Cambridge Stockholm
I did a daily post for the bike trip that I did from Cambridge to Stockholm. I have collected them all together into one page if anybody wants to read the whole trip linearly. I've done some light editing of the original posts for spelling mistakes and sorted some of the poor structuring of sentences.
Day 1: Cambridge to Harwich again
So it begins again…
After last year's mad 2000 km bike trip to Warsaw, I honestly thought I would never do this sort of thing again. There were lots of lovely moments, a challenge and a real feeling of achievement but…there were also miserable moments and it took me nearly three months to regain feeling in my hands after the ulnar nerve damage.
However, never underestimate the ability of a stubborn middle-aged man to gloss over the past and gird himself up for yet another stupidly long and sketchy bike trip.
By Christmas 2022 I was already casting my eye over the map of Europe and, rather ambitiously, the map of North America. The constraints were only that it had to be reasonably flat, reasonably densely populated, logistically possible and not pass through countries that were at war and controlled by a madman. Sorry Vlad, Warsaw to Moscow is once again out. The Great Lakes certainly ticked the “flat” box but the logistics were a nightmare. Nearer to home, I thought about continuing from Warsaw through the Baltic States to Tallinn but again the logistics would also be hard. You need to get your bike somewhere — with its associated bike bag — and then somehow get the bike bag to the place you are going to end up.
So…Stockholm it is. It's relatively flat between Cambridge and Stockholm and Sweden is not at war with anybody. I can send the bike bag to a hotel in Stockholm and then follow the prevailing winds eastwards. The dates were booked and I started getting everything together for the trip.
Having done this once before, I had a few “learnings” from the previous trip.
Firstly, Topeak bike bags are utter garbage. The bean of doom had
been binned and I had bought a new bean — of which more in a later blog.
Less tools (eek) and, surprisingly, a small lightweight rucksack were
the only changes I made. The horrid nylon “Angela Merkel Trousers” and
the world's least cool shoes were brought out of the dark dark drawer in which
they are hidden stored and pressed into service again.
What would a trip like this be without looking like a complete twat every
evening?
The bike is, once again, the Bat Bike™. A couple of weeks ago, I took it entirely to pieces, cleaned everything in my cool but basically pointless ultrasound cleaner, greased everything up and build it back again. This goes against all the tenets of aerospace maintenance. When you maintain something, it's just an opportunity to make some mistake and screw up badly but it did mean that the bike was clean, silent and looking pretty mean.
Basically the
car from the Dark Knight
but with two wheels.
The first day dawned, I spent five hours stressing about what I was going to pack, checking the bike, re wrapping the bars and then…it was time to go. I'd been thinking about this for about five months and but it was a bit daunting when the time came.
I had my traditional breakfast of champions
My body is a temple
Wendy, Fulvio, Alex, Teky, Jake, Isabel and Ewa were all there. They gave me balloons (one of which seemed to say “Enjoy the Afterlife” and another said “Tell The World About Jesus”!) and we drank sparkling tea and then…it was time to go.
Before I left, I'd mentioned to my friend JJ that my first day was from Cambridge to Harwich. He immediately said “I've got a route, it's great, you should do my route”. There are two problems with that. Firstly, JJ often just slips in a couple of unnecessary climbs into his routes and secondly…it wasn't my route. Having checked JJ's route for sneaky detours up the Puy de Dôme and finding that it was only marginally longer than mine and marginally more climbing, I decided to do it. Literally the only reason for doing this was so that when I sat down to write this blog, I could throw some shade about how pointless it was to hand craft bike routes and turn the snark knob up to 10.
The way out of Cambridge and the South Cambridgeshire route was very similar. I passed through Six Mile Bottom which — sadly given my age — always makes me snigger.
Eventually, the JJ route and my route diverged and it became clear that JJ's route was better than mine. No…wait…much better than mine. Those of you who read the first day of the 2022 trip will remember the crappy Essex towns, the dangerous drivers, the slightly “down at heel” feeling on the way to Harwich. There was none of that today. It was all tiny country lanes, beautiful cottages and houses, wooded drives and achingly quaint villages.
Oh, how lovely is this?
I just rolled along marvelling at the beautiful British countryside
Oh great, a ford. Not much fun going through this
Yes, a village with a green and a pond.
It turns out that spending a bit of time working out a bike route really
does pay dividends. Who knew? The only downside of this was that all
the snarky comments about bike routing were now defunct. Chapeau JJ.
Grrrrrr.
Eventually, even the routing genius of JJ couldn't avoid the run into
Harwich. I didn't take the town route and once again had a battle of
wills against amphetamine fuelled truckers driving along a single
carriageway at 70mph while I avoided the roadkill at the side of the road
attempting to avoid ending up as yet another squished mammal on the A120.
It was…well, I'd like to say something cool like “tense” or
“challenging” but to be perfectly honest, “terrifying” is the best word.
Finally the trucker-rollerball road ended up at a roundabout and I rolled
down to the checkin kiosks, got the card for my cabin and then waited for 90
minutes for boarding to commence.
There were effectively the same people waiting for the ferry as last
year. A few wiry cycling couples with way too much stuff attached to
their bikes. Some fat middle-aged men on motorcycles. Being fat
and middle-aged seems to be the default setting for motorcyclists.
Some families in overloaded cars getting fractious as the wait to board
lengthened. I just stood and tried to look superior to the wiry
couples with too much stuff. "You should have all your stuff in a neat
and aerodynamic bean you fools" I silently said.
Boarding the ferry is actually pretty cool. The cyclists are supposed to
lead the way but the fat middle-aged men on Harleys really didn't like that
so they zoomed on ahead scaring the living crap out of me as they came past
gunning engines through their borderline illegal exhaust systems.
These boats are big engineering and I really like this sort of stuff.
Fat middle-aged man on a hog. Surprise!
Bike tied up, I found my cabin and exploded my bags all over the four (!)
bunks which I seem to have in my cabin.
It's luxury Jim but not as we know it.
The food and drink on the Stenaline ferries is certainly trucker-oriented.
Lots of stodge, lots of beer. I stuck with the cyclists
favourite: A Diavola Pizza. It wasn't bad to be honest.
Tasted better than it looks.
Today was -- apart from the much much better route -- pretty much the same as
the start of the Cambridge Warsaw trip. Hard to write about and since I
didn't hit anybody, didn't eat anybody's breakfast, didn't vomit and therefore
not really a high blog content day. Let's hope tomorrow changes.
- Bike: 🙂
- “Contact points”: 🙂
- Route: 🙂
- Distance: 114km 😐
- Climbing: 976m 😢 — To be honest, didn't expect this amount of climbing!
Day 2: Hoek van Holland to Zwolle
I'd set my alarm for 5am because last year a lugubrious scouser had woken me up on the tannoy at 5am and I thought I could get some breakfast and get ready to go for the 6am docking and departure from the boat. I'd even remembered to to leave my phone on so that the time would automatically change to CET.
There were two problems with this strategy. The first being that leaving your phone on means that Vodafone charges you “maritime and aerospace” rates for data. This is…wait for it…£6 for every megabyte. Given that the average web page is a megabyte or so and one megabyte is pretty much a single auto-refresh of Twitter (or “X”…ffs) or LinkedIn. By the time I woke up, I'd spent £48. £48 to get spam messages from idiots on LinkedIn asking me if I'd like to employ some programmers in Tajikistan and have the latest river of bile on Twitter ready to read when I woke up.
This I could have coped with but it turned out that I had made a poor assumption about StenaLine. Surely their sailing times wouldn't have changed from 2022 to 2023. Looking out of the window (and noticing the lack of lugubrious scousers on the tannoy) I was somewhat worried to see that the ship was barely making way and there was no sign of land.
Unfortunately for me, StenaLine had decided to save some fuel (yay the environment, yay for StenaLine's profitability) by extending the sailing time by two hours. I had an extra two hours before we docked. What joy…I found a “coffee shop” which was open, drank coffee, tried to eat a “croissant” and failed.
The entire day was screwed. I'd optimistically arranged a long day and I'd also arranged to meet my friend Gideon for lunch in Utrecht at noon which would have been lovely and relaxing but if I was going to make it to Utrecht by 12:00 I was going to have to ride very fast indeed and if I didn't I would miss Gideon. I texted Gideon, cancelling and realised with a sinking sensation I had a long long day with no nice relaxed lunches with a friend in it.
The view from the deck
There was the usual kerfuffle getting off the ship and after having a nice chat with the passport guy, I was on the road.
My route took me up the northern side of the Rhine from Hoek van Holland to Rotterdam. Once again, the sheer neatness and overall density of the Netherlands was impressive.
Huge greenhouses on one side, long straight cycle paths and…spot the
lamb
Finally I arrived in Rotterdam which is big, a bit gritty but still insanely
clean and well ordered.
Rotterdam
I was reminded of
this scene.
Cycling infrastructure and canals
Eventually in a small village, I found a Snack Bar which was open and had a
bewilderingly large menu. I could have everything from a cheese sandwich
to a three course Libyan lunch. Like every sensible person in the
Netherlands, I chose chips and two cups of coffee. The chips
were…possibly the best chips I've ever eaten and the coffees came with little
biscuits which handled the sweet craving.
Human again…
Now is the time to sing the praises of the Dutch cycling infrastructure. I cycled 192 km today and apart from a handful of kilometres where I was on very quiet roads which were shared with cars, I never actually shared any space with cars. There are cycle paths everywhere and they're not just crappy old things thrown down to keep the cyclists happy. They're new, the tarmac is so smooth that my new knobbly tyres made singing noises while I cycled along. At roundabouts, you (mostly) have right of way and cars (almost always) wait for you. Unfortunately, there are some junctions at roundabouts where you don't have right of way and it was my luck to whizz round a roundabout and nearly get hit by a car. A police car. The officer peeled rubber to catch up with me and then pulled in in front of me and let rip with what I can only imagine was a stream of Dutch invective. I'd like to say that I shouted “You won't take me alive copper” and a Italian Job style car chase ensued but…I grovelled in English about how I was new to the country and didn't understand the excellent Dutch cycling infrastructure. The policeman said “take care”…three times and then peeled rubber off into the distance. Obviously Dutch policemen don't pay for their own tyres.
I stopped in Utrecht for a coffee two hours after when I should have met
Gideon for lunch. I should have chosen a Starbucks because I just needed
caffeine but I ended up in a hyper-trendy coffee bar. I was offered
three different types of coffee, tasting notes on each and a choice of
cup shapes. <sigh>. Of course it took 30 minutes to
make and was…terrible.
30 minutes for some brown tasteless water.
I was only half done. There was a long way to go. Although I was aided by a reasonably friendly tail wind, there were long and dispiriting sections of flat straight roads. I did get a bit blasé about the cycle lanes and got a tremendous buttock-clenching shock when I was passed by an agricultural tractor about the size of a small family house on the cycle lane.
There were some pretty bits
I can't remember where this was but it seemed pretty nice to me.
What's going to make this look good? I know, a big bike.
A windmill.
These horses are not a long way away. They're tiny.
The Apart!Hotel (yes, the exclamation mark is part of its name) in Zwolle had
sent me 8 emails and 6 WhatsApps in the days leading up to my arrival.
Mildly aggressive emails asking me for arrival time and some somewhat
useless descriptions of how to find it. I wandered around the centre of
Zwolle in a post 192km daze singularly failing to find anything that looked
like my hotel.
Eventually I phoned them and a nice Dutch lady piloted me to the back door and
then remotely opened it from, I presume, home. There was nobody in the
hotel. Just me. I had a key which remotely operates my door and
the main door. It was slightly weird but also quintessentially Dutch.
The room was big, has Wi-Fi but didn't have a heated towel rail so not
everything was rosy in the land of long-distance cycling. I showered for
a long long time, washed my cycle gear and headed out into Zwolle to find some
much needed food.
