JOIN #TEAMNONSTOP : https://www.patreon.com/kymnonstop and follow me on instagram, will ya? @kymnonstop
There’s a stretch of road called the Rallarvegen that looked amazing when I googled cycling in Norway so called every bike rental shop I found (there were two) and managed to reserve bikes at one. The other was closed for the season. (read my full blog here: http://www.kymnonstop.com/blogspace/norwaymistake)
After a 4 hour train ride from Oslo, we arrived in Finse, a breathtakingly beautiful little railroad stop (I would hardly dup it a town) where we were to pick up the bikes. We stepped off the train into 40 degree sunshine. Snow crunched under our feet as we walked to the shop. A gorgeous, ridiculously tall, long haired Nordic mechanic wearing a t-shirt and jeans greeted us. “We reserved two bikes to ride to Flam.” “It is not recommended” he responded, with no further explanation. I persisted. It was a beautiful day and this was our only time for cycling. “We’re not novice. We have gear. We’ve done this before” I half-lied. I mean, I’ve ridden through most conditions and was confident that my mom could handle most anything. Besides, when I looked at the google map it looked like the route was almost all downhill.
The viking conceded and gave us two steel touring bikes with fat mountain tires, racks and paniers. From my limited google research, I thought the road was paved but it turned out that it was not. The first stretch was all dirt and rock.
My mom was wary- knowing I was far more willing to fling myself into the snowy wilderness than she. again I persisted. Look at this snow covered mountains! Look at the lake! How often do you get to see this kind of beauty??
And we took off. It wasn’t long before we stopped for pictures. There was some snowy patches on the road so to make my mom comfortable to walk her bike I said I wanted to take a lot of photos anyway. Besides, we had all day to go 30miles— we didn’t need to rush. We rode a bit more and walked a bit more. I slowly realized that this path was more difficult than my sales pitch to mom made it sound.
“When’s the downhill?” My mom asked, huffing as she pushed her 50 ton over a snowbank along a cliff. “It should be soon!” my voice overly cheerful to compensate for my mistake. I had no idea how far we had to go. I never use a Garmin. One hiker had passed us in 90minutes and she’d expressed surprise at our bike tour idea.
The sky began to turn pink. I had no idea how far we’d traveled but I knew we had about an hour of daylight left. My feet were wet. and numb. The temperature had dropped about 10 degrees. Hold on. I remembered my mom’s phone had some data. I turned it on and checked for signal. One bar. I went to google maps to check our progress. to my complete disbelief I see that we are almost exactly half way to the next town. 10 miles. We had pulled our 50lb bikes through the snow for 10miles and it had taken us 3 hours to do that.
Shit, I thought. Mom and I are gonna freeze to death out here in the middle of the Nordic countryside Way to screw up a nice family vacation, Kym...read my full blog here: http://www.kymnonstop.com/blogspace/norwaymistake
