We are tucked up in our tent in a big wide valley plateau thing on the other side of the pass leading up from Geirangerfjord. It’s 12:30 am and we finished slurping our pasta vegie soup not long ago, horizontal, fishing bits and pieces out of the billy with our heads sticking out of the tent. There is the patter of light rain which probably means another day of wet riding tomorrow.
Today was a good day though. This was no doubt helped by the weather. It didn’t rain. At least not until now. We left our camp site reasonably late in the morning. The sky was not blue. Let’s not overdo things. The sky was grey and cloudy but… but… not raining. We found some public toilets near the shore of the fiord and spent some time happily splashing water over ourselves. Then I made the glorious discovery that they had a shower around the back. We splashed 20 Kr of deliciously warm water over ourselves and the feeling of cleanliness was superb.
We put our sparkling clean legs to work and cruised up into the hills. It was a balmy 20 degrees and all was good. We almost got real sun every now and then. Almost… The road was narrow and there wasn’t a lot of traffic. It made for nice cycling. We passed cows, sheep, and lakes.
From the top we descended down to a fiord and caught the oh so very touristy ferry across to Geirangerfjord. It’s supposed to be the most spectacular fiord in Norway but we felt it was a little ruined by the tourists, cruise ships, general commercialisation, tourists, and the tourists.
Once reaching the shore we left the fiord as quickly as possibly and climbed steadily for the next couple of hours to the pass. The view back down into the fiord was very nice although a little too cloudy. The road winds its way backwards and forwards up into the sky. The higher we got the greater the number of waves, and thumbs up we got from motorists and motorcyclists. This could also be because it was 9 pm and rather chilly and I was wearing jandals and reasonably summery cycling attire. It was 9 degrees at the pass and Leonie was rather cold. Camping at the pass was ruled out and we descending until it flattened off. We checked the map and realised it was still quite a way to the next camp site and as it was now quite late, still cold and looking like rain we found a place to camp off a little side road.
I cooked us some soup for dinner and tried to defend myself from the mosquitoes while Leonie tried to get warm in the tent. And that’s about it for the day. It’s done its best to get dark but it’s only managed a dusk light again.