Zwolle was absolutely jumping. Scores of cafes and restaurants with
people spilling out onto the streets laughing and enjoying the sunny evening.
Given the 192km and the associated “soft tissue” issues, I was not
laughing and enjoying the sunny evening. I needed food and I needed drink. An
Indian restaurant supplied both.
Mmm. Indian food and, in the background, blog authorship.
I know the Netherlands is a rich country and so can afford to be clean,
well-ordered and have superb cycling infrastructure. I don't think even
the Dutch would class their country as beautiful but it does work incredibly
well. The UK isn't a rich country (any more) and so it's often dirty,
littered, badly-ordered and has potholes the size of Belgium in many of the
roads I cycle on frequently. It's all a bit depressing.
So, full of Chicken Karai and Spinach Pakora, I got an early night
and tried to not wake up 2 hours before I have to. It's another long and
flat day tomorrow. Germany beckons.
- Distance: 192km 🙂 — This is…a very long way.
- Climbing: 423m 😀 — Yes, that's four meters of climbing for every 1km of forward motion. The Netherlands is very flat.
- Undercarriage: 😢 — the less said about this the better.
- Route: 🙂 — Ok, I didn't have the genius of JJ to do it but the Garmin Autoroute functionality worked well.
- Hands: 😕 - an early appearance of hands being a problem
- Bike: 🙂 — The Bat Bike™ still performing well.
Day 3: Zwolle to Oldenburg
The day dawned in Zwolle and, apart from a drunken maniac shouting his
unhinged madness in the square below at 3am, I slept pretty well. That
being said, I got fairly grumpy just after waking up. The Apart!Hotel
(how I hate that !) has the usual system where the sockets don't work unless
you have the key in the room. This is a giant pain in the bum when you're
trying to charge all your stuff while out for dinner. The even more
giant pain in the bum is that the heated towel rail which you switched on
before leaving the room…doesn't turn itself back on again when you come in from dinner. You have to
manually turn it back on again. So while I
blissfully slept dreaming of dry shorts and socks, in fact they were lying
soaking on a rail drying through evaporation. Or rather not drying.
I packed and climbed into my cloyingly moist shorts and top. Ugh.
The only human interaction at the Apart!Hotel in Zwolle is the breakfast.
It appears you can't serve breakfast remotely using an app. Who knew eh?
I was very pleasantly surprised to be greeted by a perky waitress — who
gamely overlooked my damp clothes and offered me infinite coffee and a feast
for breakfast.
A feast fit for a long distance cyclist
Fresh scrambled eggs and bacon, bread, cheese, ham. I couldn't have wanted for
more and, indeed, I really hardly managed to make a dent in it. There
was a lot of food left after I'd tried — and failed — to lay waste to that
fabulous breakfast. Had I known what was in store for the day, I would
have tried to stuff in that extra couple of bread rolls, the boiled egg and
the apple.
Zwolle was pretty and quiet as I rolled out of town. The “undercarriage”
was complaining a bit after yesterday but the legs didn't feel so bad and I
started grinding out the kilometres.
The Netherlands continued to be delightful for a cyclist. I have settled
into a bit of a rhythm. I don't listen to podcasts for the first 50km
and I try to get those first 50km under my belt before finding somewhere to
stop for my mid-morning coffee. Here's a video of what those first 50km
were like.
They were like this
Look ma, it goes round and round.
It means “thrift store of the snuffle goose” according to Google
I had hoped to stop in the unfortunately named Slagharen but, in a portent
of things to come, there was nothing open although it did have a London Eye
sized ferris wheel and a tumbled down roller coaster.
Come to Slagharen and ride the ferris wheel
Let's have a coffee and then buy some more giant pants Hans.
I was on a cycle path on the left hand side of a fast two lane road and
there was a big canal. I think it was the
Küstenkanal. It was long and straight
and had a lot of barges on it which, come to
think of it, rather defines what a canal is.
This is a big kanal
And my view looked like this
This is what it was like.
This is what it was like four hours later
Finally, six hours after my last drink and eight hours after my last food,
a garage appeared. I was actually so hungry, I could barely
eat.
The bike is in the background, the croissant was a saviour.
The heavens opened and I got very wet. I only own one piece of
clothing which could be called “hi-viz” — because hi-viz is for dorks…I'd
rather get squished etc etc — and I put on my hi-viz rain jacket only to
find out that although it is very high visibility, it's also got a high
porosity and I was almost immediately soaked.
I'm too old to hang out in bus shelters
Oh crap
The last 20 km were really miserable. They were very wet and with
appalling road conditions. The only saving grace is that the
south-westerly wind which had been blowing me along since (effectively) Hoek
van Holland, continued to work in my favour. I think if I had had to
do this into the wind, I might have got the bus instead.
See, exactly the effing same but this time wet.
Just as I reached Oldenburg, the rain stopped and as I sat rehydrating and
refuelling it was a lovely sunny summer's eve and it seems like quite a nice
place. It had to be because there didn't seem to be anywhere
else within 100 km that was open.
Don't judge me. I deserve steak and chips.
I've had two back-to-back 190km days and I'm feeling a bit wiped out.
I have another 160km day to Hamburg tomorrow and I had intended to
keep powering on to Denmark but I think I'll try to make to to Hamburg and
have a day off on Monday. My “contact points” will almost certainly
thank me for a day to recover.
- Distance: 191km 🙂 — This is once again…a very long way.
- Climbing: 392m 😀 — This part of Holland and Germany is really flat.
- Undercarriage: 😢 — the less said about this the better.
- Route: 🙂 — Well, I guess it was flat.
- Body: 😔 - hands getting quite a lot worse
- Bike: 🙂 — There's an irritating rattle from somewhere but it keeps going.
Day 4: Oldenburg to Hamburg
It was time to do more of this.
This is different. The bike path is on the right
Mmmm Food.
It was truly lovely first thing. Oldenburg looked very pretty on a
quiet sunny Sunday morning.
Normally, the first 5 km getting out of a town is a bit sketchy. You
have to find the Garmin route — which, of course, I had neglected to start
at the hotel — and navigate a lot of confusing signs and traffic lights.
Meanwhile you're coping with your feet, hands, legs and…soft tissues…
complaining madly about having to get back on the bike again.
Nevertheless, it was actually a lot of fun today with the quaint old
streets and the sun shining down.
Once I got out of Oldenburg, it was effectively just the same as yesterday.
A rather good bike path alongside a very straight road. We
started off on the right hand side of the road which felt like an outrageous
innovation. Unfortunately my sense of wonder and excitement on
realising that one could cycle on the right hand side of a road soon dimmed
and I broke out the podcasts. After 10km….
I stopped early for the first coffee of the day. Next to the road,
there was a bakery which sold coffee and, although it was less than the
traditional 50km I thought I'd better get a coffee on board in case Germany
was shut on Sunday — which it often is. I was served by a cheery old
lady who looked almost exactly like
Toby Jones. Maybe she supplements her baking income appearing at
German parties as a
Toby Jones lookalike. Or maybe not.
As I cycled off, I noticed the roads getting busier, industrial parks
shouldering up to the road, buses and trams starting to appear. That's
strange I thought what could be going on? Stupidly, I hadn't
paid enought attention to my
route but it turned out I was going to be going through Bremen. This
is a bit like unexpectedly going through Manchester in terms of size and
complexity. I needn't have bought a coffee from Toby Jones, I was soon
surrounded by Turkish coffee shops, German Coffee shops, endless Starbucks….
I really don't know how I missed the fact that I was going to ride through
one of the major cities in Germany.
Nice…
Beck's is brewed in Bremen and I cycled past the factory. The photo
below is all I could fit in of the absolutely gigantic outdoor staging area
for beer.
There's more than 2,000,000 bottle of beer in this photo alone
It's like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time.
Just when I thought it couldn't get any more exciting, there was another dramatic
shift.
There's no road!!
I continued to grind along and the road started to almost imperceptibly tilt
upwards. Everything got slower and more difficult and then…it started
raining. Just a little bit so I put on my hi-viz
jacket string-vest and as the clouds burst, I cursed a lot of
things but mostly the stupid hi-viz jacket.
Live action misery
Of course, Hamburg is a big industrial town but I didn't realise quite how
big. It's got a population of 1.8m people and is the largest
non-capital city in Europe. A city this size starts about 20km from
the centre and navigating in is not easy. Especially when it starts
raining again and this time the rain is whipped into your face with a gale
force wind. I passed through miles of wet port buildings, wet
harbours, wet docks, wet big box stores and wet industrial parks. I
fitted right in.
The going was slow and I was going slower. I really thought I was in a
Zeno's paradox situation. As I got closer to the hotel, I got slower.
Maybe I would never actually get there. Unexpected roadworks
just added to the rolling omnishambles.
Look at that blue sky. 5 minutes later it was pissing down
Hamburg had one final surprise for me — or maybe the Garmin routing system
had a surprise for me. My route took me under the sea… Yes, the route
went through the
St Pauli Elbe Tunnel.
You go down in an elevator, cycle through the tunnel and then back
up in an elevator. It would have been quite cool but I was shivering a
lot and rather scaring the families who were on a day out to walk through
the tunnel.
Pretty cool I think.
My hotel is…boutiquey. I suppose it should be given the price.
I've managed to negotiate another night in my room and so tomorrow is
a rest day. The hotel also has a laundrette so I can not only wash my
cycle gear but, come Tuesday morning, I will not be heading off north to
Denmark with moist clothing. #winning.
The hotel pointed me to a street about 15 minutes away where there are lots
of restaurants. In the end, I chose a hamburger joint. It felt
appropriate.
- Distance: 168km 🙂 — A shorter day.
- Climbing: 601m 😀 — All the climbing was at the end when I was knackered
- Undercarriage: 😢 — I think everything has gone numb.
- Route: 🙂 — More of the same really.
- Hands: 😔 - Appear to have lost feeling in my little fingers.
- Bike: 🙂 — Ok.
Day 5: Hamburg
No stats today because it is my first rest day. The last four days have been long and I really felt I needed some time not sitting on the bike.
My hotel has a laundrette! One of the sad things about long distance cycling is that you get irrationally excited about laundrettes and heated towel rails. A laundrette and a rest day means that you're not washing filthy cycle kit when you get into your room in the evening and the heated towel rail means you're not pulling on damp and semi-clean cycle kit in the morning.
Finding the laundrette involved some basement detective work but finally, nestled in a dark corner I spied a washing machine and a tumble drier…joy! I put everything except what I was wearing — I had future plans for the clothes I was wearing — and headed out into the wet streets of Hamburg at 7:30am looking for something to do while my cycle gear washed and tumbled for a couple of hours.
Grim and forbidding
The church is right next to
Speicherstadt
which is part of the dock area which has been added to the HafenCity
regeneration zone near the docks. There's a modern (and eye-catching)
concert hall and scores of beautiful neo-Gothic red brick warehouses many of
which have been sympathetically restored and rebuilt. Even in the rain —
yes, it was still raining — it was a stunning area to walk around.
Wouldn't mind living here
Since I had another hour to wait for my washing, I thought I would drop in at
the
Miniature Wunderland billed as
“Germany's Number 1 tourist attraction” — which is a bit of a
stretch given (say) The Brandenburg Gate I thought. However, I could
wander around for 30 minutes, take some pictures of bad miniature models and
be able to write some amusing things in this blog about it.
Surprisingly, it was rammed at 8am on a wet Monday morning.
I got a ticket which gave me entry “maybe 30 minutes…maybe an hour”.
Kids and adults in the queue were almost vibrating with the excitement
of as they got closer to getting into Miniature Wonderland. One woman
had an attack of the vapours and had to be brought a chair. I maintained
my aloof world traveller cool. How good could this be eh?
