). He told me it would suffice to load his smartphone over the day, which he did not constantly use for navigation.