20th Anniversary European Bike Adventure: Day 14, Kongsvinger to Ekshärad
Day 14 dawned sunny and clear and full of alpacas. It was beautiful, which helped me forget how hard the day before had been.
I had been too tired/distracted to do a vlog on day 13, so I did it the morning of day 14, and it's mostly alpacas and a turkey.
We breakfasted on the convenience store pastries I'd gotten the night before, and Matt did a little maintenance on our filthy bikes while I pet dogs and talked to alpacas.
Friends.
And packed up and cleaned up and whatnot.
Matt had plenty of help.
I knew this was the day that we were leaving Norway and entering Sweden, but when our airbnb host told Matt she was going to drive into Sweden to do some shopping, that's when it really hit me how close we were. I mean.. it would be a long drive for her, but it was driveable for shopping!
We bid farewell to our alpaca and doggo friends, and headed out.
That hill I'd had to walk the bike up the day before was WAY easier going down.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
We rode back through Kongsvinger again, marveling that this time it contained people and open businesses (and no rain), and then headed out into the wilds of Norway.
This was one of my favorite parts of the trip. We were on a highway (ugh, E16, you were not kind to us yesterday) for most of the day, but after we got out of the Kongsvinger area, there was basically nothing at all for.. a really long time.
Traffic died off, the highway got pretty narrow, and it was just us and endless forest and lakes and beauty. It was constant rolling hills, but the roads were so nice and smooth, and we had a tailwind for this whole part, and it was mostly shady and cool, and it was just.. amazing. I could have just ridden that part forever.
I mean.. perfection.
And honestly, there's not a whole lot to write about this part! It's so barren out there, there's really nothing to write about. (So we'll cram this thing full of pictures and videos!)
<3 <3 <3
This is actually one of the parts Matt was as little concerned about, because there is seriously nothing out there. If we needed food? Nothing. Water refills? Nothing. Matt had said we might have to resort to refilling water at cemeteries, but (a) we never ran low on water through this part, so we didn't have to refill, and (b) it's a moot point anyway, because there weren't even any cemeteries!
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
We did have a little mini adventure when kamoot had us turn onto another unpaved trail. It was a a beautiful area, and mostly pretty rideable, so we just went with it. (This is before we implemented our strict "NO GRAVEL ROADS" policy. That'll come soon.)
Eventually that lovely road took us to.. a do-not-cross barrier. Huh. We were pretty far down this road, so riding back would be annoying. And it didn't LOOK like there was anything deadly on the other side. I think Matt assumed I would want to turn around at a barrier, so he was looking at the map, and I'm like, "Or.. we could just go around it."
You shall not stop us, barrier!
So we did!
We took that little unpaved road quite a long way. Or maybe it just seemed like that, because we had to ride so slowly on it. But it was just so pretty through there, and, well, there was ZERO traffic of ANY kind, which was nice. So we stuck with it.
There is no "correct side of the road" when there are zero other humans.
Downhills: More fun than uphills.
We did pass a number of signs that indicated maybe they'd held some sort of event out there, and eventually we passed an area that looked like an event had happened. Matt theorized skeet shooting. But fortunately for us, that even either had already happened or hadn't happened yet. We were not shot at. But maybe that's why the barriers were there! Oops.
No idea.
We made it back out onto the road, and a short while later (I have no idea if it was a short while later) we came to.. THE BORDER BETWEEN NORWAY AND SWEDEN!
Matt's like, "Do you want to stop and take a picture?"
I said, "You bet your ass I want to stop and take a picture!"
Finally, at our last country-change, we finally had tangible evidence that we were changing countries! I may have been a little overexcited about this.
Matt's like "Did you get a picture of the other side?" Oh. I guess there's a Norway side, too. Oops.
After taking a lot of pictures, we decided to have a snack before we moved on. I was really hungry at this point, and knew we had a lot of miles left to go, and we'd had zero calories since our very meager breakfast.
So I ate a protein bar, and Matt had a stroopwafel, which he'd been carrying with him (and snacking on periodically) since Amsterdam.
He's hoping he's the first person to eat a stroopwafel at the Norway/Sweden border. I'm skeptical, but lacking evidence otherwise, I'm going to give him the record.