Well…when I finally got in, the answer was
that it was absolutely amazing. Spread over two floors of one of the
old factory warehouses the total floor area is a bit more than a full sized
football pitch. There are nine or ten “zones” which have been
constructed over the last 20 years. There are 16km(!!) of model
railway tracks, more than 1,000 trains, nearly quarter of a million little
figures and an airport with planes which take off. Every 15 minutes, “night”
falls and everything is lit from within. There's Hamburg, Switzerland,
Italy, Las Vegas (complete with tiny little prostitutes on The Strip), Monaco,
and more.
Here's some videos and pictures which might give a small impression of what it
was like.
Scale is hard to get
Switzerland: I've been over that bridge!
Controlling this is a “NASA control room” operation.
This is just a tiny part of the world's biggest train set.
Las Vegas at night
Seemingly, the speed, angle of attack and takeoff run is all scale
correct.
It might be a bit of a stretch to say “go to Hamburg to see this”
— but not much — however, if you are in Hamburg and you don't go to see it,
you're an idiot ‘cos it's great. Since I had to queue at
8am on a wet Monday morning you will probably have to queue
but you won't be disappointed.
After that, I wanted to visit Harry's Harbour Bazaar which is a miniature
overstuffed museum of wooden dolls, PNG figurines, shrunken heads and other
weird exotica. It's based in a floating crane ship in the Harbour City and,
notably, was the inspiration for Tom Waits' song Lucky Day. It gets
a great write up on “alternative tourist” websites but unfortunately, despite
the door being open and the curators being there, in a strange inversion of
normal German practice, it's only open on Saturday and Sunday.
I haven't mentioned it was raining in the past few paragraphs so I'll just say
again: it was raining. A lot.
I have covered at length in previous posts how incredibly shit my HiViz rain
jacket is. Not just it's HiVizness which is enough to make it dorky and
shit in my eyes but its complete lack of any form of waterproofing. I
found a reassuringly expensive “ProBike” shop after walking through the
non stop biblical level rain
in my useless HiViz jacket. They had bikes in
the window for €10,000+ and therefore this looked like my kinda place. The staff were
all caricatures of hipster bike blokes but, to give them their due, they (a)
spoke English, (b) were very impressed with a 2,000km trip and (c) understood
the pros and cons of the high end bike jackets they stocked. My guy was
Willy and I had to keep my 11 year old's sense of humour under control.
Willy's only mistake was to initially get me a HiViz jacket…but once I'd
explained my deep philosophical aversion to HiViz, we settled on a brutally
expensive Specialized jacket. In black naturally. It's even got those little
cycling pockets on your back to keep your phone and stuff in.
Willy even threw in a free Specialized t-Shirt which dealt with 1/3 of my
remaining shopping. Although, to be fair, he could have almost thrown in
one of the hyper bikes in his window and would still have made a profit on the
jacket.
Look at that beading…
One final stop before heading into some long business related video calls.
I had to do a “Jack Reacher”. If you're washing your cycle clothes
ever night, there's never any chance to wash your non-cycling clothes.
Even with a laundrette downstairs, I would have had to wander up and
down the hotel in a towel and nobody's idea of a good hotel stay is seeing a
semi-naked middle aged man wandering around the corridors. I found a
badly branded casual mens wear store and bought some underpants and socks.
Changed in the toilets in the shopping centre and binned the old ones
and binned my old t-Shirt and put on my nice, clean and free Specialized one.
I squelched home in my new (but rapidly dampening) socks as the rain
continued to fall.
Then it was a few hours of calls. While it rained outside.
By 6:30pm the calls were done and I was hungry. But it was still raining —
I have mentioned that right? So my choice of restaurant was constrained by how
close it was to the hotel. There was a Chinese restaurant 250m from the
hotel so that had to do. The food was fine. The wine was fine.
I'm a long distance cyclist, what do I expect?
Cheap, filling food.
I was glad I stopped in Hamburg. It's a big city (approximately the size
of Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool combined) so it's not really
somewhere you “do in a day”. The ports are still a huge part of the city
despite their decline after the free port status ended and it's one of the
largest deep water container ports in the world. Water is everywhere —
not just the rain. There are rivers, canals, docks. The buildings
destroyed in the 1940s have been rebuilt well. It feels prosperous but
with an…edge.
I didn't see the Beatles memorial and I didn't see any museums or cultural
things apart from Miniature Wunderland. That was enough for this visit.
It was too wet. It rained literally all day. Part of the
reason for doing this sort of trip in late July and early August is to
increase the probability of decent weather. Today would have been
considered an unpleasant day in Glasgow in November.
The weather forecast looked a bit better for the following day. I'm heading
northeast towards the Baltic. The wind is from the southwest. At
least the small amount of forecast rain won't be blasted into my face.
One final day in Germany tomorrow and then it's Denmark for me.
Fourth country and one more after that.
The blog today was longer than I expected it to be because I was writing it in
the Chinese restaurant and…it's raining. Not just a little bit…really
really heavily. And I don't want to go out in the rain one more
time….
Like this. All day. Like this.
Time for another glass of wine I think.
Day 6: Hamburg to Fehmarn
Much to my surprise, it wasn't raining when I woke up in Hamburg and I felt
good. Raring to go. I packed up quickly, pulled on my beautifully
clean and sweet smelling cycle gear, ate some breakfast and then unpacked in
the lobby again when I realised that I couldn't find my chain lube. Due
to some screw up in the Hotel's booking system I had to change rooms from the
first night to the second night and in the confusion, I must have left the
chain lube in the first room. A search of the hotel didn't turn up
anything but took a lot of time and so I left a lot later than expected.
Attentive readers may have realised that it's been quite wet in the past few
days and a lot of water has the tendency to wash all the oil (or “lube” as it
is known in cycling circles) from the chain, cassette, jockey wheels, pedals
etc etc. Therefore you need to lube the chain every day. Well, you
do if you have lube. I had a choice, I could wait until 10am when the
first hipster bike shop opened or just put up with the
squeaking. I put up with the squeaking.
Getting out of a big city is painful. Squeak squeak. It was
basically 10 km of stuff like this. Squeak squeak.
Lots and lots of junctions
After about an hour, I'd reached the equivalent of Walthamstow. Squeak
squeak squeak. There was a short cloud burst but I was proudly wearing
my new rain coat and so my upper body stayed dry. My shorts didn't
stay dry. Squeak squeak squeak. It was then that I found out why
my shorts and top smelled so fragrant. I hadn't set the rinse cycle on
the washing machine and so my kit was basically impregnated with washing
powder. As I squeaked along, my shorts started to foam at the crotch.
I was looking for an open bike shop to buy some oil but there's no way
you wants to stop in the equivalent of Walthamstow with a foamy crotch.
Squeak squeak squeak squeak.
Another cloud burst of rain cleared off the worst of the foam and after 30 km I
squeaked loudly into Bargteheide. I bought a coffee from a lovely lady
in a bakery and asked in my google-translate-powered German about the
possibility of a bike shop in Bargteheide. It turned out that there was
one but as far as google translate could work out, the man that ran it was an
ugly lazy man who probably wouldn't be there.
Please be open
Happiness is lube
The route really started “rolling”. No stupid insanely steep cols but
just endless rolling countryside. I stopped for lunch in a garage and
had a traditional German delicacy.
Less said about this the better
As I crested a motorway bridge, I saw a really interesting bit of
electrification infrastructure. Feel free to skip this section if this
sort of thing doesn't interest you.
Wow
This looks ominous
Apple weather isn't wrong
This part of Germany is rural — often, and in this case correctly, a synonym
for “smells of dung” — with lots of small villages with little
thatched cottages. It feels a lot like Norfolk to be honest.
Not easy to be a sexy fireman in this fire truck.
This resort is set up for wind and rain
Crazy golf is universal in rainy seaside resorts.
I was hoping to follow the shore but, of course, the route curved back up
into the rolling countryside and I still had about 50 km to go. On any
day, the last 50 km are always the hardest and today was no exception.
Lots of punchy climbs and the wind started to veer (or is it back)
round and wasn't quite as encouragingly behind me as it had been for the
rest of the day.
My destination Fehmarn is on an island which is the last bit of Germany
before Denmark. I had to cross a bridge to get there which
was…challenging.
Looks graceful and easy…
…actually a 30cm wide bike path and traffic everywhere
I asked for the WiFi password but that took about 15 minutes to get since
the singsong woman had to get the printer to work and then printed out a
WiFi password of ludicrous complexity. If you're ever in Fehmarn and
want to steal some of that sweet sweet WiFi bandwidth from the Hotel
Hasselbarth, here's the password 1AihW1Svct52q7hHTBqi
<sigh>.
I'd booked a room for one adult and so the hotel had thoughtfully removed
the other duvet from the room in case I was thinking of sneaking my secret
family in the back door later.
You booked for one person and that's what you're getting. Note tiny
sweet on the duvet…
Although the hotel gets a plus for having a thermonuclear towel rail, it
does loose some marks for supplying the smallest bottle of shower gel I've
ever seen.
A euro and a bottle of chain lube for scale.
Fehmarn felt exactly like a Norfolk or Northumberland seaside resort.
It was a bit down at heel, the patrons are a bit down at heel, there's a
few fancy boutiques set up by richer people who wanted to move here to get away
from it all. These boutiques will shut down in a year and be bought
by the next person who wants a lifestyle business and they will shut
down in a year. The cycle goes on forecer.
All the
visitors were grimly enjoying themselves eating mediocre food under umbrellas
as it continued to rain.
I actually enjoyed myself a lot while eating the mediocre food under an
umbrella. Today was a good day all in all. The mixed weather is
now something I can cope with. Legs feel good and, now I'm out of the
endless plains of Germany, there's a lot more to see and enjoy.
Tomorrow I get up early, negotiate breakfast with singsong lady and then
head to the ferry which is about 8km from here. I have no ticket and
absolutely no idea how to get on the ferry with my bike but I'm going to
assume I can work it out. Then it's my first day in Denmark.
Country four. Not bad.
- Distance: 158km 🙂 — Less than planned but enough
- Climbing: 948m 😢 — This really felt like a hilly day. Hard work
- Undercarriage: 🙂 — Everything…”down there”…seemed to be fine.
- Route: 😕 — Quite tricky in places and a lot of rolling countryside.
- Body: 😔 - Still no improvement in the fingers and a new appearance from my right ankle which is ominously aching at times.
- Bike: 😔 — I lost my chain lube (of which more below).
Day 7: Fehmarn to Køge
Today was a good day.
Before starting on today, I thought I would raise the subject of…the bean.
Readers of my daily posts from last year's trip from Cambridge to Warsaw will remember “the bean”. It was a rich vein of amusement for readers and a bottomless pit of despair for me. It wobbled, it caught the wind, it finally broke somewhere in the middle of Poland hundreds of kilometres from the nearest bike shop. It was, in summary, a complete effing disaster.
The Bean is a way of carrying your kit in a bean-shaped protuberance attached to the back of your saddle. It looks a lot cooler than dorky panniers and has the added benefits of being aero and not being too big — which focuses the mind when it comes to choosing what to take. However, as I found last year, a badly designed and badly manufactured bean is The Bean of Doom, the Bean of Misery, the Bean of Desolation, the Bean of Hate.
Enter…The Bean of Happiness, the Bean of Love, the Bean of Joy…I'm not really sure about this but I'm just going to go with it…
The bean of joy
I had come across a firm in Yorkshire called Restrap which makes bike bags by hand. They've got a really nice back story and their stuff is fabulously made. You can tell that proper thought has gone into how to design packs for bikes which actually work. If you ever need anything like this (beans, handlebar bags, frame bags etc), just buy them from Restrap. I have three other bags from them and they're superb.
