... and a big thank-you to Margaretha and John

I'd also like to say a big thank-you to Margaretha Danbolt Simons and John Hart for an unforgettable stay.

Of course, I wouldn't have been here if two years ago John hadn't asked Janet if we were English cyclists when we met on the ferry to Leka in Norway.

At the time, John asked if I was learning Norwegian - and then introduced his travelling companion Margaretha as the author of the Teach Yourself Norwegian book I was listening to just before he came over to us!

The rest is history... but a stay at her summerhouse is an unmissable experience, with lots of laughter and fun, scintillating conversation, and a years' worth of new literary recommendations to work through now. Something to store away and recall in the dark and gloomy winter months ahead of us in the UK, I think!

p.s. - This time it's a big picture, if you want to click through to the original rather than peering at the thumbnail.

I'm on my way home!

Just time to write a quick note to say I'm on a big container ship in Brevik waiting for it to slip its lines and sail to Immingham in the UK, which it should reach on 20 August at 0200 - then I join the family in Cornwall for the last part of the summer holiday by the beach.

Thanks for all your emails and comments, it's been great to be in touch with you. Ubiquitous internet connectivity and mobile phone coverage have changed travel forever - no more delight at finding post restante mail waiting after weeks of news blackout, but on the plus side I've never been lonely or short of something to read from you all!

They are pulling the lines in now and the engines are rumbling - can feel a surge of excitement in my cabin high on the superstructure at the back of the ship. Shortly I will be literally out of radio contact as the mobile signal falls away but this won't be the last post, watch out for more photos and conclusions soon!

Best regards,
Jerry

Time to reflect...

I've been in Strömstad in Sweden for several days. This pleasant seaside spa town is famous for enjoying more sunshine than anywhere else in Sweden. It's some 135 km from Oslo, and makes a popular day trip destination for the Weegies. They can catch the Color Line ferry from Sandefjord which docks here to buy all of the expensive things at home much more cheaply abroad.

It reminds me a little of Cowes on the Isle of Wight at home, with its many yachts, small boats, and white wooden buildings. In high summer, it is crowded with tourists, but we are now in the second week of August - the schools are re-opening, the crowds have gone, and the town is noticeably quieter.

By some miracle, I managed to get a room at the very lovely Crusellska STF hostel in the oldest part of the town. The large, cream-coloured building dates from 1827 and was run as a health spa for many years by its owner, Doctor Bernhard Crusell. Today the white fluffy dressing gowns and complementary white house slippers are still very much in evidence, along with wicker furniture and well-tended pot-plants, because the new owners run it similar lines, offering short stays for guests wanting a bit of pampering. I'm not booked on any treatment courses, but it does make for a wonderfully relaxed setting to bring the diary up to date in, and to turn over the experiences of the last two and a half months. Ultimately I'll be here until Margaretha and John fly back to Oslo from their trip to Finnmark and can welcome me to Margaretha's summer house in Stavern. At that point I'll join the returning day trippers on the ferry back to Norway.

A ride along the Klarälvsbana

Another unexpected and rewarding discovery this week has been the Klarälvsbana, a fifty-five mile asphalt-surfaced cycle route from Hagfors to Karlstad that follows the line of an old railway track. It's flat, and very pleasant to cycle along.

No expense spared - they have even put white stripes down the side for the visually impaired, and they mark the edges of the track with reflective posts when it travels over an embankment (which I suppose one might conceivably need on a dark winter night). The money came from the EU, and the project was completed last year. It isn't seeing a huge amount of use yet, summer traffic seems to be about 30-40 cyclists each day past the cafe at the half-way mark, but I'm sure it will build when word spreads, because it's an excellent car-free route between the two areas.

There are a couple of campsites beside it, and free camping is a possibility too. They've even built little composting toilets at each five kilometre mark, with fly-proof screens and toilet paper too!

Once I've got the tent up, I can relax...

Once I've got the tent up, I can relax...

