Day 22 – Our road got washed away

Trip odometer: 1,975km

Today we woke up to rain. Yet again. It rained for most of the night and the tent leaked worse than ever. We cooked and ate breakfast on a snowmobile, under a small outcropping of roof where it was parked. After taking a long time to pack up, hoping the rain would abate, which it didn’t, we set off, at 10am.

We started the cycle frozen. We were damp right through, our shoes had completely soaked through, and there was a wind. Rather miserable indeed. We finished the final hundred metres of yesterday’s 400 meter climb and then began a long decent, with my brakes not working well at all in the rain. Having descended most of the way down, a orange flashing highway maintenance vehicle stopped us. The man cheerily told us that the road ahead was closed, having washed away in the heavy rains, and that we would need to turn back and re-climb the mountain. He probably saw in our eyes that we were about to cry and ended up offering to take our bicycles in the back and not only drive us back to the town of Forde, but 5km up the first mountain of the alternative route. He told us that 87km along the route, we would encounter our next ferry at Rysjedalsvika (to Rutledal) and that it had a wonderful waiting area with chairs and toilets. With that, we were ecstatic about the prospect of dryness and so set off with determination in our hearts… and thighs.

I was absolutely frozen for the first 10km of the route, descending off the mountain. My body was trembling. We just had to make it to Bygstad, where there was a “Spar” for lunch. Arriving in Spar we walked in through the doorway and just stopped. Our shoulders were drooped. And we dripped. The happy shopkeeper offered to let us sit around a staff table to have our lunch and also gave us lattes and told us that we didn’t have to pay. On doing our shopping we also found some spelt bread samples and ate about five each. We bought some mackerel (a fancier variety today) and settled down to our daily mackerel sandwiches.

Finishing lunch, we continued onwards, with 67km to our resting place. The rain lessened and we found some beauty in the land around us. There were massive waterfalls, the kind that people back home might drive hours to see, and all the rivers and streams that we saw were bursting and overflowing their banks. The water in many ran brown with the dirt and silt that had been churned up. It was really quite impressive.

We finally arrived at the ferry terminal just past 7pm. We washed ourselves, hung up all of the camping equipment to dry, and cooked dinner (tonight an exciting addition was a traditional Norwegian fish soup – the shopkeeper even looked at us excitedly when we bought it, telling us how typically Norwegian it was).

It’s now 10pm and we’re very much looking forward to a good night’s sleep on this dry linoleum floor.