Anyway, the Bean of Happiness has performed perfectly over the past 7 days. Although there's a resonant frequency which sometimes appears if I'm grinding up a hill at a low cadence out of the saddle, almost all of the time it's completely solid and doesn't wobble at all. As you may be able to see from the photograph, it comes in two parts. A sort of “holster” affair which remains on the bike and a waterproof stuffsack for your stuff. The waterproofing has been sorely tested over the past few days and absolutely everything is dry. Buy a bean from Restrap and you won't regret it.
On to today. I woke up early and decided to skip the Hotel
Hasselbarth breakfast and leave at 7am. It didn't look like a long day
but I had to navigate the ferry terminal and I really didn't know how long
that would take or even how frequently the ferries went.
As I asked the scary and brooding handyman — who bore a passing
resemblance to Lurch from the Addams Family — to get my bike from the garage,
the singsong lady came running out of her bulletproof plexiglass booth and
was very insistent I had to pay for my room. I
smiled indulgently and gently pointed
out that she'd made a big deal about me paying yesterday and I'd paid
yesterday. But she was convinced I hadn't and didn't appear willing to
check her filing system — which consisted of a tottering pile of papers. The
general factotum guy loomed in the background and boomed the immortal words
“No Pay No Bike”. It was a tense stand-off.
Then I remembered that I'd stuffed the laboriously hand written receipt that
she'd given me last night in the back pocket of my horrid Angela Merkel
trousers. With a huge sigh, I completely unpacked the Bean of Love,
found the trousers — at the bottom of the bag obviously — and handed over the
wrinkled and stained receipt. Suddenly everybody was sweetness and
light. My bike appeared and the singsong lady wished me well.
At this point I feel it's necessary to point out that I was the
only guest at the Hotel. One would have thought that they might
have remembered the 10 minute omnishambles of trying to get the payment
machine to work last night. It's not like they're running a giant inner city
hotel with hundreds of guests which change on a daily basis. Did I just blend
into the background amongst all the other middle-aged baldy white dudes who
arrived on a bike? There's a great but dark and disturbing short story
or film based around the Hotel Hasselbarth. Oh well, I doubt I'll be
going back.
It was only 10 km to the ferry terminal. There was literally nobody around
so I bought a ticket and took my bike along the passenger gangway.
Nice looking bean you've got there Herr Doctor Doctor Kirk
Somewhere here there's a way of buying a ticket
I met some bikey people
Some lorries ‘n' stuff.
The
pushmi-pullyu
of ships.
Familiar…yet different
This is a nice day
Hundreds and hundreds of these
Surprisingly disturbing
The new broen
As the km ticked away, I noticed a slight issue with the route and
with Denmark in general. The route was picturesque, rural but
not smelling of dung and quiet but it didn't go through any major
towns and, as far as I could see from the little villages, Denmark
was…shut.
When you hit a new country, it takes a while to work out the urban and
peri-urban geography. Where are the garages? Where are the
coffee shops? Where are the bakeries? I'd worked it out
very well in Germany and knew exactly which side roads would have a
coffee shop on them in a small town. Here in Denmark there was
nothing. I wasn't too hungry or thirsty but I was getting a
little worried.
After the bridge I was… 🎶woah woah more than half way there🎶 so it
was time for the traditional 🎶half way there🎶 stop. The route
skirted a town called Vordingborg so I decided to do a bit of
off-piste cycling and try to work out where Vordingborg high street
was. It took a while but eventually I found the linear
misery-fest of the high street. Barbers, vape and charity
shops just like any benighted market town in Lincolnshire but right
at the end there was a nice cafe. There had been other cafes but
they looked like you would have to win a cage fight with the scary
guys outside before getting served.
I'd forgotten to charge my power meter on the bike for the
past four days and so it had died sometime mid-morning. I got a
power socket in the cafe and ordered some food because it had been a
long time since my “Danish Pastry Special with Coffee” on the ferry.
There wasn't a lot of choice. It was either a burger and
chips or a burger which had had a lot of random shit thrown on it…and
chips.
It was surprisingly good
With all my bike bits fully charged and my stomach fully fuelled — and
burping slightly — I set off for the second half of the day.
The route elevation profile had indicated a distinct spikyness to the
second half of the day. It wasn't lying. None of the hills
were long but there were some sections of 10% gradients which do
require a bit of heroic heaving of the bike to get up. As long
as the heaving didn't hit the Bean of Love's resonant frequency, I
ground it out fairly well.
I did run out of water which looked like it was going to be a problem
since, as I have mentioned before, Denmark was shut. With 30 km to
go, I found an open “Pizza and Doner Kebab” joint which was open. It
was the hangout for the all local neds who owned badly pimped Fiat
Puntos but the long-suffering owner sold me a bottle of coke and I
rehydrated.
The glamour of long distance cycling
It's a long way from the Andes to here.
Yes, it's a thrill a minute.
Finally the road looped down into Køge and, after a tiresome interaction
with the cobbled streets and squares, I found the hotel.
The hotel was another one of these funky ones in which the human presence
has been removed. I got an email from the owners giving me a code
which allowed me to open a safe deposit box and get my key. I had
splashed out and have the one room in the hotel which doesn't have a
“shared bathroom” and looking at the shared bathroom, that extra
€20 was a pretty good investment. For
future days, I'm going to book international chain hotels. They
might be boring but at least there's a bloke on the desk that you can
complain to about the non-heated towel rail…
There was only one place open for food in Køge. It was pretty odd but
it had food and it had wine and that's about all I needed.
A burger antidote.
Given my unplanned rest day in Hamburg, I'm a day behind my very rough
plan to get to Stockholm next Thursday. I'm going to have to do a
few of big days if I'm going to hit Stockholm on time. Tomorrow I
need to get to Sweden and about half way up the coast from Malmö to
Gothenburg. Looks like it's 180km and a ferry ride so it's going to
be a very long day and my right ankle is really screwed up. Hope it
fixes itself overnight.
- Distance: 147km 🙂 — Definitely an easier day and some of it I floated over.
- Climbing: 788m 😢 — My Garmin said 350m before I started. It was more than expected.
- Undercarriage: 🙂 — This is a relief
- Route: 🙂 — Ships, bridges, interesting countryside.
- Hands and other parts of the body: 😔 — Ankle causing a lot of problems…
- Bike: 🙂 — Excellent performance except having to charge my power meter over lunch.
Day 8: Køge to Halmstad
The advantage of the Centralhotellet in Køge is embedded in the name.
It's central and therefore close to the one restaurant which was open.
The disadvantage is that the refuse lorries grind and groan round the
central square at 5.30am in the morning right outside one's window. Therefore,
whether or not I had wanted an early start, that's what I'd got.
There was a coffee machine downstairs and when I went down at 6am I saw the
only other human I had seen in the Centralhotellet. I'm not entirely
sure whether or not he was a guest or a homeless person who had broken in
during the night but we gamely nodded at each other, drank coffee and I
retrieved my bike from the kitchen. The photograph below is absolutely
everywhere in the Centralhotellet and, trust me, as I left, four
women didn't come out to wave me good bye. The homeless person didn't
even wave me off.
These women do not exist. Maybe nobody exists at the
Centralhotellet.
Unwaved off, I started out on the 40 km from Køge to Copenhagen. It was
pan flat but due to a rainstorm overnight, everything was damp and slippy.
Soon after I left, I passed through a major milestone (or kilometre
stone). 1000 km since I left Cambridge. Hurrah for me and my indomitable legs.
Some guy better dressed for the weather than me.
It pretty much looked like that picture all the way. A
great but wet cycle path running alongside a dual carriageway.
As I reached the outskirts of Køge, I saw some adverts for the “Flying
Superkids”. Not just some adverts, adverts on every single lamp post.
They're kids. They're super. And they FLY!
They're still kids, they're still super and they still FLY
All of a sudden, Copenhagen started and I had to banish my musings on Flying
Superkids from my brain because big cities require Maximum Effort.
There's a lot of cars, there are confusing junctions, there are
a lot of other cyclists coming zooming past you or that you're
zooming past. Between towns you can zone out and just turn your legs.
In cities, zoning out will get you killed.
The only photo I took in Copenhagen
There hadn't been any breakfast in the Centralhotellet — or maybe the homeless
guy had woolfed it all down before I arrived. Anyway, I was now 50 km into the
day and I hadn't had anything to eat. On the way out of Copenhagen I had
a sudden desire for something familiar, well known, something that wasn't just
complex and difficult to order. I focused on McDonalds. I really
really really wanted McDonalds. This was a serious tactical error because I
cycled past places which would be able to serve me carbohydrates and coffee
but I was focused on McDonalds. You would think that a major European
capital city would have McDonalds everywhere. Nope. I did see one
in the middle of a vast big box shopping park but unfortunately it was on the
other side of an 8 lane motorway and my Garmin told me that it would be a 5 km
detour to get there. I can live without McDonalds to save my legs an
extra 5 km.
I got something in a chic little cafe in some nameless town where some bloke
hit me on the back and shouted at me for crossing the road on the zebra
crossing rather than the bike path. Quite surprisingly, he shouted at me
in English. Did I look English? Were all the cyclists in no-name-town
English? I dunno but the advantage of him obviously speaking English was that
he definitely understood my richly inventive invective about him and his
mother. There's nothing quite like swearing in your native language.
Then it was more bike paths, more traffic lights and then, without warning, I
was at the sea.
I'm at the sea.
Ooo another ferry. Exciting.
This ferry is very similar to the one I took from Germany to Denmark.
Double bowed, roll on roll off, just a moving bridge really.
That's Sweden over there.
The ferry is so efficient that the open the front door while the boat is still
moving. Here's a video of this surprisingly balsy move from the captain.
Why doesn't it sink?
My first mistake was unfastening the back of the Bean of Joy to get my
waterproof out but I forgot to do it back up again. As I cycled
off the boat first, the strap from the Bean of Joy got caught in the rear wheel of
the bike, it stopped, skidded on the metal deck and I ended up on my arse.
In front of two cyclists, four motorcyclists, 30 lorry drivers and about
200 car drivers. It was not one of my best moments. Of course, it
goes without saying the the two cyclists were pretty Danish women…if you're
going to humiliate yourself, go all in.
The rear strap of the Bean of Happiness was now covered in chain lube which
had been on the bike for the past 8 days and sorting out the strap got a fair
amount of that filthy chain lube all over my hands and subsequently all over
the handlebars and brake hoods. I finally got everything sorted out and
headed into Helsinborg and immediately hit an 8% hill out of town. It
was sunny and hot and the hill was brutal. The ankle was really sore on
the hill and I started trying to only cycle with one leg. I'll look like
a fiddler crab by the time I get to Stockholm. Also, there's something
weird going on with my triceps. It's like I've pulled a muscle.
This bit was no fun.
As soon as I'd hit the plateau, it got really dark and then the heavens
opened. I stopped to take out my raincoat and once again forgot to do up
the Bean of Love's strap properly so the whole bean fell out in the
middle of a junction as I was crossing which meant I had to run out in
front of the huge articulated lorries trying to retrieve the bean. To be
clear, this was not the bean's fault. It was purely operator error.
The rain was pouring down, I was soaked and everything was grim.
Welcome to bloody Sweden
Oh yes, this was really very unpleasant. Here is a selfie of me thinking
“this is really very unpleasant”.
Even my stupid hat is squint. That's how bad this was.
Eventually, I just gave up in the rain and stopped at a Burger King for a
coffee. Unfortunately, this was a
Burger King with a floor which was exceptionally slippy in the
wet and consequently I went over on my arse again. This time in front of scores of
impossibly blonde mothers with their impossibly blonde kids. It took an extraordinary
amount of time to produce a single black coffee but I wasn't complaining since
it was dry and I could cope with the mothers and their kids snickering behind
my back about the dirty wet man with the funny clothes on.