Saw this big brother version of our tentipi at Räda Camping near Hagfors. I'm not sure how portable it is, but it would be great for a large group of you on tour...

Someone else on a bicycle!

This is a rare event, considering the number of miles clocked up here in Sweden. After days and days of riding in isolation from Stockholm along the Sverigeleden I meet another cyclist, heading in the opposite direction!

The scenery behind our bikes is fairly typical of this part of Varmland between Fredrikstad and Hagfors - the road just keeps climbing and falling, and it is rainy and cool. The pine trees form a pretty impenetrable barrier beside the road, and beyond them the ground is often either swamp or rocks and tree roots. On the plus side, there's very little traffic, and cars and lorries give cyclists a wide berth.

And it is very, very quiet.

Janine tells me I'm the first person she has talked to for some time, and that I am the only cycletourist she has seen here (same goes for me).

She has been riding for three or four weeks from Trondheim towards Stockholm, and we had a lot to talk about. I could tell her that her endless days of pine trees, hills, and lakes are nearly over - just 120 km to go to the rich farmlands of Dalarna - and she could warn me about endless days of pine trees, hills and lakes ahead for me! We both stopped early yesterday as the rain intensified into a gale (much damage here in Sweden). But whilst I was tucked up in front of a wood burning stove writing my diary in a holiday chalet at Säfsen, Janine was once again lying in a wet tent for most of the afternoon, listening to branches creaking ominously above her tent in the storm.

So one salient difference is that she's been wild camping for weeks at a time, with just a dip in a perfectly silent lake to look forward to at the end of each day. And she drinks her water from lakes and churchyard taps - one tough cookie! I'm not quite ready to embrace discomfort for days at a time, but maybe I should really throw myself into the feral lifestyle now, when I've got just a few weeks to go? This is after all the ideal place to go really wild, there's no-one else around for miles.

In the end, Hagfors was going to be my final destination for the day because it's the only town of any size along this stretch of road. It is raining again, but this time I'm in a sizable but cheap three-room apartment close to the Tourist Information office, which is apparently the closest thing the town has to a hostel. I haven't seen much of the town yet, but I plan to go out for a wander when the rain stops later ... correction, if the rain stops later...

The rain has finally caught up with me ...

After two weeks of browning my knees in the scorching Swedish sunshine, I'm now back in my rain gear again.

I'm trying to ride towards Arvika to find out about opportunities for a canoe holiday there next year, but the rain is falling in sheets today, so I am going to make a short 40km dash from Borlänge, where I have stayed overnight in the luxurious but very reasonably priced First Hotel, to the youth hostel at Grangärde at the top of Lake Väsman to the west.

Thursday and Friday were spent in a prison cell in Falun, home of Sweden's copper mining industry and its second city for many hundreds of years until the mine collapsed in the late 17th century. Fortunately the prison is now a Youth Hostel, so I had the key to my room, but nevertheless I didn't enjoy the experience - clanging cell doors at all hours, and five sets of locks to get through each time I left the place. I prefer Roar's approach, no locks whatsoever anywhere. Falun was well worth the time spent there though - apart from the huge pit left by the mine, it's a beautiful historic town in its own right and a UNESCO World Heritage site.

I was also able to use Falun as a base for a day ride to Carl and Karin Larson's house at Sundborn, which will remain a highlight of the trip for me. I found the tour very moving. The house was so beautifully decorated by the couple who poured all their artistic ability into their family home. Every room conveys a very strong visual impression of the life of the family living there at the turn of the 20th century.

The First Hotel at Borlänge has been a very welcome refuge from the rain on my way back from Falun, I'd definitely choose it again if I come back this way!

Sixty seconds...

Neil Armstrong famously landed Apollo 11 on the moon with less than 60 seconds of fuel left. I seem to be in the same place with credit remaining on my phone every time I finally get to the top of the queue to talk to a callcenter person in the UK...

I've just burnt through another 200kr top-up card provided by my Swedish mobile operator Telenor SE while on hold for Vodafone UK callcenter people.