Winner!
He also offered a celebratory stroopwafel to a guy on a motorcycle who was similarly taking a break at the border. Said guy had no idea what to do with that, and did not accept, but seemed pleased that Matt had offered.
And then we were in Sweden! I'd say nothing much changed, but it became obvious that this area of Sweden is a heavy logging area. Makes sense, lots and lots of trees. But while we hadn't seen any clear-cut fields in Norway, we started seeing a lot of stump fields and giant stacks of trunks once we got into Sweden.
It made me a little sad, but I also use a lot of wood-based products, and I do realize they have to come from somewhere.
Eventually we came to our first actual town since we left Kongsvinger! It was tiny, but it had a cheeseshop!
Ostaffär = cheeseshop! Thanks to duolingo, I knew this!
We were excited about finally having an opportunity to buy something to eat, but once we got inside, it was basically a cheese shop/convenience store. They did sell food we could have eaten for lunch, but it was nothing appealing.
I mean, other than a whole lot of cheese.
Matt mentioned that Torsby was maybe 12k further down the road, so we bought and drank some caffeine, and then hopped back on our bikes and rode.
And rode and rode and rode. Because either I misheard the 12k estimate, or Matt had misread the map, but Torsby was more like 24k away, and at our pace that was nearly 90 minutes. That's a lot of minutes when you told your stomach it was going to get food real soon!
At least it was an absurdly beautiful 24k.
May have stopped here to pee in the woods.
But eventually we did make it to Torsby. Which.. had a Dollar Store, which I found (and find) really confusing.
We stopped long enough to have google maps suggest some place to eat, then followed the map into downtown Torsby, which seemed to contain some sort of.. party. At 3:30pm on a Friday? Maybe some sort of holiday thing, except now we were in Sweden, so I'm not sure that Norway 4 day holiday weekend thing still applied.
WHO ARE ALL OF YOU PEOPLE.
Anyway, there were a billion people, tons of children, everyone yelling, and some sort of thumping Eurovision pop music loudly playing, and after a full day of riding through the middle of absolutely nowhere, it was intensely overwhelming. But it also featured a restaurant that was willing to sell us food.
We leaned our bikes against the neighboring hair salon, and Matt went in to see what was what in the restaurant. We'd gotten more trusting with people and our bikes over the course of this trip, but there were a TON of people out there, and 4 kids with no parental supervision who kept leaning against our bikes.
Matt came back with a plate of food and said it was a buffet, go have at. We ate a lot of food. It was 4pm at this point, and we were eating what was effectively our first meal. Definitely ate more than would be advised when you have to get back on a bike, but we needed it. A buffet of carbs and protein was just what the doctor ordered.
My first meatball in Sweden!
After we ate, I sat at our table and watched the bikes while Matt went across the square into the market to take his turn at "buy random food for dinner/breakfast".
When he got back, we crammed all of that into our panniers and got back on our bikes for the last ~22 mile stretch to our cabin for the night.
Which was completely uneventful, other than our bikes being even heavier with their groceries, and us being pretty tired and done.
We made it to the turn to our campsite, and as we turned, a car that was pulling out yelled something at us. We had no idea what. And then as we rode down that road, there was a house with a raised porch with a hot tub, and there were a bunch of (we assume) drunk guys who also yelled at us. More of a "drunken cheer", I guess. Thanks, guys. WHY IS EVERYONE YELLING AT US?
Our road turned gravel (which I only mention because it's the first in a series of "why do we have to deal with a gravel road at the end of every day?!"), and then we pulled into the parking lot of our lodging for the night, Byns Campground.
We were pretty happy to be off the bike, and the campground was so pretty. Matt read off the instructions for late arrival, and I went up to the key box to get our key out. Except it wasn't there. We looked in everything that might have been a keybox or a mailbox or a .. birdhouse. Everything. But the front desk building was locked, there were no notes, and there were no people.
Matt then realized that's probably what the first person who yelled at us was yelling about. That was probably the owner, and hopefully he was yelling something about coming right back to help us. Which did turn out to be the case!