Eventually the storm abated and I got gingerly back on the bike — falling on
your arse twice in one day tends to make one's arse a bit tender. It was
75k to Halmstad and I was just going to have to grind it out. Although the sun
eventually came out, it took me a long time to dry out. I was soaked
although the single benefit of the rainstorm was that it cleaned my hands and
bike of all the filthy chain lube.
A lot of Sweden looks like this…
…and sometimes you get prototypically Swedish stuff like this.
I had noticed a bit of a spike in the elevation profile around about 150km
into the route and, yes, it was the only hill in Southern Sweden. Not
a huge hill but 6km at 4% really saps your strength. As I ground up
the hill, I remembered that I had a work call I had to do at 3pm and so I
stopped near the top at a nice picnic area and set up for a call.
Welcome to my office
A combo bar, cafe and estate agent.
The Kattegattleden wound its way through the coastal forests which was both
pretty and also a bit of a relief after all the coffee I'd been drinking.
I never thought I would look back fondly at the endless forested roads
of Germany.
Hurrah! Trees!
The last few km were tough. Halmstad was hard to navigate, I was tired
and the sky was looking ominous. However, eventually I got to the hotel.
For this evening I had chosen the Best Western Plus Grand Hotel on the basis
that it couldn't be terrible. After a little bit of a stand-off about
taking my bike to the room (“is it clean?” “I have ridden it through a
rainstorm…it's clean”) I got into my minuscule room which has a minuscule
bathroom without a heated towel rail…<sigh>.
However, unlike the Centralhotellet it has humans working here and I've been
served a couple of beers and a bit of food by some smiling actual humans who
don't appear to be homeless so it's maybe not all bad. To be fair, there
isn't much of a choice in Halmstad and I don't really need much apart from
beer, food and somewhere to sleep. A heated towel rail would be nice
though. I forecast a moist morning tomorrow.
Tomorrow I will follow the Kattegattleden all the way to Gothenburg.
It's 150k and I think I can make that if (a) the weather is good and (b)
I have the prize of a rest day to look forward to. I've been planning
ahead. If I have a rest day on Saturday, I have Sunday to Thursday
inclusive to make it from Gothenburg to Stockholm. The route across
Sweden isn't very well served for towns. It is only about 600km but I'm
going to have to plan the five days carefully. To (mis)quote Mark Watney
“I'm going to have to geography the shit out of this”.
- Distance: 176km 😢 — This was a long day
- Climbing: 941m 😢 — I found the only hill between Copenhagen and Gothenburg
- Undercarriage: 🙂 — Most feeling seems to have gone which is not really ideal.
- Route: 🙂 — Apart from the hill, a lot of nice stuff today.
- Body: 😔 — The ankle continues to play up and I appear to have pulled a muscle in my tricep. WTF?
- Bike: 😔😔 — A few operator errors today
Day 9: Helmstad to Göteburg
Nothing amusing or scary happened today but it was very tiring.
I saw this sign on the journey today and, although it's just a meaningless
collection of syllables like Walthamstow or Cumbernauld, it felt onomatopoeic.
Yeah, I feel like this.
The weather looked like it might not rain which is, in the long
distance cyclists book, a big win. The wind was more of a problem
since it was whistling in from the
Kattegat
in the west at a good 30km/h clip. Since I was supposed to be heading broadly
north, I thought this might not be too much of a problem but most of the early
part of the day actually involved going west into the teeth of the wind.
My average speed for the first hour was less than 16 kph. I was
skäggered.
Helmstad did have a surprise on the way out. Here was the saddest water
park on Earth. Called “Pirates of the Caribbean” — presumably Disney's
lawyers haven't been to Helmstad yet — it was windswept and soulless.
Admittedly, all water parks suffer from the sneaking suspicion that
you're sliding down slides lubricated by other people's urine but I
suppose one could overlook that in the bright Mediterranean sun. On a
wild windswept 10 degrees day in Helmstad, it must be hard to suspend one's
revulsion.
Hey kids, lets go the freezing cold wee slide.
This way
You can't see in a photograph but this beautiful road goes west. Into the
wind.
I bailed out for the first coffee of the day at 20km. That's how
skäggered I was.
Then the route veered north and the wind slowly backed towards the south.
For the very few boat people who read this, I got the directions or
veering and backing correct…
Sweden, like Denmark appears to be shut a lot of the time. Towns would
come and go without coffee stops or even garages which had shops attached.
The next 50km were a lot of this.
Mmm nice if the wind was behind
Mmm…wooded paths
This is a “flaggy” shaped Swedish flag
But most of the houses have these “pennanty” shaped flags
When you're hungry and skäggared, you muse on this and do some research
while you're cowering from the wind in the traditional bus shelter.
And…it turns out it really is a proper Nordic “thing”. Check
out this article from Wikipedia about
Household Pennants. You'll be a
lot more bored than I was but when you've seen hundreds of
these things, it sticks in your mind.
For what it's worth, those pennants above are actually
wrong because household pennants in Sweden are actually regulated
by the government —
I can almost hear my American readers having a stroke…
This is the government approved pennant.
80km came and went. I was 🎶woah woah, more than half way there🎶 but
I hadn't eaten for a long time and my caffeine levels were dangerously low.
Then, as I was rolling through another medium sized town in Sweden
without coffee shops or snack bars, I spied this.
Doesn't look like much? Let me zoom in.
Easy ordering of bland and familiar calories ahead
I'm lovin' it…don't judge me
The road continued to be mostly north and the wind continued to be
mostly behind me. Unfortunately, the Kattegattleden started to
wiggle wildly and pointlessly so I ended up on the roads. While it
is true that almost all Swedish drivers are pretty considerate and so
most of the time spent on the fast cycle-path-free A roads wasn't too
scary, there are always a few drivers who go past at 100kph a few
centimetres from you and your bean. Some of the scenery was worth
it though.
Wild cycling
And really it was just another 75km of cycling from there.
Sometimes on roads but increasingly as I got closer to Göteburg on
pretty decent if poorly connected cycling paths.
I normally like to stop with about 30km to go to load up on a bit of
caffeine and some sugar to get through the last bit. But, as I
may have already mentioned, Sweden is shut and there was nothing to do
but continue to grind on.
Strangely, there wasn't really any sign of Göteburg actually existing
until I was about 5km from the centre. Almost without warning, I
was thrown into the killing ground of major city traffic while
extremely skäggered.
Maximum effort
There was a lot of this
This is only about 2km from the centre
A combination of the Garmin and the Google Maps lady in my headphones
directed to the other side of the road from my hotel. Unfortunately
my joy at completing today's route was somewhat dampened by forgetting
about things like kerbs, balance and sharp pedals. So I have a gash
in my calf to add to my woes.
I'm sure it'll fix itself over the next couple of days.
I'm wrote this in the very swanky hotel bar. The waitress had shown
me to a quiet darkened table in a dark corner of the bar which was fair.
I didn't think wrinkly
t-shirt, stained polyester Angela Merkel pants, 9 days worth of stubble and
a slight hint of madness was really the vibe she's hoping for for her swanky
bar.
Early night tonight and then a day exploring Göteburg and working out the
final few days of cycling routes. Hopefully less skäggered after the
rest day.
- Distance: 158km 😐 — Shorter day than recently but felt amazingly long
- Climbing: 797m 😢 — The Garmin said 350m of climbing before I left. Ugh.
- Route: 😕 — Variable. Some majestic beauty, some long stretches on busy scary roads.
- Body: 😔 — Ankle has responded to just cycling on it by not getting much worse which is a win for the “stubborn middle aged man” approach to injury. A surprise new appearance for “a gash in the calf” due to operator error.
- Bike: 🙂 — Faultless performance by the Bat Bike™ today.
Day 10: Gothenburg
Author's note: I've decided to use the xenonym Gothenburg in this post rather than the endonym Göteburg. Why? Partly because it's easier to type and also partly to show off that I actually know these words. It's like Turin/Torino or Cologne/Köln or China/中国. They're called toponyms (which is another word I bet you didn't know). I'm also doing it because I'm an absolute freak for getting the ørthögråphy of a language correct but typing the “ö” takes longer.
Today was a rest day in Gothenburg. I had a nice lie in, a restrained breakfast and then headed out to do some “stuff” in Gothenburg. It's a big city and there's a lot to see and therefore, like always, I used Atlas Obscura to find some things to see. I really recommend it if you've got a limited amount of time to in a city and want to see some unusual things.
First up was downloading the various apps which allow you to use the buses and trams. This is always a bit annoying but I got my $10 all day pass on the bus and headed out to the Liseberg amusement park. I hadn't heard about it before and I thought “what better to do on a rest day but go to an amusement park as a solo middle-aged bloke”.
Let's go…
Geeks know how to have fun
Really? “Crazy Horses Weeee weeeeee” vs
Anyway, there was no more time for musing on stars on the pavements because
the gate opened bang on 10am and I rushed in with the families and teenagers.
First up was
Balder
a completely wooden roller coaster with a single drop. (Note that most of
the links to the rides will end up at a video of what it's like on the
ride).
I had always thought that wooden roller coasters would be a bit tame.
It was terrifying. 90km/h with lots of sections of zero g.
However, it was a bit relief to be going up and down hills without
being on a wobbly bike.
I know this is safe but it doesn't look it.
Then I did the
Valkyria and I really recommend
clicking on that link and watching the POV
video. It gives a good feel for it except you're missing the being
upside down and in a zero-g roll. Helix
was next and, to be honest, this was the most terrifying. Lots of
zero-g sections, maximum g-force in the corners of 4.3g. Whilst this
isn't quite fast-jet levels, it is physically quite a shock.
Liseberg has a great system involving an app — colour me shocked — where you
can virtually queue. You start “queuing” for the next ride while
you're doing one ride and so you just walk on the next one. This meant
that in two hours I hadn't queued once and done pretty much all the rides
that were designed for grownups. Sitting on my own on the
Tuta and Kör
with a bunch of four year olds would not have been a good look.
Next on the list was the
Volvo Museum. It seemed to be a little
out of town so I got my Gothenburg public
transport app out and planned a journey.
I love trams. Especially vintage ones.
The bus wound its way through Gothenburg stopping every 500m or so. The app
said that it would be 12 stops so I thought I'd be there quickly.
However, then the bus got onto the motorway and started whizzing
along. We crossed the river and continued to go through what appeared
to be countryside.
Now, here is an important Gothenburg travel tip. Outside the city
centre, the bus only stops if you press the stop button before the stop and
if you don't, the bus goes sailing past your stop. Don't make the
mistake I made.
By the time I'd worked this out, I was about 5km beyond where I needed to
change to another bus.
A motorway and a bridge. That's all.
They call Gothenburg the Grangemouth of the north.
I trudged wearily in my terrible lightweight shoes. I took photographs
even though there were lots of signs warning me not to take photographs.
Here's a selection.
The complete lack of pavements was a feature
Still no pavements
Don't take photographs of the Don't Take Photographs sign
Look a pavement. And a railway track.
Sanctuary!
A really old boat engine
The first 23hp engine that powered most Volvo cars and lorries until
1939
They made aircraft engines
I do now
There's something very grand about these cars.
This is actually Sir Roger Moore's car. He donated it.
Trucks, race cars and, upper right, jet planes: Volvo make jet
engines.
I didn't realise that the whole of the mechanical gubbins
in a bus is contained in the chassis.
And, of course, a full sized Volvo XC90 made of Lego™.
Ok, I admit it, the Volvo Museum wasn't fantastic. Mildly interesting in
places. Given the amount of effort to get there it was a long run for a
short slide. If you're in Gothenburg and you've got a car (a Volvo for
example) and you've got a couple of hours to waste then…sure, why not go?
As I walked out I saw a sign saying that the next bus back to central
Gothenburg was two hours in the future so I gave up on the public
transport and ordered an Uber.
I spent some time in the centre of Gothenburg wandering around streets like
this
A lot of it looks like this. Clean but quiet.