It has taken several attempts to talk to them about unblocking the two SIM cards I use, one for my usual contract number and the other for mobile internet access. It seems that after a very slow start, the roaming charges for mobile internet access all arrived on their system in a big burst, resulting in the suspension of both SIM cards while they investigated "usage irregularities" on my account.

They tell me they sent me an SMS message warning me about the suspension just before they put it in place, but I didn't have their SIM card in my mobile for much of the time in Norway, and both cards were blocked when I tried them on entry into Sweden.

It seems to be a similar story with my bank, who also stopped my debit card for a while because they want to issue another one to me. Fortunately they handle calls from abroad much more efficiently than Vodafone (with a seperate priority queue) and all is sweetness and light with them again. Plus they call you back rather than popping you on hold while they investigate further.

It's not that the funds are not available, it's just a question of working around the anti-fraud systems they use, which naturally stop any activity unless it follows a pattern that predates the trip.

The alternative to all this expensive calling should be a set of well-designed web pages to allow both sides to sort out this kind of problem asynchronously. Vodafone's website falls pretty short of what is required here, by asking customers to provide them with five or six easily guessable security questions. If you register with their site, make absolutely sure you travel with the answers to each question, written with the exact punctuation and captitalisation you used when setting up your account, or you'll be back to languishing in their callcenter queue while you burn through your recently topped up Swedish mobile phone card's credit, waiting to ask them to unlock their website for you too.

Neil Armstrong's heartbeat was around 151 per minute for the last few minutes of the lunar landing apparently - but at least he was in control of the situation...

Jo and Beamer get to Nordkapp

I am delighted to discover that Jo and her faithful bicycle Beamer made it to the North Cape, completing 10,000 kms or more on the road since leaving Munich at the start of the year. The weather seems to have been pretty much the same for her as it was for me!

She writes in an email today that she is now in Finland, and is setting out soon to cross the borders of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on her way home...

New pictures on flickr, including Stamsund

You may have been wondering why the photo trail on flickr went cold just after I arrived at the North Cape. Well, the good news is that none of the pics taken on the trip were lost in the Great iPod Disaster, it has just taken me longer than usual to find a good solid Internet connection with enough bandwidth to upload them.

So today, I have uploaded and captioned the pictures taken with the Canon EOS 350 SLR including those from Stamsund, and you'll find them here:- www.flickr.com/photos/webbje - helpfully organised into separate sets for Norway and Sweden.

I've even tagged the Stamsund photos with "Stamsund" ... now if I had a bit longer I could put these into a separate collection, couldn't I?

In the meantime, I have 430 pics from the smaller Canon Ixus here to sort out, ouch!!

I'm in Avista for lunch

Despite a lot of rumbling thunder yesterday afternoon, I am now edging into the second week of lovely cycling here with blue skies, melting tarmac on the road, and gentle breezes - no rain yet.

Yes, I should splurge on a T-shirt or two... rather than wearing the Icebreaker wool top, although this is surprisingly comfortable to ride in in the 30° heat.

In fact I've settled on a routine of rising at 0400 and riding until breakfast time (0700), then stopping for a siesta in a wood (inside the tent to keep insects at bay), emerging at 1700 for a bit more riding. This has been working very well for me, I'm clocking up 100 km days by riding in the two cool periods and of course the already quiet roads are even emptier in the early mornings and late evenings.

The slight downside is that there's nowhere to take a shower, and I could do with carrying even more water than the five liters already distributed around the bike. However the ICA stores I tend to shop in often have a fresh fish counter, and staff are generous with their ice on request.

Incidentally, I'm impressed at the variety and freshness of the produce for sale here - even more choice than I'd find in equivalent shops in the UK. The Swedes obviously take their food shopping seriously!