Once he got back a few minutes later, we collected our key and our sheets and set up camp in our little tiny cabin on a lake.
First order of business: shower. This normally wouldn't merit mentioning, but since this was a cabin at a campsite, the showers were in another building. And they were pay showers. Which fortunately we knew ahead of time, so Matt had gotten change from the market when he bought groceries. It was one whatever-crazy-Swedish-denomination coin per shower-unit, so we headed off to our respective bathrooms with 2 of those coins each.
I undressed, plunked a coin in, and went into the shower to turn on the water. And I could not get the shower to produce hot water. Now I have a sketchy history with European showers and hot water, so sometimes it takes me a lot of handle-twists to make hot water happen, but I've never completely failed to figure it out. And I was completely failing. This water was ice cold, no matter which handle I turned which direction. And time was running out on my coin. (I had no idea how much time this coin actually gave me, but it wasn't forever, I was pretty sure.) I just kept trying and turning, and nothing was happening. I finally gave up and just decided to take a freezing cold shower, but I just could not force myself to put my head under that cold water. I was already cold from riding all day, and .. I just couldn't. I may have cried a little bit. Not even embarrassed. I was so tired, so cold, so dirty, and I just wanted to be clean and sleep. And not be cold.
Finally I decided maybe it wasn't that there was no hot water, but maybe it was that this shower was broken. I decided to risk my second coin and try it on the second shower, because otherwise I was just going to bed dirty. That sounded better than an ice cold shower.
Put the coin in for the other shower, and THANKfully it gave me hot water with no problem. I lathered up my hair, lathered up my body, rinsed my hair out and then IMMEDIATELY as I was done rinsing my hair, maybe even slightly before that, the water stopped. Time's up.
So I went out and finished rinsing in the sink.
We bought and brought quick-drying travel towels, and this was the only time we used them. But this justified us bringing them along!
Whatever. I was mostly clean and only slightly soapy. I'd had a nice little cry. I was just ready to sleep.
We ate some sandwiches and leftover Pringles, and finally crashed out for the night.
How are you supposed to know when to sleep when the sun is always up?!
Total miles for day 6: 76.82 miles from Kongsvinger, Norway to Ekshärad, Sweden. Our longest day so far.
Click to viewI had been too tired/distracted to do a vlog on day 13, so I did it the morning of day 14, and it's mostly alpacas and a turkey.
We breakfasted on the convenience store pastries I'd gotten the night before, and Matt did a little maintenance on our filthy bikes while I pet dogs and talked to alpacas.
Friends.
And packed up and cleaned up and whatnot.
Matt had plenty of help.
I knew this was the day that we were leaving Norway and entering Sweden, but when our airbnb host told Matt she was going to drive into Sweden to do some shopping, that's when it really hit me how close we were. I mean.. it would be a long drive for her, but it was driveable for shopping!
We bid farewell to our alpaca and doggo friends, and headed out.
That hill I'd had to walk the bike up the day before was WAY easier going down.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
We rode back through Kongsvinger again, marveling that this time it contained people and open businesses (and no rain), and then headed out into the wilds of Norway.
This was one of my favorite parts of the trip. We were on a highway (ugh, E16, you were not kind to us yesterday) for most of the day, but after we got out of the Kongsvinger area, there was basically nothing at all for.. a really long time.
Traffic died off, the highway got pretty narrow, and it was just us and endless forest and lakes and beauty. It was constant rolling hills, but the roads were so nice and smooth, and we had a tailwind for this whole part, and it was mostly shady and cool, and it was just.. amazing. I could have just ridden that part forever.
I mean.. perfection.
And honestly, there's not a whole lot to write about this part! It's so barren out there, there's really nothing to write about. (So we'll cram this thing full of pictures and videos!)
<3 <3 <3
This is actually one of the parts Matt was as little concerned about, because there is seriously nothing out there. If we needed food? Nothing. Water refills? Nothing. Matt had said we might have to resort to refilling water at cemeteries, but (a) we never ran low on water through this part, so we didn't have to refill, and (b) it's a moot point anyway, because there weren't even any cemeteries!