The obligatory architectural photograph.
Canals. They call Venice the “Gothenburg of the South”
By the time I got back it was time for a quick snooze and then I geographied
the shit out of the next five days. I've got to be in Stockholm by
mid-afternoon on Thursday and the distribution of towns large enough to have
hotels between here and Stockholm isn't very helpful. I'd like to
average about 120km a day but on my first attempt on routing left me with
the choice between a 65km day or a 210km day. Back to the drawing board…
I eventually got something planned which looked like it would work. In a
departure from my standard operating procedure, I booked all the hotels
so all I needed to do was to turn my legs for the next 5 days and I would be
done.
One of the joys of these trips is going out and randomly picking a
restaurant. There was a Mexican fusion restaurant reasonably close to
the hotel called Puta Madre. I assumed they knew that this means
“motherfucker” in Spanish. Anyway, it was hip and cool. The food
was interesting and the other patrons were having a lovely time despite the
brain-numbingly annoying music.
And now…I'm back in the hotel bar writing this.
This is a strangely recursive photograph
Day 11: Gothenburg to Linköping
Ok, today wasn't a good day.
I had to put my “angry eyes” on this morning to get the hotel to find my cycle
kit but once I'd pointed out the cognitive dissonance involved in paying their
(large) bill and them not being able to find three bits of clothing they had
intended to wash 2 days ago, the manager swept in from his palatial office and
service droids were dispatched far and wide. At least Gothenburg didn't
have to suffer a naked man cycling through its suburbs on a Sunday morning.
The route out of Gothenburg cut north through the suburbs and industrial
parks.
This view would become very familiar
On and on and on
According to my Garmin this was a pretty flat day but it lied. There
were long energy sapping 3% and 4% hills and those combined with the wind had
my average speed below 20km/h for the morning. A day which had looked
like a nice easy 140km was starting to look a lot more challenging.
In four hours, the most fun I had was coming across some unexpected roadworks
and having to carry the bike to the other side.
Fun fun fun fun
Look ma! A lake.
Fields, farms, uphill roads and the ever-present wind.
According to the duplicitous Garmin, I had already used 2000 calories by 1pm
and I'd eaten and drank precisely nothing since breakfast at 7am. Whilst
I didn't feel hungry, I didn't think this was going to turn out well.
I stopped in a bus shelter — Swedish bus shelters are my friends right now
because they're out of the wind and they have a little wooden seat which you
can perch on — and checked out the rest of the route. It seemed to go
through many many places but I suspected they were all like Åssgörd so I had
to do something to get food on board.
10km detour? Hmmm.
One of the problems with zooming through a country on a bike is you have no
time to work out the urban geography and iconography for each country.
In the past, I had stopped at something that I thought was a cafe and
turned out to be a furniture store. I had turned down a street thinking
“This should be where the cafes are” only to find out that it was where the
vape stores were.
Once again, Google Maps helped me out. I think that reliable mapping,
geographic search and routing on a device that you carry around in your pocket
is the great unsung advance of the Information Age.
I found the Royal Cafe
Look ma! An open café.
The Royal Cafe was a little…restricted in its choice so I settled for a coffee
and a brownie cake.
This slice of cake is your 2000 calories in one single shot.
The first half of the day was pretty miserable to be honest. But I had another
60km to get to my destination of Linköping. How bad could it be?
Just 60km of this to go.
Well, pretty bad is the answer. Almost as soon as I left Trollhättan, it started raining.
Remember the wind I mentioned earlier? Well it hadn't stopped but
now it was not just blowing air in my face at 20km/h it was blowing rain into
my face at 20km/h.
The view from one of the many bus shelters I sheltered in.
The kilometres just didn't go down very fast. Even my super expensive
Hamburg-sourced rain jacket started to wilt and fail under the onslaught of
the Swedish wind and rain.
False cognates
I stopped in a rather beautiful church — many of the Åssgörd sized towns have
really stunning little churches — sat in the porch, took off my shoes, emptied
the water out of them and wrung out my socks.
Sorry about the sock water imaginary sky being.
Finally, finally, finally, 2.5 hours later than I had expected, I got to
Lidköping — which is run down in the way that only Scandinavian towns can be
run down. It isn't Cumbernauld or Skegness…it's just…a bit tired and
out of the way.
I picked my way through the rustically cobbled central streets
(oh…great…cobbles) and got to the hotel. It's not fantastic but there's a
heated towel rail which is a plus. I had a very long very hot shower, an
hour under both duvets to heat up and then thought about food.
It turned out there were two open restaurants in Lidköping on a Sunday night.
One is a pizza place next door to the hotel and one is 1km away.
It's raining like this and my raincoat is drying.
It's an easy choice. Weirdly, pizza might be the national dish of Sweden.
Any town of a sufficiently large size (i.e. larger than Åssgörd) has a dodgy
looking pizza place. However, much to my surprise, the food and wine here
is superb. It's rammed with people eating excellent Italian food. I
have Italian family and, trust me, I know what makes a good pizza and
the Pizza Diavoli I have just eaten was superb.
A lot of pain during the day is partially wiped out by a pizza of this
quality.
I didn't have much to think about today (false cognates and kids chalking the classic cartoon of the male genitals on the cycleways were the only bright spots). But I did think about the Swedish and Danish languages. Throughout Denmark and Sweden, my opening gambit of “I'm terribly sorry but I speak no Danish/Swedish” has never ended up with a lack of communication. Everybody speaks English. In Gothenburg, the bookstores have more English language titles in the window than Swedish titles.
I am reminded of that right now because the couple next to me (60ish man and woman) in the restaurant are Danish and the waitress (a 60ish Swedish woman) is speaking English to them and they're speaking it back because it's easier. In bars, restaurants, cafes, you hear a lot of people speaking English by default. I just don't think that the Swedes or Danes are bloody minded enough (like the French) to keep their language alive and they clearly don't have the huge international weight of Spanish to keep the language alive. It's a shame to lose languages but I wouldn't be surprised if 50 years from now Swedish and Danish (and presumably Norwegian) are sort of like Gaelic today.
So that was today. It's not all rolling through the flat Dutch fields
on great cycle infrastructure with the wind at your back. Also, not
every day has something funny or scary in it. Some days are just a
long hard grind which reminds you why this is a challenge, not a holiday.
I've done a bit of rethinking about my routes. Tomorrow is supposed to be a
short 100km day. The weather app says that the rain will stop at 10am so
maybe I'll leave late. Unsurprisingly, the wind is directly in my face yet
again. Joy.
- Distance: 158km 😢 — Long and mostly unpleasant
- Climbing: 986m 😢 — Garmin lies. It said 488m before I left.
- Route: 😕 — A lot of Sweden is pretty boring.
- Body: 😔 — Aches and pains appearing in random places.
- Bike: 😢 — A slightly worrying creak coming from the bottom bracket but still holding up.
Day 12: Lidköping all day (unexpectedly)
I was supposed to be cycling from Lidköping to Forsvik today but when I got up, this was the view from my hotel window.
Oh shit
It was an easy win for discretion over valour and so I decided to stay in
Lidköping today and work out what to do. One missed day in the route
plan was going to cause a lot of knock on effects. There's no way I
can cycle from here to Stockholm in three days and tomorrow looks pretty bad
in terms of rain too.
I spent most of the morning attempting to navigate the Swedish trains
website. We think that the train timetables and booking system is
complex in the UK…hah! It's a lot worse in Sweden. Eventually I had to
go down to the tourist office in the central square and ask a lovely lady to
help me. I think it was a bit of a trial for her because I didn't
really know where I wanted to go without trying to work out what
I would do if I ended up being stuck there if the biblical downpour weather
continued until Wednesday.
It was all very trying and maybe more so for her to be honest. The tourist
lady's smile became a bit more insincere when I realised that the Swedish
trains website is somewhat…vague…about whether or not bikes are allowed on
trains. Maybe some of them? Maybe you have to have your bike
disassembled in a bag on others?
The tourist office is one of the nicest buildings in Linköping.
An hour later, in the face of the lovely tourist lady's fixed and glassy
smile, I clicked a button on the website and I maybe have a ticket for train
journey from Lidköping to Norrköping. It involves three different
trains and one of them probably/possibly/whoknows might not take bikes.
Why Norrköping? Because if all weather hell breaks loose then I can
probably/possibly/whoknows get to Stockholm by train.
Now there was another hour of cancelling and rebooking hotels on
booking.com. Very sadly, I won't be going to Linköping — it is
amazingly confusing that I'm in Lidköping and the place I wanted to get to
was Linköping. When I saw this
hotel
come up in Linköping, I had to book it. I was looking forward to herds
of wildebeest etc etc.
As an aside, booking.com has been an absolute godsend. Find hotels easily, almost always got availability even 24 hours ahead, cancel up to 12 noon on the day of arrival. Alongside high accuracy mapping and routing in your pocket, booking.com makes a trip like this possible. Without it I'd be reduced to arriving in some town and hoping that the hotels had a room.
That was the first four hours of the day taken care of. What to do for
the rest of the day?
Well, I have noticed that practically every second commercial establishment
in medium sized Swedish towns is a hairdresser or barber. Since I had
time, I thought I would try to not look quite as much like a homeless person
by having a quick shave. Obviously this wouldn't do anything about the
homeless person trousers, shoes and t-shirt but maybe I could aspire to
being a freshly shaved homeless person.
I forgot to smile
It had finally stopped raining so I set out to explore the delights of
Lidköping.
The majestic grain silos
“Walk out on the pier” the tourist lady told me.
Looking back from the pier at the industrial splendour.
The bustling commercial heart of Lidköping
Not exactly the Met in New York.
This is a phone box. No really.
No, makes no sense to me either.
Here is some random stuff vaguely associated with boats.
Fish in a tank
This is kitchen stuff. From the past!
There is the obligatory “science” section which is…superficial. I
learned more from the Wikipedia article.
To be fair to the Vänern Museum, the staff there are disconcertingly
enthusiastic about it and they've made a lot out of not very promising
material. It's cute but a bit unsatisfying. It's also much
further out from the centre of town than I expected so it was a long
dispiriting trudge back to the hotel.
It's been a bit of a stressful day sorting everything out. One
thing that is great about a cycling trip like this is that one is
generally in complete control. As long as you get on the bike in
the morning and turn your legs for long enough, you get to where
you're going. Now I'm dependent on the trains running on time —
the Swedish train system is sending me increasingly strident texts in
Swedish and English asking me to check the trains (all three of them)
in case they are rescheduled or cancelled. Having three tightly
interlocking train bookings makes it all a bit more sketchy.
Even if there's only a 20% chance that a train is cancelled
tomorrow, my chances of being stuck in some town is nearly 50/50.
Something to look forward to. Maybe they'll have a hat
museum too…
Day 13: Lidköping to Norrköping (But not by bike)
In the comments on yesterday's blog, Robert pointed me to a great article in the Economist (which I had missed) on the Dutch, Norwegians and Swedish trying to reclaim their language especially in the scientific sphere. It's a nice idea but they're doomed to failure. There was a time 100 years ago where non-English words could make it in technical fields (bremsstrahlung, eigenvector for example) but the dominance of the USA in science means those days are gone. The language of STEM is English and so, in many ways, it's the language of the future and even more so with the importance of computer science.
The difficult problem comes when you consider languages like Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese or (maybe) Chinese. These are in no sense “minority” languages. Many of them have more native speakers than English. However the corpus of technical language in each of these is dwarfed by the English corpus. Who cares? Well…Generative Pre-trained Transformers like ChatGPT “learn” from the (internet) corpus of text which is out there already. If a Spanish person asks a technical question of ChatGPT, the amount of Spanish input to the large language model is much much much smaller. Their answers will be fundamentally different (and probably worse) than an English speaker. Which is — or should be recognised as — a problem for the majority of the world's population.
