August 2023 was a fun and interesting month for me. I traveled to the North Cap, powered by my legs (and a bit of train). Starting from Copenhagen on July 30th, I finally arrived on August 21th after 2200km and 18500m+ of positive elevation. During that time, I took 2 days break (so technically cycled 21 days), including 15 days with, at least some, rain.

How was it?⌗

I landed late on the 29th evening in Copenhagen, it was fairly sunny and warm… but, by the time I recovered my bike, unpacked it, and assembled it, a few drop started to come down. Alright then, lets just get started, it’ll be fine, I’m sure… it was not. It poured down rain 5min later, I picked the first hotel along the road, slept there. Me and my stuff already soaked… off to a good start! In all honesty, I was laughing more than feeling bad about it, kind of wishing it was better to have it now than later on.

Next day was looking great! I started without being not perfectly happy with the bags setup I put that morning (some stuff were a bit to loose), but I just wanted to get going, for the first real cycling day.

Slowly but surely I arrived at the first ferry to cross the channel between Helsingør and Helsingborg. This country reputation of nice cyclist infrastructure didn’t failed, even the embarkation port had a sign for cyclist onboarding. I bet it’s a fairly common route. As a fun side notes, I wasn’t really in the english speaking mindset just yet, so I said “bonjour”, out of habits, to the guy selling tickets for the ferry. He replied, surprised, in French and we spoke french afterward. Onboarding the ferry as the last person was a nice touch, no waiting for me!

Just the time to get a small drink and a snack, take a few pics. Sweden, here I am.

I planned to cycle about 100km today, so about 50km left to go after the ferry. Still feeling fairly confident, not tired at all, no growing pain, the bike is handling fine. Lets just keep on going!

Times come by, kilometers pass by, days after days. The landscape reminds me a lot of Brittany, in france: green, rocky, fairly flat, but some nice hills along the coast.

Rain, rainy days⌗

Oh boy, Sweden, sweet Sweden, you’re pretty but oh so damn rainy. The parallel with Brittany continued with this, but more like Brittany in a rainy October month…

I wasn’t mentally prepared for that much rain. I knew I was going to have some rain, but not that I would get a single day, out of the first 15 days, without rain.

I’m starting to do more dirt road, double track and single track more than road now! I love it so much more and I’m alone. Sometime you just see a person after 10km, getting mushrooms but that’s it. It’s nicer but also slower, but I still feel like I’m on schedule.

About ten days have gone past now, I was thinking, maybe it’s time for a day break, see if it helps boost the morale after the rain, and maybe get back some energy in the legs. The issue is I’m a scared to be a bit late, so I’m going to take a train during that day. Remember the rain? Yea, so, about that again… it rained so much that a train before mine derailed due to a landslide when the train got over it (thankfully no major injuries as far as I understood). All train cancelled for the day, and basically, from the info at the time, for the rest of the week as well. I thus spent a few hours waiting for more information and calling the support as they don’t have anybody in the station to help you out. Got re-booked for the next day, and had to switch from “just a train” to “a train then a bus”. Some stress related to “uh, will my bike fit in the bus with all the passengers?” And because I was arriving later than planned I wanted to get some more km down, so I started cycling again… Surprise surprise, it started pouring with heavy wind again. Getting back on it after that day break was the worst.

All in all, I don’t want to complain, but I’m don’t think it was worth it. Just keeping the rhythms, maybe pushing a bit more would have been fine. (And I could say I’ve done it without the train)

Mentally it’s not all green, I’m missing something but it’s not clear what, so I started looking. After some thought, I pinned the issue to lack of creative process (or even maybe problem solving? these are fairly similar concept I think?). Some people write diaries or stories, some people draw things, I didn’t do much of this at all. I felt a bit bored even sometimes, but that was manageable. So I started to think about creative things when cycling. It helped, but I just wanted a keyboard to code stuff now…

Sun, sunny days⌗

As I was getting closer to the north, the weather was getting to get nicer and nicer. With the remaining km count starting to get lower and lower, I felt so much more motivated, willing to push for longer days. Started with a 130km of very nice road, without any wind or even slight tailwind sometimes. I was done in 6h40 (of riding), this was, for me, insanely good.

The temperature started to get a bit colder, but nothing really annoying, yet.