The scenery is just beautiful here - the suggested route may have been penned by someone with an obsession for hiding out in the woods, since it doesn't seem to pass through any places large enough for a shop, but I can work around that by diverting to a large town after breakfast each day. The scale of the map I have is 1:500 000 for this region, which makes route finding hit and miss - I spent three hours on a gravel road winding through pine and birch forests and long lakes last night after leaving Sala, before groping my way back onto the tarmac road I should have been on, which ran mostly parallel to the alternative. I am glad to have the compass and a GPS with me; I envisage some serious back-tracking at times on the smaller gravel roads. Fortunately the terrain continues to be very gentle, and traffic has not been a problem at all.

An unexpected summerhouse

This is the summerhouse of Carl Linnaeus,the man who invented the taxonomy system we use for the plant and animal kingdoms. I discovered today that he was also something of an ecologist, perhaps the earliest one in print.

The serendipity of finding the house at Hammarby is due to the winding path taken by cycle route Sverigeleden 15, which has taken me on a winding ride from the corner of Sodermälm where the Zinkerdamm hostel lies, to Uppsala, where I am staying tonight. It should be said that the route has also taken me through numerous parks and underpasses, to the extent that at times I've almost decided to give it up for the faster road beside it, but it has come into its own, now that I am out of Stockholm.

The house is announced only by a brown "historic monument" sign on the road with the name Hammarby, and by the pantiled roof of the old building by a bend in the road.

He bought the small farm to avoid the summer outbreaks of malaria in Uppsala, where he held a seat at the University from 1738. He may also have purchased it to provide an income for his family in the event of his predeceasing them.

The museum is small, but it is a bit of a treat really - especially to stand at the doorway to the old man's bedroom and find its walls covered from floor to ceiling with beautifully printed flower illustrations from one of his most beloved sets of books. He strikes me as being a man who discovered his vocation early in life and had the rare satisfaction of being the foremost authority in his world on his favourite subject, botanising.

It has been hot today and yesterday - 30° for two days now. I could do with something other than thermal wool tops and Ronhill Tracksters to change into when I get off the bike in the evenings!

The countryside here reminds me a little of Hampshire - quite a few copses, large fields of wheat and barley, and lovely little roads only wide enough for one car. It is flatter though, and considerably less populated. Difficult to photograph; I think Kansas probably looks similar too... too vast to fit into the viewfinder on the camera.

Summer days in Stockholm...

... I was taking photos in the deserted old town district at 07:30 after waking up very early this morning. Worked out very well, because I was at the door for the extraordinary Vasa Museum an hour later, just as it opened, to beat the crowds. As it was I had it pretty much to myself for the first hour, and it is an unmissable experience - it is quite breathtaking to find a whole ship from 1628, 90% of it original, hanging in the dim lights in the huge hall. They have done an excellent job in presenting the artifacts and the ship itself, which is so heavily carved that the first thing I was reminded of was the Geiger spaceship created for the original Alien movie, the one that the doomed crew of the Nostromo board before John Hurt gets a squid attached to his face.

After a long look at scarily realistic reconstructions of the faces of various members of the crew who were trapped in the narrow hull when the newly-launched ship turned over and sank, I watched a very good film explaining how the ship was raised in the early 1960's and subsequently preserved. It is in a better state than our own HMS Victory at Portsmouth in the UK, and was even more gaudily painted when it was new.

Spent the afternoon at the equally good Skansen Museum, which houses a vast number of buildings moved to the site from all over Sweden in the last 200 years. There's enough for several trips, I couldn't have seen it all, but what surprised me most was that the commercial side of it was so restrained. I was expecting fast food stands and the greasy smell of burgers, instead I found staff teaching groups of visitors to do the Swedish equivalent of a Morris Dance. I loved the buildings most; each has a member of staff in the costume associated with the period of the dwelling, very helpfully explaining what the various artefacts on display were used for - they are very keen on people joining in and trying various things out too.

Tonight I have packed everything for an early ride towards Uppsala (sic) tomorrow morning on Swedish Cycle Route #15, which seems to head roughly towards Oslo and promised to give me a reasonable sample of what the countryside here has to offer. I am very excited by the prospect!