This feels like a bit of a heavy topic for a lighthearted blog about cycling so I'll leave it there.
In yesterday's post, I calculated that because I had 3 trains to get and if each of them only had a 20% chance of being cancelled, I had a better than evens chance of something going wrong. Well…
I woke to a text from sj.se informing me that my very first train (Lidköping to Laxö) had been cancelled due to bad weather. However, there was — and this phrase strikes terror into the heart of any regular commuter in the UK — a replacement bus service. Oh well, it wasn't ideal but hey ho.
I turned up at the station in time for my replacement bus only to be told by the bus driver that he wasn't going to take my bike. “Not in bus, not in luggage compartment, nei nei nei.”. Right. I phoned the helpline number for Swedish trains and after some patience sapping waiting, I got through to a customer service representative. I explained my plight to her and she said I had to hold and then came back 5 minutes later said “Sorry no bikes on replacement busses so I guess you're screwed”. Sometimes non-native speakers use colloquial English terms in exactly the wrong situation.
Exciting and lovely though Lidköping is, I was really keen to get out of there. I cycled back over to the Tourist Office and the lovely Tourist Office woman gamely attempted to look happy to see me. I explained my predicament and we agreed the only solution was a taxi to Hallsberg. She phoned the local taxi company who flatly refused to take a bike. Thanks Lidköping Taxis!
I've spent a lot of time in this place
After 30 minutes of calling, she found a taxi company but said it would cost
£500 to go to Hallsberg. Given that it a 130km trip (about 80 miles)
that seemed extraordinarily expensive but I really was screwed as the
woman from Swedish Trains said. So I said yes, the taxi was booked and I
had an hour to wait for it to turn up…from the next town 10km away.
The bloke turned up and I managed to negotiate the price down to £300 and I
deconstructed the bike and got it in the back of the car.
The bat bike finally going somewhere.
Three hours driving, £100 an hour, not bad.
The first order of business was to buy yet another ticket for a Swedish
train. Of course, there's no ticket office, nobody to talk to, no
sensible information. I collared a conductor on a different train,
explained my plight and he assured me that I could take a bike
on the Hallsberg to Norrköping train and I could get a ticket in the
little convenience store inside the station.
As I was buying my ticket and asking for the tenth time whether or not
the train would go on time and would allow me to take my bike, I spied
some of the worst looking food I had seen in a while.
You'd have to be mad to eat this stuff.
“What's a thing that's going to put our town on the map?”
“Pipes Bjorn, pipes”
Cycling around I had the choice of the traditional dodgy looking pizza
place…
I didn't really have the choice of this. It was shut.
Does ink count as a carbohydrate?
You might have to be mad to eat those sausages but they were actually only
choice. I suspect the shop keeper knew I'd be back when I'd bought a
ticket for a train leaving in hour…
However bad you think this might taste, it was worse.
I got on the train and girded my loins for a fight with the conductor about the bike
but he was happy and so I was happy.
After the day I had today, this sight was a Good Thing.
More of the same and somehow still as boring
My hotel is the same chain as the one in Gothenburg so the WiFi connected up
without any problem. My room is microscopic but clean and comfortable.
And it has a bath! After 13 days of weedy showers and
bottle of shower gel screwed to the wall, a bath seemed like an unimaginable
luxury.
Regular readers of this blog won't need me to tell them that it's raining.
It's pouring down. I'll spare you all the traditional 10 second
video of deserted wet Swedish streets. So I broke the habit of a
lifetime and ate in the hotel. The Elite Hotels Group — “elite” is
doing a lot of lifting there — appears to have a sister brand called “The
Bishop's Arms”. Both the hotels have a faux English pub downstairs.
It's a pub Jim. But not as we know it.
The bar food menu had a suspicious amount of
lingonberries on it but it did
have classics like fish, chips and peas. It
was all very incongruous but it was warm, dry, and it had food and wine.
Given I had cycled approximately 3km today it was probably best to avoid
the fish and chips or the meat pie and try to eat fewer calories. Or
at least get the calories from the wine.
Not a charcuterie platter. A Swedish charcuteriesque platter.
The last two days have been a bit of a logistical nightmare. Firstly
stuck in Lidköping for an extra day then an entire day wrestling with trying
to make up two days of cycling and get positioned in the right place for my
final assault on Stockholm — maybe the military language isn't quite right…
I've spent a lot of time with maps of Sweden, cycling routing software and
meteorological forecast software and I've got a plan.
It looks like it is going to be dry from 7am to noon in this bit of Sweden.
I'm going to be thankful for small mercies and I'm going to cycle to
Nyköping. It's 80km which is effectively a half day for me now and if
I leave at 8am, I should be there by noon. The wind will mostly be a
side wind which will bring a bit of knuckle whitening excitement to the
morning but won't be quite a soul destroying as a head wind. I'll hang out
in Nyköping — which will probably be yet another non-descript Swedish town —
until the afternoon when I can check into my hotel.
On Thursday it might not rain all day and it's 120km from
Nyköping to Stockholm and the wind might be behind me. So
I might make it to Stockholm in the early afternoon.
Meteorology is an iterative converging process and the forecasts have
looked reasonably stable over the past 24 hours.
Fwiw, a good article in the Economist on weather forecasting this week. The key chart is this one.
Five day forecasts are better than 3 day forecasts 40 years ago and — for come definition of “accuracy” — three day forecasts are 99% accurate. As I type this, I know I will be punished for my hubris,
Another glass of wine and some chicken wings and I'm done.
Four wings for £15. You're not in Texas now kid.
Surprisingly, really looking forward to getting back on the bike tomorrow.
Not cycling for two unplanned days was…not fun. At the end of
the day, I really do love cycling a bike.
Day 14: Norrköping to Nyköping
As I travel from <something>köping to <another>köping, it may help to know that köping is pronounced “choping” and it means “market”. So Nyköping is effectively Newmarket.
Today was, in the end, a good day. Also, today's post is a bit longer than normal because it was a short cycling day.
Unfortunately, the distribution of Swedish towns big enough to have hotels is
such that today was going to have to be a short day. I could either do
one 210km day (yeah, right) or an 80km day and a 130km day.
As you will have seen from yesterday's post, according to the Economist,
weather forecasting is now super accurate — for some definition of accurate.
There seemed to be a window between 6am and 11am where it was going to
be dry and that it would be sunny in Nyköping when I arrived.
I woke at 5.30am (<sigh>) and looked out of my window at a beautiful
morning.
Right, this is more like it
I did the normal morning routine.
A quick aside on the hotel routine. Given how appalling it would be to find out that you've left something in the hotel room after you'd cycled 30km down the road, one gets into an extraordinarily obsessive routine in hotels. Anything to avoid retracing your steps to pick up your phone or passport.
It starts with arriving in your room. Completely unpack everything from the bean and the handlebar bag. Never put anything in a cupboard or drawer: that's a recipe for disaster. Wash kit and get it drying. The “twist things in a towel” trick which Gareth put me onto is brilliant. Put Garmin, phone, lights, headphones on to charge. Lay non-cycling clothes out on the chair which every Scandinavian hotel invariably has and put everything else on the desk which every Scandinavian hotel invariably has. Shower. Go and eat. Make sure Garmin is charged. Set up phone, watch and iPad to charge overnight.
In the morning, do the unmentionable thing with the SudoCrem, get into your (hopefully dry) kit and then go around the room putting everything on the bed in two piles. The stuff you're going to be carrying and the stuff to go in the bean. Pack bean. Phone in centre back pocket, headphones in left back pocket, glasses and sunglasses in handlebar bag. Get bean on bike, put bike out in the hotel corridor and then walk around the room for 5 minutes doing one last check. Every day for 14 days. Yeah, it's not all wild unbridled fun on these trips.
Although breakfast only started at 7am, the Elite Hotel had helpfully set
out some early morning coffee and I helped myself to coffee and filled the
water bottles. My experience of Swedish hotels hasn't been very broad
but the Elite hotel group aren't bad as a middle market sort of
establishment.
Action shots of water bottles being filled.
Where's a good place for a McDonald's?
“In an industrial park Bjorn. Right there”
The road headed north and since the wind was blowing at 40km/h from the south,
this section was pretty nice. It was also really nice to be travelling
in Sweden without paying £3 per kilometre like I had to in the taxi yesterday.
Northerly road, southerly wind and free…perfect.
However, the road then turned east and I was cycling along the northern shore
of the Bråviken. This, naturally, meant that for the next 40km I had a
pretty strong sidewind to contend with. There were no cycle paths and it
was a relatively busy road which meant it was less fun than it could have
been.
Busy road on the left, fjard on the right.
The waves maybe give an idea of how windy it was
A windswept me with a stormy fjard in the background.
Probably nice in the summer…oh wait…
I spied a bijou little marina round a bend and thought that it should
have a cafe or something. I realise that the weather isn't great but
it's the height of the summer season, there's hundreds of holiday homes all
round here.
You'd think the keen sailors would be out enjoying the wind.
Shut.
There were some toilets but they were shut too.
Shut
As I turned north again (hurrah!) the rain started coming down (boo!).
Not very heavily but constantly. So much for accurate weather forecasts
eh?
Hello shelter my old friend…
I cycled past the
Tropicarium Park.
Hard to tell what it was (and indeed also pretty hard when you check out
their website) but it had an absolutely gigantic Disney-sized car park.
That's the sort of place that would have a coffee shop you might think.
Shut
You'd think that on a Wednesday morning in August, the biggest local
attraction within 50km would be open? Nope.
There was nothing for it but to press on over the increasingly steep rolling
hills and through the increasingly heavy rain. The next set of
photographs might look all the same but they stretch over a distance of about
25km.
Trees, wet road, hill
Different trees, same wet road, different hill
Different trees, a differently coloured road, and a bike.
Very weirdly (and I have to thank my daughter Hannah for telling me this) Norway is the biggest consumer of frozen pizza in the world. Indeed the average person in Norway eats 5kg of pizza a year and 20% of the population say that pizza is the Norwegian national dish. Given the fact that the only restaurant in a town large enough to have a restaurant is a pizza joint, I can only assume that Sweden is very close to Norway in the league tables. And, doing some cursory internet searching, it appears that 68% of Swedes eat pizza a few times a month or more. It's kind of not surprising because outside the main towns and cities, it's all there is to eat.
Despite the hordes of Swedes clamouring for their regular fix of pizza, in Jönåker,
the pizza place was…shut.
Shut
Also shut
Tree with bike. A classic of the genre.
By now I was getting close enough to Nyköping that I was resigned to just
grinding it out to get there. However, at some godforsaken junction in the
middle of nowhere, there was a garage. The bane of my life in Sweden
has been the fact that most petrol stations are entirely self service.
You turn up, put your card in the machine, say how much petrol you
want and then the petrol pump does the rest. No need for people
or the usual shop/cafe/place to buy 5 litres of Castrol GTX.
But this was an old fashioned garage with cigarettes (not for me thanks!),
coffee, sweets and Castrol GTX.
I felt a bit like Alan Partridge…
I know that finding words in other people's languages funny is childish
and immature but as soon as I saw it, I had to have a Plopp.
You can't beat a Plopp.
While I was having my Plopp, the rain actually stopped. So I jumped
on my bike and, fuelled by Plopp, I sped through the remaining kilometres.
The roads opened up but sadly this also gave the vicious side wind
an opportunity to try to grab me, my bike and my bean and throw all of us
into a messy heap in the road. Maximum concentration and effort was
required.
Welcome to Sweden. Land of contrasts.
Basically the same thing but with less trees and more wind.
This bad boy makes it all worthwhile
It would be easy to be snarky about
Nyköping
but I won't. There's a castle and a nice harbour redevelopment.
The information booth was unsurprisingly shut but…”history” stuff I
guess.