Time to cross the finland border and the Arctic Circle, not too far away to the finish now. Reindeers! Reindeers everywhere. They’re cute but they seem scared of cyclist (but not about cars, motorbike, trucks and all other vehicle, even when they are super loud…). And I don’t want to find out what they do when scared… they can easily outpace me, out strength me and definitely outweigh me, if they want to. (they also don’t seem to be the smartest: they get “stuck” nears road fences and then panic if you approach them…) I met another french speaking guy, managing a camping and it was nice to see them happy so far away from their origin country. I didn’t spent that much time in finland, but the weather was finally starting to look good and saunas are more common that toilets it seems (I didn’t tried them though).

Now the temperature got a bit colder again and I started to worry a bit about the lack of heavy clothes for night time. The days are long, and it’s really nice thing to have when you cycle long distances. Bike lane are getting rare, and sharing the road in the darks isn’t my favorite way of cycling. I missed the midnight sun by a few weeks, but it’s alright, I knew that before starting.

Closing in⌗

Second and last day-break, in Alta, before the long and sparsely populated north. I arrived during the Alta Live music festival so it was pretty crowded but the city looked cool. The food sources, camping/hotel/shelter will be getting more and more distant from each other now. So I had to pack more food on the bike. I used to pack to have always one meal in advance (so, I can always eat one meal and then have a backup if I don’t find anything), but now having something more would be nice. That went mostly fine, until for some reason I miss-managed my food the last day. I only had a small breakfast and needed to do like 40km before the next supermarket. I had some snacks but that was a bit short. I ate all the rest of my food 2km before the supermarket because I was just too hungry. I bought some extra food, some that I knew I couldn’t pack on the bike but just ate it before going on again. It’s the final day anyway! I learned that the Nordkapp had some kind of nice breakfast available but I packed some anyway.

The tunnels. The multiple tunnels going to the north cap have a small reputation. And they are true, the Nordkapptunnelen is a shared road for almost 7km, with slope as steep a 9%, with a quite high humidity (there’s a fog warning sign before the tunnel). It’s a “V” shaped tunnel (as seen from the side), where you go down for about half the length, and then go up for the other half. I was surprisingly happy to do it though! You - seem to - go fast in the first half. My speedometer is GPS based and my visual cues are completely out because everything is close and fairly dark, so I’m not exactly sure how fast but it’s downhill for 3km+, in basically a straight line, so you can imagine. I never realized how loud a tunnel is when car or noisy vehicle passes you, but after somewhere around 40min under, you definitely notice.

The other 2 tunnels are fine, one of them is even equipped with a dedicated bike lane separated by a concrete wall since a few years.

The north cap is definitely a high spot for cyclist, and you encounter people from all over europe. I’ve met a couple traveling about 70km a day for months across europe, I’ve met solo a traveler trying to cross every european country on a year and a half long journey. I’ve met hikers doing multiple hundreds km trip, even some with their inflatable boats on their shoulders so then can go down the rivers later on. Lots of tourist as well! I got to lunch with a german family with a rental camper van. That seemed like a nice family try to be honest!

The end⌗

All in all, it’s quite amazing what the human body can do, even for a mostly untrained person. I’m for sure not in bad health, but I’m fairly untrained for such endeavors. Consistency is the key for “long distance”, that’s for sure!

So, what’s next? I wanted to never touch my bike again… but after literally 2 days off…. I wanted to come back. I even cycled the following weekend to come to a close and see what’s the limit for me in one day. Sadly I only managed to do 200km (with two flat tyres, that took me way to long to fix). I sadly lost most of the GPS trace (I discarded it by pressing a button on my watch while refilling some water…). Is the addiction real? I guess we’ll find out next yea. But I may need to push for 150km a day, at least.

Random though⌗

Few bullets points that don’t fit in any specific timeline:

• Lots of non swedish/norwegians/finnish people in the touristic industry (hotels, camping, restaurants, bars and such). Some told me that the work conditions are better than in France for example (which is not really surprising considering the state of french labour in these kind of jobs), and that the experience is worth living!
• I was surprised that some folks don’t seem to speak english very well. I imagined the scandinavian countries to be almost fully english speaking (like I’ve experienced in the Netherlands when I was longboarding there)
• Bought some earphones, never used them. I was missing something at times, but it was never a urge for music.
• Garmin, why in the world would you discard traces without a way to recover them for like a couple hours or day or until the device is close to being full or anything. I’ve bumped or miss-clicked too many time on “save” or discard or whatever instead of resume.