Day 17: The shortcut that wasn’t

https://www.strava.com/activities/9476881546

We woke up quite late, we were still tired from the long ride we did the day before. We left the camping and went directly to Namsos city center to get a good but quite pricey breakfast at a shopping mall.

Our goal for the day was to reach a camping a bit after Steinkjer, making a total of 90km for the day. We did few kilometers under the rain, we were feeling cold on the bikes. We left Namsos by the south and we then had two options in front of us. The first one was to follow the Eurovelo route and bike on the main road between Namsos and Steinkjer. The second one, take a smaller road going between the mountains and also a bit shorter according to Google maps. We thought that following the main road could be slightly boring and quite annoying with the traffic so we went for the second option. 

It started very well, the road was very quiet and the landscape quite nice.

The rain became a bit lighter and even stopped from time to time.

We biked around 10km and the path changed from concrete to gravel. Few kilometers later we reached the entrance of some kind of natural park. We looked at the map that was at the entrance and dived into it. The path became a bit less smooth and it was going up, we were slowly going into the deep forest of Norway.

We were in the middle of the forest when Maria’s back tire got flat - first time it happened during the trip! We were prepared for this kind of issue and managed to fix the tire pretty quickly.

But when we put back the wheel on the bike we damaged the gear change. Maria could not change gears!! And it was stuck on the hardest one, meaning that it was impossible to bike on this kind of road. We were not prepared for this kind of issue… We thought about looking on the internet but we suddenly realized that our phones had no network, and we were in the middle of nowhere and completely alone!

We are two engineers, so we should be able to figure out what failed! We looked at the issue and after some time we managed to partially fix the problem. There was just one gear that could not be used. We were quite relieved. We still had around 40km to do in this forest and no maps anymore. We went back on the bikes and decided to continue towards the south, we were really hoping that Maria’s bike would hold on. The road was bumpy and constantly going up and down amd we were extremely slow.

At some point we managed to load the map on our phones an agreed that the best option was to exit the gravel shortcut and go back on the main road as soon as possible. We had lost quite a lot of time and energy but at least now the road much easier.

We had biked 50km and had 30km left to Steinkjer. It was almost 6:00pm. Few kilometers before Steinkjer we realized that we had to make a detour to avoid a tunnel forbidden to cyclists, 15km more to bike…

We were extremely tired. The road was going up and down all the time. The landscape was really beautiful and there was some nice view points but it was difficult to appreciate due to the tiredness.

We biked almost 95km and made it to a camping in Steinkjer. We had a shower and ate dinner before going to bed.

The positive side, we are much closer to Trondheim, just 120 km left!