Highs and lows

Where to begin.

Geir's bowels. Let's start there.

According to himself, Geir's internal workings are so precise you could time a clock after them. This manifests in him have to fart every half hour on the minute. If he cycles ahead of me he lifts his behind and lets it rip.

That was a low, if you didn't guess.

Another low was checking into a hotel in Sirkka in Finland, showering, putting on clean clothes and going to a restaurant for a proper dinner. When the waitress came up to our table she stopped, made a face and took a step back. She smelled our shoes. We didn't feel very good about ourselves that evening.

There were far more highs, though. Lying under our mosquito nets at midnight, deep in the Swedish woods. Warm and comfy in our bags we watch as countless mosquitoes swarmed around overhead. The air was buzzing with them. That was a good feeling.

Coming to the town of Jörn intending to sleep in a warm bed only to find it was a ghost town could potentially have been a huge low, if Geir hadn't managed to secure accommodation for us at the local retirement home. I slept like a baby!

Another good moment was deciding to.spend the night in a cabin in Pukka, Finland, in the middle of nowhere. Geir became more and more distraught as we found there was no running water, no washroom, the heating and hot plate couldn't be used simultaneously and the proprietess didn't speak a word of anything but Finnish. But we prepared cups of tea for lunch, went for a long walk in beautiful Finnish terrain and made a lavish dinner of wolf fish stew.

In general most of our best moments were potential disasters we turned into success.

Even the day when my knee failed, which was by far my worst day, had a silver lining. When we arrived in Morjärv, cold, miserable and starving, to find nothing was open, and Geir got a wonderful lady to open her shop for us so we could eat and change.

Also, breakfast on day two in Åre, when someone cycled past the window at seven in the morning on a unicycle. What was that about?

Watching Geir scare reindeer off the road was also quite fun.

The drunk man in Åsele who refused to believe we were said we were travelling by bicycle and not motorcycle. He asked us four times and still wouldn't believe us.

And the incredibly talkative Swede in Pajala who wanted to take a picture of us to show his missus.

Cycling, quite literally, from Hell in Stjørdal to Valhall in Meråker.

Finding a bank-o-mat in Strömsund after almost giving up on Sweden entirely.

Tame reindeer in Finland.

Geir declaring war on Russians after a Russian lorry passed quite close to us on the first day.

And probably lots more I'm forgetting. It has been a good trip, but I'm glad it's ovet now. Time to go back to the real world.