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
We did have a little mini adventure when kamoot had us turn onto another unpaved trail. It was a a beautiful area, and mostly pretty rideable, so we just went with it. (This is before we implemented our strict "NO GRAVEL ROADS" policy. That'll come soon.)
Eventually that lovely road took us to.. a do-not-cross barrier. Huh. We were pretty far down this road, so riding back would be annoying. And it didn't LOOK like there was anything deadly on the other side. I think Matt assumed I would want to turn around at a barrier, so he was looking at the map, and I'm like, "Or.. we could just go around it."
You shall not stop us, barrier!
So we did!
We took that little unpaved road quite a long way. Or maybe it just seemed like that, because we had to ride so slowly on it. But it was just so pretty through there, and, well, there was ZERO traffic of ANY kind, which was nice. So we stuck with it.
There is no "correct side of the road" when there are zero other humans.
Downhills: More fun than uphills.
We did pass a number of signs that indicated maybe they'd held some sort of event out there, and eventually we passed an area that looked like an event had happened. Matt theorized skeet shooting. But fortunately for us, that even either had already happened or hadn't happened yet. We were not shot at. But maybe that's why the barriers were there! Oops.
No idea.
We made it back out onto the road, and a short while later (I have no idea if it was a short while later) we came to.. THE BORDER BETWEEN NORWAY AND SWEDEN!
Matt's like, "Do you want to stop and take a picture?"
I said, "You bet your ass I want to stop and take a picture!"
Finally, at our last country-change, we finally had tangible evidence that we were changing countries! I may have been a little overexcited about this.
Matt's like "Did you get a picture of the other side?" Oh. I guess there's a Norway side, too. Oops.
After taking a lot of pictures, we decided to have a snack before we moved on. I was really hungry at this point, and knew we had a lot of miles left to go, and we'd had zero calories since our very meager breakfast.
So I ate a protein bar, and Matt had a stroopwafel, which he'd been carrying with him (and snacking on periodically) since Amsterdam.
He's hoping he's the first person to eat a stroopwafel at the Norway/Sweden border. I'm skeptical, but lacking evidence otherwise, I'm going to give him the record.
Winner!
He also offered a celebratory stroopwafel to a guy on a motorcycle who was similarly taking a break at the border. Said guy had no idea what to do with that, and did not accept, but seemed pleased that Matt had offered.
And then we were in Sweden! I'd say nothing much changed, but it became obvious that this area of Sweden is a heavy logging area. Makes sense, lots and lots of trees. But while we hadn't seen any clear-cut fields in Norway, we started seeing a lot of stump fields and giant stacks of trunks once we got into Sweden.
It made me a little sad, but I also use a lot of wood-based products, and I do realize they have to come from somewhere.
Eventually we came to our first actual town since we left Kongsvinger! It was tiny, but it had a cheeseshop!
Ostaffär = cheeseshop! Thanks to duolingo, I knew this!
We were excited about finally having an opportunity to buy something to eat, but once we got inside, it was basically a cheese shop/convenience store. They did sell food we could have eaten for lunch, but it was nothing appealing.
I mean, other than a whole lot of cheese.
Matt mentioned that Torsby was maybe 12k further down the road, so we bought and drank some caffeine, and then hopped back on our bikes and rode.
And rode and rode and rode. Because either I misheard the 12k estimate, or Matt had misread the map, but Torsby was more like 24k away, and at our pace that was nearly 90 minutes. That's a lot of minutes when you told your stomach it was going to get food real soon!
At least it was an absurdly beautiful 24k.
May have stopped here to pee in the woods.
But eventually we did make it to Torsby. Which.. had a Dollar Store, which I found (and find) really confusing.
We stopped long enough to have google maps suggest some place to eat, then followed the map into downtown Torsby, which seemed to contain some sort of.. party. At 3:30pm on a Friday? Maybe some sort of holiday thing, except now we were in Sweden, so I'm not sure that Norway 4 day holiday weekend thing still applied.
WHO ARE ALL OF YOU PEOPLE.
Anyway, there were a billion people, tons of children, everyone yelling, and some sort of thumping Eurovision pop music loudly playing, and after a full day of riding through the middle of absolutely nowhere, it was intensely overwhelming. But it also featured a restaurant that was willing to sell us food.
