Day 5/7 (2018 Summer Biketrip)

I woke up at 7.00 am in the morning and I started to pack up my gear. I was ready to hit the road at 8.20 am.

I biked for about 42 km, primarily in ‘Pas 0’ (no motor assistance). Quite tough on this perfect hot summer day on my heavy packed bike. I wrote a few text messages to my sister Cille, and she told me to be carefull and pay attention to all the forrest fires there where in Norway and Sweden at this time. I’ve seen a lot of small airplanes flying by the last few days, Checking for fires. I didn’t get close to any fires on my trip but there was definitely the possibility to do so. The woods was very very dry.

At 13.20 (1.20 pm) I decided to make a long pitstop out in the middle of nowhere with forrest on both sides. I found a side road on my right side that had a short paved road goin parallel to the main road. The area was cleared from forrest – a nice place to setup my solar panels for some hours and rest 🙂 I placed them at an angle to get as much sun on them as possible to top of my battery.

There where something almost magical about this place, it was just the perfect spot for me to rest i think, and it’s right here I took one of my favorite photos of my bike setup.

The small solar panel on the front of my bike is for charging a small battery bank I’m using to keep my phone topped of – I need that because I’m using Google Maps during the day. I also use Google Maps to scout out for a suitable camp site for the nights.

I got to rest for like 2 hours, got some solar energy back into my battery. I found some bushes with a lot of raspberrys on them. yummy!

I packed up and started biking again in the hot weather. I used a bit of assistance from time to time. I biked past another guy that was on a bike tour. he was parked in the side of the road – I greeted him while passing by.

A bit later I was running low on water – You wouldn’t imagine the amount of water I was going thru on these hot summer days on the road. I kept my eye out for a sign of a church. Churches have free water on their graveyard. I found one soon after in a tiny little town.

Later on in the distance I could se that guy I passed earlier on the road. He had passed me on the main road while I took a detour to the small town with the church. I used a little more motor assistance to catch up with him.

I caught up to him and he stopped so we could chat. He was a german guy in his late 20’s that had finished university and had been biking up in the north of Norway since april in the cold. Now he was biking home to germany. He was on a mountain bike with way less gear than me – we laughed at my insane amount of gear. I can’t remember his name and I sadly didn’t get a picture of him but we started biking while we kept chatting about a lot of different things – it was really nice.

Later on the day I was getting really tired and told my german friend that I would be starting to look for a suitable campsite. He wanted to keep going – so when I found a nice looking sideroad into the forrest we shook hands and said goodbye – Damn why did I forget to get his name or anything ?

I biked down the sideroad and found a spot in the forrest that could not be seen from the sideroad. I started to setup my camp at 18.30 (6.30 pm) and I had biked for a total of 83 km today.