Day 18 – Waiting in the rain

Trip odometer: 1,637km

We woke up this morning with a race to the first ferry! We set off in record time, on our bikes by 8:24am! It was a tough first piece of 18km, but we made the earlier 9:30am ferry, with 6 minutes to spare.

Today would be a day of hopping from island to island. This first ferry brought us from Hollingen to Aukra. It was then just 10km to Smage, where we hadn’t yet looked up the timetable. We arrived to a rather desolate looking place, exposed to the great winds of the Atlantic with not a terminal building nor even a terminal toilet. We had nothing but a leaky cement lean-to with no bench and – we were horrified to find out – an over three hour wait, from 10:20am to 1:40pm. We sat, cold, on the asphalt, with Viki reading and me grazing on any food I could find.

A couple hours into the wait a German couple arrived in a car and, after finding us interesting, asked to join us in the shelter and offered to make soup. We accepted their offer and enjoyed talking with them. Finally on the ferry from Smage to Finnoy, we looked at the route on Google and realized that ferry number four for the day did not seem to exist. We recalled that it may be a “speed boat” that links the two places, but did not know what this was. The ferry conductor very graciously made some telephone calls and somehow ended up getting us the phone number of the speed boat’s captain. Based on the arrival of ferry three, we would have 55 minutes to cover 19km with 150m elevation gain in order to get the 5:15pm departure, the last until 11:35am tomorrow. With the winds howling and rain monsooning (really – it was absolutely positively horrendous – we even took a video clip), we decided to take the speed boat from the terminal of ferry 3 (Miklebust).

The speed boat brought us to Alesund by 5:30pm. We were sodden, had only covered 40km for the day, and not in particularly high spirits. After a quick trip to the supermarket, we started biking away from Alesund. It was still raining and the route was quite complicated, which made for numerous stops where I had to dry my hands in order to operate the phone to see the map.

Finally, 12km or so from Alesund, not finding anywhere great to camp, we decided to just stop and set up in a large field outside of a hedge of some houses. We’re rather visible, but will start sobbing if someone tries to kick us out.