The harbour front redevelopment is underpowered but pleasant.
Not much going on in the main square.
It's “Puta Madre” all over again.
For somewhere with a 4.9 rating it's pretty quiet…
and the menu is…funky
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
The wine was extremely cheap by Swedish standards and the food was actually
lovely. I tried to engage the owner in a discussion of which bit of
“Africa” does the food come from but the intersection of our shared
languages wasn't rich enough to get this concept across.
“African” food in Sweden. Didn't have that on
the carbohydrate bingo card.
So…today was actually a good day despite the weather. Two days off
the bike meant I felt pretty strong and the much shorter distance made it
easier to push it early on. That being said, I'm glad that most days
have involved 8 to 10 hours on the bike because you get a bit bored
wandering around small Swedish towns in the afternoon.
Tomorrow Stockholm and the end of the trip. There will be one more
post and then that's it until next year…maybe.
- Distance: 81km 🙂 — A short day.
- Climbing: 796m 😢 — Some punchy 9% rollers on the way
- Route: 🙂 — Despite the rain and the wind, this was maybe the most enjoyable route in Sweden so far.
- Body 😐 — No creaks…perfect.
- Bike: 🙂 — No creaks…perfect.
Day 15: Nyköping to Stockholm
The last day started badly but ended with a lovely surprise. Since this is the last blog for the trip, it'll be the usual random stuff interspersed with incredibly boring pictures of Swedish roads but…followed by some overall thoughts about the trip.
Last night the weather forecast started to converge on rain in the morning and
when I woke up it was pretty accurate.
More rain. Summer in Sweden.
Nyköping's quite quaint central section turned into the, now familiar,
hinterlands of identikit apartment blocks and power tool stores.
Like the other towns. Wet and boring.
Road, trees, puddles, cycle path
More road, more trees, more puddles, no cycle path.
“I think you'll find it's a fjard Brian”
There were no bus shelters but bike under tree provided some respite.
Road, trees, and a new appearance for rocks. No cycle path.
The road was really rolling. In total I did 1,140m of
climbing today but I was never over 50m above sea level. It was much
much harder than I had expected.
Of course there were no towns or villages which had an open cafe. In
fact, there were no towns or villages. The massive caffeine overdose
I'd taken before leaving was starting to wear off 60km into the ride and,
against all expectations, there was a garage and it had coffee.
No Plopp today.
It's a sad thing when you start actively looking forward to garage forecourts
Stockholm within striking distance..
Yes yes yes, it's childish but you take your fun where you get it on long distance cycle trips.
The wondrous scenery of Sweden
All a bit cyclocrossy during this section.
“Where's a good place for a McDonalds?” “In a building site Bjorn, right there”.
The route led along the south bank and there, on the north bank was the Royal
Palace. It's where they hand out the Nobel prizes.
Bike, water, Stockholm.
Surprise!
All together once again
We have a fun family weekend in Stockholm to look forward to but the trip is
over. 1,824km averaging 165km a day. I would have been over the
2,000km mark had I not had the to enforced non-cycling day in Lidköping.
Feeling pretty good about that.
The last act is to pack up the bike and get it sent back to the UK.
Good job bike. See you in the UK.
- Distance: 121km 😐 — Felt longer
- Climbing: 1141m 😢 — I was never over 50m above sea level which indicates how rolling these last 120km were.
- Route: 😕 — Outside the city, the route was the usual boring roads but the route into Stockholm was good..
- Body: 😔 — Who cares? Last day..
- Bike: 🙂 — More thoughts below but I am still slightly astonished that something that I built out of bits and pieces can travel the best part of 2000km powered solely by my legs. And not a single mechanical on the way.
Thoughts about the trip.
Countries
Obviously the UK doesn't count but the one day I did cycle there was
superb entirely due to JJ's excellent route.
Cycling in the Netherlands is fantastic. I know one shouldn't
judge a country by its cycling infrastructure but when you're cycling
through it, it does make an impression. The towns that I cycled
through and stopped in were vibrant and interesting. As always, the
Dutch were straight talking and direct. Some people find this
rude but I absolutely love it. Dutch people tell you exactly
what they're thinking and that's very refreshing. Obviously
cycling through the Netherlands is made better by its extreme
flatness.
In The Netherlands, the cycling infrastructure is clearly the first
thing that goes in. When the Dutch are planning a town or a road or a
junction, you get the impression that they think “Ok, what's going to
make this easy for cyclists. Let's do that. Now…how do we fit
the cars around this”. In Germany, there's still good cycling
infrastructure but it's more of an afterthought. “Ok, we've
sorted out the roads, now how do we safely add cyclists to this?”.
It still works but not quite as fluently.
The density of Germany is enough that there are towns every 10 or 20km
and most of them have a bakery or a cafe that you can stop at.
Judging a country by the density of coffee shops is nearly as
stupid as judging it by its cycling infrastructure but it really
matters on a cycling trip. I really enjoyed the section of this
trip which went through Germany. Everybody was friendly, put up
with my lack of German with good spirits and it felt like I was seeing
a lot of the country that I might not normally have seen.
The Danes won't like this but Denmark really felt like Germany but
with more complex orthography in the language. Same general feel
to the country, same type of “safe but slightly inconvenient” cycling
infrastructure. Routing your trip through Denmark is more
difficult because there are so many bodies of water to cross but
it was fun and interesting to see. I liked it.
It was sunny when I got on the ferry at Helsingør and it started
raining 10 minutes after I reached Sweden. Over the next few
days, Sweden suffered the worst weather and floods it has seen for
years. It's hard not to have one's view of a country coloured by
just how atrocious the weather was and just how hard it was to make my
way across the country.
The cycling infrastructure in Sweden is good in the cities but rapidly
peters out in the countryside. More than that, the way that
people live outside the cities is…odd. The density of housing
throughout the countryside is, on average, relatively high I suppose
but that doesn't translate into very many real towns. Villages
are just loose little clumps of housing centred round a church which
may or may not have a pizza joint or a garage. This makes
cycling through Sweden much tougher than the other countries I cycled
through. I regularly cycled for 80km+ without any cafes or
shops. In an unsupported ride, this isn't good.
Much to my surprise, Sweden felt very…”down at heel”. Slightly
shabby and a bit ugly. The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and the
UK, feel like rich countries. Sweden is rich on a
GDP per capital basis but doesn't feel like it either in the towns or
in the countryside. The train system is…a bit crap even without
the weather emergency. The outskirts of towns are unnecessarily ugly.
The towns themselves are quiet to the point of near desolation.
I much preferred Poland as the last country on the previous trip but
my view might be coloured by the terrible weather and the trials and
tribulations of trying to get across Sweden in a weather
emergency.
Routes
Route purists would say that you should plan each and every day with
care. There's no doubt that the routes would definitely be
better (thanks JJ…) but just asking Garmin to make me a route between
point A and point B worked pretty well. There weren't many
places I wanted to second guess the popularity routing algorithm.
One note for anybody who is thinking of doing the same thing:
the autorouting function makes a lot of use of cycle paths and
cycleways. These often involve difficult junctions and bumping
up and down kerbs. It feels like it would be faster to just
stick on the roads. However, in Holland and (I think) Denmark,
it is illegal to ride on the road if there's available
cycling infrastructure.
Hotels
Booking everything 24 hours in advance on
booking.com worked astonishingly
well. Highly recommended.
Choosing the hotels on booking.com is a bit of an art. It's
tempting to choose the funky interesting boutiquey hotels and those
are fun — and make for good stories for your blog. Nevertheless,
there are risks associated with this and as the trip progresses, you
want somewhere that's just going to be “ok”. Chain hotels are
fine and always choose one close to the centre of town so you're not
stuck on some faceless ring road hiking up the hard shoulder to the
nearest garage like Alan Partridge.
In Sweden there really is a stack-a-Scandi style to hotels.
Irrespective of the chain, they're the same. Rooms are the
same, the bathrooms are the same, the breakfasts are the same.
Mostly that's fine but it does get monotonous.
On average, I probably always chose hotels in the £100-a-night sort of
range. Most towns I stayed in apart from Hamburg and Gothenburg,
there wasn't anything much more expensive than this.
Things To Take
Since I'd done one of these trips before, I could optimise what I took
pretty well. Weight is everything so you need to plan carefully
and everything has to fit in your bean. Having stuff hanging off
your bike looks dorky and unprofessional.
- Bike kit. Like last year, I wore Rapha bib shorts and a Rapha top. In fact, I wore the same Rapha top that I'd worn last year. Hard wear and washing means it is actually fading particularly on the back where the sun gets it. At the last minute, I threw in a casquette (one of those silly bike caps that make you look like a schoolboy). I wore it every day under my helmet.
- A bike computer. Mine is a Garmin 840 and the most important thing about your bike computer is to learn how to use it. You're going to be using it a lot so make sure you understand the functions and, especially, the navigation and routing functions.
- Non bike clothes. Lightweight clothing is horrible but the difference between a pair of polyester Angela Merkel trousers and a pair of jeans is probably 700g. So you just have to suck it up and wear horrible clothes and look like a dork. The Jack Reacher approach of buying a new t-shirt, underpants and socks every three or four days works well.
- A warm jacket. I nearly didn't take my Rapha Explore jacket because I'd only used it once on the trip to Warsaw. Boy I was glad I took it.
- A waterproof jacket. See the days before and after Hamburg as to how important this is.
- Charger and cables. Practice before you leave to make sure you can charge everything with one charger and a bunch of cables.
- Toiletries. The minimum you can get away with to avoid being actively offensive. Also some of this to wash your kit in the evening. Soak Wash is fantastic and is a critical component of not being actively offensive.
- SudoCrem or equivalent. I took two of these with me to deal with issues…down there. After the first day, it's pretty obvious what you need to do with it and if you don't, you're going to suffer from saddle sores and your trip will be over.
- Apple Pay. Apart from one occasion, I paid for absolutely everything on this trip from a plopp chocolate bar to two nights in a hotel using my phone. The European banking and payment networks are the best in the world. Don't try to do this if you're cycling across the USA.
- One inner tube, one multi tool, chain lube. If you're doing 150km+ a day, you need to oil your chain every day. More in the wet. The inner tube is in case of a massive puncture in the tubeless tyres.
- IPad. This is a controversial one. With the keyboard, this added over 1kg to the weight and made packing the bean really hard. However, I like writing these posts. It gives you something to do while eating on your own and you can use the Kindle App to read books in the evening.
And that's it.
Bike
This section might be interesting only to the hard-core bike folks.
Once again, the Bat Bike™ did fantastically well. The 1x group
set worked brilliantly and faultlessly. Apart from the one day
where I had to buy some chain lube and one day where there was a bit
of a creak from the bottom bracket, it was just perfect. It
felt smooth, fast and solid even with the bean on the back.
One really big thing was that over 1,800km and 15 days, I didn't have
any punctures and didn't even have to blow up the tyres once.
The new knobbly (33mm) tubeless tyres were fantastic. I
could run them around 45psi which smooths out a lot of the road
vibration. When you're cycling on cycle paths there's a lot of
bumping up and down small — and not so small — kerbs at junctions.
Tubeless tyres don't get pinch flats and so you feel really
confident on the bike. The knobbly tread pattern helped with
confidence in the rain.
I had to re-wrap the bar tape once. It wasn't a big problem but
you spend 8 hours a day interacting with the tape on your handlebars
and if it's not quite right, it turns into one of those irritating
things. So the people in Hallsberg station waiting room got a
master class in how to correctly wrap handlebars. Lucky them.
As I mentioned earlier, the Restrap Bean of Joy was…a joy.
Of course I took tools but the only time I used my
beautifully designed lightweight multi tool
was to take the front wheel off the bike when I was putting it in the
taxi in Lidköping. Click on the link and buy this tool.
It's really nice.
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