Cycling Norway - Day 0

A note on the writing from this trip…

It’s dif­fi­cult to write and post these notes. They take fo­cus time, which I struggle to find.

I do it largely for my­self, so that I can gath­er my thoughts, or­gan­ize the pic­tures for oth­er uses, and look back later to re­mem­ber de­tails I would have oth­er­wise for­got­ten. It’s a bo­nus for me that oth­er people seem to en­joy read­ing them when I post them.

I have this ro­mantic no­tion, when on these trips, that I’ll be able to post one of these notes every day. In real­ity…. it just doesn’t work.

A day on a bike ad­ven­ture is pretty full. You get up in the morn­ing with just barely enough time to get everything done - stretch, get bike gear ready, grab break­fast, pack up and check out of the hotel, as­semble at the launch point. Once at the end of the day, you need to clean up, deal with any bike is­sues, maybe if lucky get a mas­sage, eat-eat-eat, re­charge gear, man­age pho­tos, pray that there’s wifi that works, prob­ably deal with some work is­sues… writ­ing an or­gan­ized entry and up­load­ing all the pic­tures that go with it is ba­sic­ally im­possible.

So, on this trip, I didn’t even try. I took notes in my journ­al - some­times the full text that you’ll see here on the blog, some­times just enough to re­mem­ber bits. Then, when I had time on the re­turn flight, I wrote up the full blog notes, gathered the pho­tos, and then pos­ted them all once I’d settled home and had fo­cus time, a big screen, and really re­li­able net­work.

These days, Face­book, Strava, Twit­ter, iCloud photo shar­ing - and just tex­ting pic­tures around - suf­fice for keep­ing in touch in an im­me­di­ate way, but none of them really tell the deep­er, more in­ter­twined story, or put the pic­tures in con­text. So, while this slightly post-trip blog­ging is a bit less sat­is­fy­ing than the “daily up­date” sort of feel that it could have, I’m still do­ing it.

Prepping…

It’s not a good sign when you text pic­tures like this from Nor­way to your friendly neigh­bor­hood bike mech­an­ic back in Mas­sachu­setts:

… but I get ahead of my­self.

After an un­event­ful and scen­ic 6-hour train ride from Oslo to Trond­heim, I found my­self get­ting in one of those huge European vans with my La Fu­ga guides Rich and John, on the cusp of an­oth­er multi-day bike ad­ven­ture, this time in Nor­way.

Nor­way?

Not ex­actly a fam­ous cyc­ling des­tin­a­tion… right?

Right.

The think­ing went like this:

  • I wanted to get out for an­oth­er bike ad­ven­ture this year. I like these things.
  • Early June is the only time of the year that doesn’t com­plic­ate fam­ily va­ca­tion, as the kids are still in school… (and also doesn’t risk snow in moun­tain passes).
  • La Fu­ga, the group I’ve toured with be­fore in France, had a trip planned in Nor­way.
  • I’ve al­ways wanted to go to Nor­way, nev­er been. It’s al­ways looked spec­tac­u­lar, and I’d heard the cyc­ling was fant­ast­ic.
  • I looked at many oth­er op­tions for get­ting out on a bike for a week - moun­tain bik­ing in Peru, a Dolo­mites trip, … this was the best of the bunch in early June.

So.. here I am, in a little vil­lage called Oskanger, nestled in­to a fjord on the Nor­way coast.

I ar­rived in Nor­way on Fri­day af­ter­noon, settled in­to a hotel in Oslo, and passed out early, hop­ing to get over the in­ev­it­able jet lag be­fore the rid­ing began. I spent Sat­urday tour­ing Oslo on foot with a good friend from grad school. Awe­some city…. and then I took the train to Trond­heim where I was picked up by the La Fu­ga guides.

They drove us to our hotel in Oskanger, which is a little es­tate on the edge of town.

The goal this even­ing was to gath­er all the guests, as­semble bikes, get din­ner, and settle in be­fore to­mor­row’s first ride.

It looks like this group will have sev­en riders, three guides, and an­oth­er guest - the wife of one of the riders - who’s along for the ride but won’t be cyc­ling.

Un­like on pre­vi­ous rides, I don’t know any of these people. It has been a bit odd think­ing about that while plan­ning this trip. Who am I do­ing this va­ca­tion with? Will they be cool? Will they all be amaz­ing cyc­lists who will crush me on the hills, or will they be really slow, mak­ing each day stretch on too long? I took a look at Strava, the cyc­ling so­cial net­work, be­fore com­ing over to Nor­way, and found most of the riders. They all have many, many more miles in their legs this year than I do, and they all have some very im­press­ive rides… joy. I may be in trouble. I hate be­ing The Guy Off The Back.

Meet­ing every­one to­night, they cer­tainly seem friendly. Al­most every­one is Brit­ish. There are a couple of sorta young­er guys who race (Dan and Mark), an older couple based out of Aus­tralia (Frank and Jess), a fel­low who just fin­ished a 3-day, 150km/day ride last week­end (An­drew), and a Ro­mani­an with a cus­tom Bi­anci (Seb). The guides are Rich, who has been with La Fu­ga for three years, John, who has been in the cyc­ling scene forever and will be driv­ing one of the vans every day, and Joel, a former pro triath­lete. A prom­ising group.

For this ride, I chose to bring along my “square bike”, as Rose calls it - the Guru, which dis­as­sembles al­most com­pletely to fit in­to a suit­case-sized box for easy travel. Con­sid­er­ing the many flights (five) and the train ride, this seemed the best choice. Plus I love rid­ing it… the disc brakes are so smooth, and it handles like a dream. The down­side is that it’s about 3 lbs heav­ier than a car­bon bike, which is a big deal on a long hill, but oth­er­wise not a prob­lem. The oth­er down­side is that it takes a lot of work to put to­geth­er.

To­night, while I as­sem­bling it, some pieces came loose from the front fork that I hadn’t seen be­fore. This isn’t good… you want the front fork work­ing cor­rectly so you can do minor things like, you know, steer. And stay up­right.

Rich broke out some dia­grams from the web and we figured out, we thought, how it all went back to­geth­er… but there was a 2mm gap at the top of the head­set when we’d as­sembled it, which wasn’t right. Even­tu­ally I called Andy at ATA back in Con­cord, then emailed him some pic­tures. He told us what to do, and we did… the 2mm gap re­mains. Everything feels fine and tight… def­in­itely some­thing isn’t quite right. There are no safety or break­age is­sues with it, so I’ll ride it and see if it shakes out.

And that’s about it. Time to get stuff ready for the morn­ing and try to get some sleep in this ri­dicu­lous “sunny all day” sum­mer in Nor­way.