Cycling Norway - Day 4

I star­ted today with The Day Four Blues… that “I’d rather stay in this hotel bed for an­oth­er 4 hours and then perch in a cof­fee shop with a kindle and head­phones for the rest of the day” feel­ing. Wooden legs, sore back, cranky ass… so many good reas­ons. But no, it’s.. . “ok then! Back n the bikes and let’s start the day right off with a little 1000 meter climb!”

How the pros do it for 20 days in a row, I have no idea.

We rode out the back of Gerainger, head­ing up.

(In Gerainger, you pretty much only have two ways to go. North (and up and over), or south (and up and over). Or you can take a ferry some­where.  If you’re a cyc­list there - which seems un­likely - you pretty much have a choice of straight-up-this-way or straight-up-that-way.)

We were sup­posed to do a big loop, end­ing up in a town on the oth­er end of one of the ferry lines by 5pm, then tak­ing the ferry to get back to Gerainger.

The first part of the day was a climb up the Dalsin­bba moun­tain that frames Gerainger, climb­ing about 1200m to a frozen lake (the Djupvat­net). This climb was as tough as the Troll­sti­gen, and al­most as pretty. Open­ing up on the lake above was an­oth­er ‘wow’.

From there, after put­ting on warm clothes, we worked our way for an­oth­er 20km to a gravel road that branched off the main road, tak­ing us through a wil­der­ness area still bur­ied in snow. The gravel road went on forever, and I had vis­ions of (again) run­ning out of road and hav­ing to con­tin­ue for­ward on the snow.

For­tu­nately, we even­tu­ally came out at a spring ski­ing area, wav­ing high to the ski­ers who looked a little sur­prised to see cyc­lists…

The des­cent was com­plic­ated, tech­nic­al, and spec­tac­u­lar. Mark, Dan, and Joel, un­sur­pris­ingly, are also very fast at des­cend­ing. They’re also bor­der­line in­sane. Much lower and later, we ar­rived at Yet An­oth­er Fjord for an­oth­er great John-cre­ated pic­nic lunch at the side of the wa­ter. We rode for an­oth­er hour, then got in the van so that we could make it to the re­turn ferry in time.

The ferry ride was al­most the high­light of the day… (so many high­lights to choose from). We rode for an hour through the fjords, hear­ing the oc­ca­sion­al tour­ist-fo­cused story about the wa­ter­falls and in­sane farm­ing loc­a­tions we could see on the moun­tain­sides in front of us.

Here you can see the road we came down on day 3, zig­zag­ging down the moun­tain­side.

It was a long, tough, fant­ast­ic day. I don’t mind those ex­tra kms we didn’t do.. there was no way to really fit those in.

Back at the hotel, I was lucky enough to get a short mas­sage to work out the is­sues in my back (thanks to Mark for giv­ing me some of the time he had re­served) and then the team as­sembled for the great buf­fet of­fer­ings that hotel had for our din­ner.