Stockholm!

Few words from an airline stewardess are as worrying as these:

"Don't worry, just run when you get into the arrival hall and make sure you get your connection - we'll send your luggage on to your hotel! Just file a missing baggage complaint when you get into Stockholm...".

I only have a laptop and a camera with me. I don´t have a room booked. I don't have any maps or guides to the city, I was going to buy one in the Duty Free area of Oslo airport.

Anyway, I run, and I run a good long way all the way to Gate 48 on arrival in Oslo.

I reach the gate just as it is closing, I'm the last passenger on board.

And then a miracle occurs - the captain decides to delay departure until the missing bags from Bodø are safely on board, and my bike is rammed into the remaining slot under the wing.

So arrival in Stockholm was fine, and all my bags were reunited with me within a few minutes. I took the excellent Arlanda Express train into the main city railway terminus twenty minutes later, calling the Zinkensdamm Hostel on the way as a last resort because they come at the end of the listing, so may get fewer calls. It's a pleasant, very organised hostel with 450 beds and individual lockers for food inside the fridges. It's on the island called Södermalm, about twenty minutes or less by bike from all the sites.

But best of all, the city is a fantastic place on a bike! Separate cycle lanes with proper signs for routes and their own traffic lights, few cars, and an extraordinary number of waterways, gorgeous buildings, and tree-shaded squares to gawp at.

I'm loving it!

I bought a new SIM card for Sweden today, no connection yet via the Vodafone SIM card and the laptop, so pictures will surely follow in a day or two when I have found out who to roam with.

In the departure lounge again

Now I am beginning to remember why I said I would never do this flying business with SAS again. The check-in at Bodø went fairly smoothly despite them detecting 55 kilos of baggage when the limit is 20 and 8 in the hand, but unfortunately the 12:40 flight has been rescheduled for 14:30 because the original 'plane has a technical problem and a new one has to be flown up to Bodø to replace it. This cuts my transfer time in half - always notoriously difficult to switch to a different aircraft in Oslo because of the hassle of collecting bike and bags for a connecting flight. Nothing to do except cash the 100 Kr lunch voucher, and see how things pan out.

I need a clue about cycling from Stockholm airport towards the city too - ideas anyone?

Stockholm tomorrow

It's a gorgeous 22° C here this afternoon, the sunshine is twinkling on the waves in the harbour, and a whale was spotted in the bay this morning. I must be nuts to leave, but I feel a strong pull towards roaming around Sweden and finding out how it is for cycling there rather than going over old routes again up here in the Lofoten Islands. I have reached the tipping point a bit more easily because the hostel is nearly empty but for the really long term residents like Marlene, who has found a permanent job in Leknes as a psychologist, and the heavy duty Polish fishermen.

I have just booked a flight tomorrow with SAS from Bodø to Stockholm, leaving at 12:40 - so I'm about to start shoving things back into bags in the otherwise empty dormitory (most of the others left this morning). I'll be taking the hurtigruten to Bodø later this evening for a night at the old standby, Bodøsjoen Camping.

Interestingly, SAS call you back after telling you that their lines are busy. Of course they can't confirm the bike on the plane immediately but I am pretty hopeful there won't be a problem. The flight was cheaper than I was expecting, maybe because I am taking it tomorrow rather than booking it several months in advance.

I should probably borrow a set of fishing scales from Roar too, to see if I can reduce the weight of my bags to the requisite 30 kilos...

Summer evenings in Stamsund

I'm still at Stamsund because it is such a lovely place to stay - I plan to move on tomorrow or on Monday. Yesterday the southerly wind fell and the colder northerly breeze took its place, but it has a fantastic effect on the scenery ... the mountains fifty miles away are perfectly clear, and the very long evening sunshine (there's no sunset) made it look extraordinarily beautiful, with long shadows falling over the sharply folded mountains all around us. A light shower with the sun low in the sky made for a perfect rainbow in front of me, with an astonishingly pink veil of clouds behind.

