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.

The final day

I'm sitting outside a café, enjoying the.sun and a delicious soft ice cream. I'm not sure if it's really so delicious or if I'm just projecting. It doesn't matter.

I've had a walk around Kirkenes centre and bought new clothes and shoes so I can throw away the old ones. The sweat and stink has seeped into the fabric by now. There's really no point trying to salvage them. Especially the shoes.

Earlier we met my mum and gran, uncle and aunt at the pier. We loaded the bikes into the back of the car and strapped them up for transport back south.

This has a strange sense of finality to it. I'm going to go back to the hotel to shave and change, and later this evening I'll have dinner with the others, but that's it. Tomorrow I fly back home.

I'm going to write one more post to share sum up some of the highs and lows from the trip, some which I haven't already written about. That'll be it, though.

So this is me, signing off for now. Perhaps Geir will trick me along on another of his mad ventures, but it won't be anytime soon. Thank you for reading. I've had fun cycling and writing.

Aftermath

Even though the journey is done, we're still quite a way away from home, and our holiday isn't over until we're back home in Trondheim again.

After reporting our success the both of us fell onto our respective beds to watch some well-earned television. It just so happened Tour de France was on. It was refreshing to watch someone else bust their ass on a bike for a change.

After that we went for a joyride around Kirkenes. It's not a very big city so we started by cycling to the pier of "hurtigruten," a commercial ferry that runs continuously up and down the Norwegian coast. Tomorrow at 9:30 we'll be there to greet my mum as she disembarks.

The pier is also the end of the E9 highway that runs all the way from Rome to Kirkenes. It literally runs into the sea at the top of the world. So I thought, what better place to take my victory picture than at the end of the road?

After that we rode through Kirkenes centre and had burgers at the local petrol station. Kirkenes is a place of many wonders, such as a proper Volvo, though I'm not sure what to make of their Seamen's Club.

Tomorrow after my mum arrives I'm going to pamper myself. A new haircut is in order, my nails need cutting and my beard needs trimming. I'm also thinking of buying a new suit, just to get as far away as possible from the biking clothes I've been wearing these past two weeks.

Lastly, I want to thank everyone who has been reading this blog and following our progress. It's been reassuring knowing that someone has been keeping an eye on us.

Mission complete

We arrived in Kirkenes today and are officially done.

We didn't get our cosy Sunday trip, though. Almost as soon as we were ready to start this morning, the rain started pattering down around us. It only let up once or twice during the final five mile ride, and we arrived here cold and wet but in very high spirits.

Kirkenes is nestled on a rock that juts out into the sea. It has an almost edge-of-the-world feel to it and serves as the perfect destination for our trip. We literally can't cycle any further. We've run out of road.

At the final tally we ended up just shy of 1500 km, and that's our ten mile bus ride subtracted. It took us twelve days to cycle from Trondheim to Kirkenes, and we arrived today in great shape just in time for lunch.

We're going to take it easy today and in the morning we'll go down to greet our support crew who will be arriving by boat. We got here a day ahead of them, which is a mean feat in itself. So far we've managed to shower and eat, and I've tried to dry our shoes with a blowdrier I found in the hotel bathroom. It seemed like a good idea at first, but then the smell hit me. Imagine roasted, sour feet.

On Tuesday I'll fly back to Trondheim as Geir and my mum embark on a weeklong drive back down with the bikes and all our equipment. I think I'm going to leave the bike locked up for the rest of the summer. My ass is sore and needs time to heal.

Goodbye Finland, almost.

Yesterday we laid out two possibilities for today's leg. Either we cycle ten miles, sleep at a camping site, then cycle ten miles tomorrow, or we cycle all the way across the border and then save the last five miles for a nice, cosy Sunday ride to Kirkenes. When we started we thought we would go for the first plan, but after.cycling ten miles we realized we were in.such good form, and had such great weather, that it would be a shame to stop. So we ate and rested up and cycled another 4.7 miles.

I'm writing now from barely two km away from the Norwegian border. It's so close that I can almost spit across, if I could spit very very far.

We found a motel just as Geir was starting to have enough cycling for one day, got a hot meal and then hit the sauna. Geir is now running around like a madman trying to find signal for his mobile broadband thing so he can check his emails. I'm just lying in bed, happy that it's almost over.

Yesterday I had a beer to honour our possibly last day in Finland. My brother calls these bear cubs. The bear being Finland's national animal, I thought it only fitting that I had a bear beer. Seeing as it turned out today is our definite last day in Finland, I had another one. I'm a sucker for loopholes.

Road menace

This is what reindeer see when Geir approaches. Any wonder they flee like the devil is at their heels?

Today

We've arrived in Inari after a pleasant ten mile cycle ride. It's been overall sunny but we've been tormented with intermittent downpour.

Through the national park we saw dozens of reindeer who all turned to flee at our approach. I can't blame them. If I saw Geir coming towards me on a bike I'd turn and run as well.

The countryside we cycled through was quite flat and alternated between expansive marshland and dense forest. Every once in a while, though, we'd climb over the top of a hill and be treated to a gorgeous view of the rolling landscape, seeming to stretch on endlessly in every direction. Then we'd plunge back into the thick forest again.

I wish I had pictures to show for it but with the rain I kept my camera safely buried away. I did take it out on one occasion, though. As always Geir's nose did not fail us. He sniffed out a patch of cloudberries close the road that served as our lunch snack.