Cycling Norway - Day 1

Nor­way re­minds me of Switzer­land. I think the re­cipe goes like this:

  1. Take Switzer­land, par­tic­u­larly the rolling hills with green fields, forests, and lakes every­where.
  2. Sub­tract the Alps.
  3. Sub­tract chalets and ger­man­ic-style ar­chi­tec­ture.
  4. And take away churches and castles.
  5. Add more lakes, and more ocean coast and these funky big wa­ter things that look like huge lakes but are ac­tu­ally the ocean (fjords), and more pine trees.
  6. Sub­tract cows.
  7. Add lots of red-painted plain-ar­chi­tec­ture farm build­ings.

Presto, Nor­way.

Oh, and keep the sun on for about 20 hours a day, and turn it down just a little from about 11 to about 2am. Don’t both­er put­ting heavy cur­tains in the hotel rooms… the loc­als are used to these crazy long days, and it’s fun to watch for­eign­ers real­ize that it’s 10pm when they think it’s 3 in the af­ter­noon.

Today’s ride was longish, and fairly flat, with rolling hills that seemed to be con­tinu­ally on the banks of a lake, river, or fjord. The ba­sic idea was to head through the coastal re­gion, get­ting a feel for this corner of Nor­way, even­tu­ally ar­riv­ing in Kris­ti­an­sund, a town spread across a set of is­lands.

Early in­to the ride, we had a first mech­an­ic­al. For­tu­nately it wasn’t my head tube, which was work­ing fine. Seb’s elec­tron­ic Cam­pognolo had is­sues that took a while to work out… but fi­nally Rich worked some ma­gic and we were able to keep rolling.

It’s re­mark­able how com­plex and pre­cise all these ma­chines are that we’re rid­ing, and how well they work con­sid­er­ing that all had to be dis­as­sembled par­tially to get here.

Rich men­tioned this was a first - every cli­ent in the group is rid­ing elec­tron­ic shift­ing. (Every­one else is on Shi­mano of vari­ous fla­vors. (For good reas­on.))

To­ward the be­gin­ning of the ride, we had a gradu­al climb that took us just above the tree line. The group did the in­ev­it­able split apart, as al­ways hap­pens in these sorts of out­ings. Frank and Jess went off the back, fol­lowed a bit later by Seb, then An­drew. I kept pace with Joel (our guide on the bike for the day), rid­ing right be­hind Mark and Dan who were push­ing the pace in­to the wind. It felt really good to push the legs really hard after all that travel. After a while of climb­ing and breath­ing hard, I began to won­der if I was in trouble as Dan and Mark seemed to be hav­ing no prob­lems with the pace… then I no­ticed both were sweat­ing pretty hard, which was good. They’re strong (and very smooth, steady riders), but not im­mor­tal.

We waited at the top of the climb on a high plat­eau. We could see snow-capped moun­tains in the dis­tance. Would we be rid­ing those in a few days?

After a few hours of rid­ing along a gor­geous still body of wa­ter (is that a lake? or a fjord? Fresh or salt? Can’t tell from here!), we crossed a bridge and saw John in a rest stop ahead. We pulled in for a mar­velous pic­nic on an is­land in an in­cred­ibly pic­tur­esque world… moun­tains, wa­ter, green every­where, sunny blue skies above… amaz­ing.

After rid­ing for a while longer, we ar­rived at our first ferry of sev­er­al for the week. The numbered high­way we were on went right down to the wa­ter shore, end­ing in numbered lanes full of vehicles. The boat pulled up right on time, opened up the front, and let out a seem­ingly in­fin­ite num­ber of vehicles. Soon all of the cars and trucks with us star­ted load­ing the ferry. The rest of our cyc­ling group showed up just in time, and we rode on as they star­ted to close the gate.

For about twenty minutes, we bridged the fjord gap, sail­ing across smooth wa­ters. We climbed to the top of the boat and took pic­tures, soak­ing in the scenery.

We rode off and put in a few more miles un­til we reached a long tun­nel. That wasn’t safe for us, so we boarded in­to the two vans and drove for a little while to our hotel on a small is­land that’s part of Kris­ti­an­sund.

I wasn’t quite done with the day, so in a Long­wellian ex­ten­sion man­euver, I took my bike to ex­plore the is­lands that make up the town. I found a little forest on the tip of the is­land, ex­plored tight res­id­en­tial dis­tricts, got lost on stealthy bike paths in­filt­rat­ing the hill­side, and found the ports and shop­ping zones on the lar­ger is­land. I took a few pic­tures from the tops of a bridge, hop­ing to cap­ture some sense of the huge ex­panse of sea and the sur­round­ing land.

It was a glor­i­ous first day of rid­ing… hills, is­lands, lakes, fjords, fer­ries, tun­nels, little towns to ex­plore, stun­ning weath­er.

Hard to ima­gine what life must be like here dur­ing the dark and cold half of the year…