We hit another milestone today! 2000 kilometers biking from home. But no flowers, no fanfare, no remembrance stone along the way. But then again, so many people hit important milestones in their life without fanfare, or remembrance stone. Maybe sometimes with flowers.
Anyway, the day kicked off with a bang. Thunder and lightning at 04:00, and it came by surprise. Besides some interrupted sleep (it rained ’til 9), everything worked out fine. The tent, for example, kept us dry.
As we were already awake early, we started packing and ate breakfast with what was available in the tent. There was a little bit of water inflow, caused by putting the tent partially on a slight slope. As a consequence, the tents canvas was not as tight as it should’ve been. Anyway, there was no big harm done, only a few things got a little damp.
Once it stopped raining, we tried to dry the tent as much as possible with one of our towels. And when the sun started to shine, the drying went even a bit faster.
As it was getting late and we wanted to start biking, we packed the tent while it was not completely dry. We need to air it tonight to avoid mold.
Veronica, our host, told us to take a different route around the north side of the lake, which just added a few kilometers and some height meters to our original plan.
45 km and 370 height meters was the original plan, 50 kilometers and 440 height meters was the new. And Veronica assured us it would be a much nicer road. We even had to take a ferry across the Stora Le, something we also did in 2017, but then by car.
But small differences sometimes become bigger differences along the way. The changes finally added up to 52 kilometers (still OK), and 590 climbing meters. Some slopes were very steep both uphill and downhill. Our average speed was 7.6 km/h, and my maximum speed was at one point 47.8 km/h!
Leen had to tackle some steep slopes on foot.
At lunch, we had a reverse type of a ”Wouter Deboot experience”. We met an Italian motorbiker couple driving from Dakar to the North Pole. He interviewed us for his vlog.
Around 16:40, at a decent hour anyway, we arrived at our Airbnb in Bengtfors.
As the grand finale, we had an almost 45° climb to the house, as all houses around the lake are built on the steep lakeside to have a perfect view of the lake.
We quickly unpacked our bags and drove to Bengtfors to buy an evening meal. Nothing fancy this time as we were too tired to cook. So we settled for two frozen meals. And to be honest, they were Ok.
I still wanted to air out our tent like I said earlier today, so it will be a bit drier tomorrow.
And at the end of the day, I write a bit for our blog, and Leen was checking our luggage to see if everything was dry (it wasn’t).
And then I almost forgot to mention that we also enjoyed fully all the beautiful landscapes we passed by.
And tomorrow we bike to a famous camping (at least in Belgium), some 48 kilometers north. Does anybody know which camping we are talking about?
Leave a Reply