Day 13: Not a fun day

https://www.strava.com/activities/9450053152

We left the house of our Argentinian friends around 9:00am and biked to the supermarket where we stopped the previous day. We had a good breakfast in order to prepare ourselves for probably the biggest climb of the trip. The weather was fine.

We reached the climb after only 8km and managed to pass it without much difficulties. It was a 6km climb with some percentage at the highest probably around 8 or 9%. The day started well.

Just when we passed the top of the climb the rain started to fall, heavily. After a couple of minutes we were soaked once again and the rain continued strongly as we were going downhill. With the wind it felt like the rain was slapping us in the face, we were pulling the breaks quite hard to avoid going too fast. The view was probably nice but we could not look at it since we had to pay attention to the road. It stopped raining when we finished the downhill.

Few kilometers later we arrived at a ferry station in Nesna, the sun was back and we were trying to dry our shoes and our socks before going on the ferry.

The ferry took only 25 minutes, but we would have happily stayed a bit longer inside the cabin. We got back on the road on our way to Sandnessjøen, the next city on our way. 

The rain came back, and to make things even worse we also faced a strong head wind. The road was also going up and down a lot, it got us tired very quickly. It continued like this for a while and we decided to stop in a bus stop to have a break, eat a granola bar and think about where to spend the night.

It did not take us a long time to go once again for the hotel option, we found one in Sandnessjøen, which was “only” 20km away. The only worry was that the weather forecast was indicating that the wind would get worse as we were getting closer to our destination. We were clearly going through a storm.

A German bikepacker going in the opposite direction came to talk to us. We got a bit jealous when he told us that he was going at 30km/h without pedaling and we thought that maybe we should have done Trondheim to Tromsø instead…

Anyway, we did not have a choice, we went back on the bikes despite being completely soaked and freezing. The weather was really terrible, the road was also very crowded, with cars and trucks driving quite fast, and the visibility was definitely not optimal. We did not feel super safe but there was no other option. It took us some time but we managed to get closer to the city, there was only one last obstacle to pass, the bridge:

It was a quite long and high bridge. Normally it must look beautiful but today for us it looked very scary. The wind was lateral and extremely strong, 15 m/s indicated by the sign at the beginning. That we couldn’t have done on the bike, so we decided to get off and walk on a narrow sidewalk, it was probably the safer approach. The scene of two bikers pulling their bikes across the bridge was probably worth of an extreme adventure documentary. Luckily we could cross it without any problem.

We biked the few remaining kilometers to our hotel and we could finally get warm and rest a bit after a terrible day on the road. We did around 65km, which is not so bad in regards to the circumstances. We hope once again that the weather will get better so we can reach Trondheim and more importantly that we can also enjoy a bit more the remaining days of our trip.

Today we don’t have a lot of pictures as that was not our priority.