We leaned our bikes against the neighboring hair salon, and Matt went in to see what was what in the restaurant. We'd gotten more trusting with people and our bikes over the course of this trip, but there were a TON of people out there, and 4 kids with no parental supervision who kept leaning against our bikes.
Matt came back with a plate of food and said it was a buffet, go have at. We ate a lot of food. It was 4pm at this point, and we were eating what was effectively our first meal. Definitely ate more than would be advised when you have to get back on a bike, but we needed it. A buffet of carbs and protein was just what the doctor ordered.
My first meatball in Sweden!
After we ate, I sat at our table and watched the bikes while Matt went across the square into the market to take his turn at "buy random food for dinner/breakfast".
When he got back, we crammed all of that into our panniers and got back on our bikes for the last ~22 mile stretch to our cabin for the night.
Which was completely uneventful, other than our bikes being even heavier with their groceries, and us being pretty tired and done.
We made it to the turn to our campsite, and as we turned, a car that was pulling out yelled something at us. We had no idea what. And then as we rode down that road, there was a house with a raised porch with a hot tub, and there were a bunch of (we assume) drunk guys who also yelled at us. More of a "drunken cheer", I guess. Thanks, guys. WHY IS EVERYONE YELLING AT US?
Our road turned gravel (which I only mention because it's the first in a series of "why do we have to deal with a gravel road at the end of every day?!"), and then we pulled into the parking lot of our lodging for the night, Byns Campground.
We were pretty happy to be off the bike, and the campground was so pretty. Matt read off the instructions for late arrival, and I went up to the key box to get our key out. Except it wasn't there. We looked in everything that might have been a keybox or a mailbox or a .. birdhouse. Everything. But the front desk building was locked, there were no notes, and there were no people.
Matt then realized that's probably what the first person who yelled at us was yelling about. That was probably the owner, and hopefully he was yelling something about coming right back to help us. Which did turn out to be the case!
Once he got back a few minutes later, we collected our key and our sheets and set up camp in our little tiny cabin on a lake.
First order of business: shower. This normally wouldn't merit mentioning, but since this was a cabin at a campsite, the showers were in another building. And they were pay showers. Which fortunately we knew ahead of time, so Matt had gotten change from the market when he bought groceries. It was one whatever-crazy-Swedish-denomination coin per shower-unit, so we headed off to our respective bathrooms with 2 of those coins each.
I undressed, plunked a coin in, and went into the shower to turn on the water. And I could not get the shower to produce hot water. Now I have a sketchy history with European showers and hot water, so sometimes it takes me a lot of handle-twists to make hot water happen, but I've never completely failed to figure it out. And I was completely failing. This water was ice cold, no matter which handle I turned which direction. And time was running out on my coin. (I had no idea how much time this coin actually gave me, but it wasn't forever, I was pretty sure.) I just kept trying and turning, and nothing was happening. I finally gave up and just decided to take a freezing cold shower, but I just could not force myself to put my head under that cold water. I was already cold from riding all day, and .. I just couldn't. I may have cried a little bit. Not even embarrassed. I was so tired, so cold, so dirty, and I just wanted to be clean and sleep. And not be cold.
Finally I decided maybe it wasn't that there was no hot water, but maybe it was that this shower was broken. I decided to risk my second coin and try it on the second shower, because otherwise I was just going to bed dirty. That sounded better than an ice cold shower.
Put the coin in for the other shower, and THANKfully it gave me hot water with no problem. I lathered up my hair, lathered up my body, rinsed my hair out and then IMMEDIATELY as I was done rinsing my hair, maybe even slightly before that, the water stopped. Time's up.
So I went out and finished rinsing in the sink.
We bought and brought quick-drying travel towels, and this was the only time we used them. But this justified us bringing them along!
Whatever. I was mostly clean and only slightly soapy. I'd had a nice little cry. I was just ready to sleep.
We ate some sandwiches and leftover Pringles, and finally crashed out for the night.
How are you supposed to know when to sleep when the sun is always up?!
Total miles for day 6: 76.82 miles from Kongsvinger, Norway to Ekshärad, Sweden. Our longest day so far.