Unfortunately I didn't get to capture this on my camera very well because my Norwegian teacher Margaretha rang for a chat just while the sun was going down behind the mountains behind us, bathing everything in golden light ... she's got her second set of visitors staying
until the 12th of August in Laukvik (where she has her summer cabin from June to September) and wants to know whether I can still come to visit her the following week. Naturally I'm keen to see more of the area around Stavern with a native who knows it well!

We've been fishing from small rowing boats, with a mackerel line and six lures each. Sometimes I'm successful, but I think I have been too close to the shore because most of the fish I catch are on the small side. The more experienced fishermen here bring back full sized cod by the boatload, easily as long as your forearm. I feel happiest to go out only when the water is perfectly still though, despite having two sets of oars, a mobile phone, and of course a life jacket. No fishing today, the breeze is a little too strong. Instead I've been taking some time to look at the possibility of a kayaking trip - the Odin Tour - near Arvika in Sweden next week, with help from www.arvikacanoe.se. Søren (whom I mistook for a Swede with perfect English until he told me otherwise) guided for them for a while and has piqued my curiosity on doing "the other half of the Ray Mears thing" for a week or two in early August.

Connection restored

Thanks to prompt action on Janet's part, the bootable USB stick was in the post box when Roar and I went up to the post office this afternoon. Ten minutes later, I am relieved to find everything looking much the same as it did before the file system got corrupted.

I'm hiding in the outbuilding that Roar calls "The Library" at the moment. Now I should probably put the laptop away. If he finds I've smuggled one into his island paradise, he'll probably slip it quietly into the sea while my back is turned, and that would be more difficult to recover from!

Stamsund again

Apologies for the scarcity of news in July, I've found it a challenge to get to Blogger now that the school holidays have started and public libraries have closed until the next school term starts.

Briefly, I've had a succession of good days on the E6/E10 from Hammerfest down to Setermoen in the Bardu region - despite being the backbone of the Arctic Highway, the road usually has a good rideable shoulder and the traffic behaves sensibly with speed cameras on the sections that are straight and would otherwise be too fast for comfort.

Obviously I've been taking pictures too but haven't been able to upload them yet.

Yesterday the rain descended with a vengeance and the predictable tailwind vanished, so I hopped on a bus for the last section to Narvik, not really wanting to be riding in rain and spray on the busy section of road from Setermoen. On arrival in Narvik I had the option of taking the train I've been looking forward to catching to Abisko, because it left in fifteen minutes ... but in the end the lure of returning to Stamsund first was too strong, so I caught the connecting Lofoten Express bus in the downpour, and spent a very enjoyable evening at Roar's. I've got a bed in the dormitory over the kitchen in the main building so I may be settled here for several days... if not longer!

The picture comes from the hytte book at the Justad Vandreheim, of course, and there's a hilarious story attached, but I'll save that for later...

Not a happy day scenario

Last night I connected both iPods to the laptop at the same time in order to back one up to the other. There seems to be a bug in the kernel for mounting two identical 80Gb iPods because the file system table got corrupted, wiping both iPods and the on-board memory of the laptop - so until I can somehow restore the system image from a memory stick after downloading it from the EEE forums, I am without a laptop, guidebook, music, or photos I've taken. Not to mention weather reports from yr.no, my emails, and of course mobile access to Blogger (I'm writing this from the public library in Hammerfest on a very slow connection). Not a happy day scenario - the only good news is that the majority of the photos are also on the memory cards, and as I write the photo shop up the road is burning the surviving 4 Gb onto CDs.

Anyone with access to a small Xandros distro with mobile networking (ppp) and Huwea USB mobile internet modem support is welcome to point me at their image :-) - in the meantime, posting is going to be a bit more limited for the time being.

Incidentally, I can strongly recommend the Arran Nordkapp guesthouse - the mostly Polish staff made a big fuss of me and kept bringing more and more free food for dinner last night. The rooms being refurbished are warm and very comfortable too. Full marks to them!