NORTH SEA SUMMER

In the summer of 2015 I cycled around the North Sea. I started in Bergen on 25th May and finally reached the northern tip of Shetland on 28th September having stopped in London for a month or so in the middle of the trip. I say it was summer, but it was snowing and raining in Bergen at the end of May, and it was so cold in Denmark at midsummer that I needed gloves and a wooly hat to walk on the beach.  Then, when it did get hot in Germany, there was no sea deep enough to swim in.  Nothing but mud and more mud.  But more of that another time. The website dedicated to the North Sea Cycle Route has closed down, so I've placed links to the guidebooks I used at the bottom of this post.  The most useful general blog I've found about travelling by bike is Tom's Bike Trip .  I don't want to repeat what others have written, but there are a few things I discovered that might be helpful to you if you're thinking of making this journey, especially if you've not been...

Summer does not begin in western Norway until the middle of June.  And Bergen is one of those cities, like Santiago de Compostela, where it always seems to rain.  Or snow, in the case of Bergen. As I was about to leave Bergen it occurred to me that the small, slightly broken umbrella we had been using might come in handy on a bicycle tour.  I took it with me, and I was glad I did.  I don't know why I'd never thought of it before.  It's not much help on those days of solid rain where you just have to get on with it, but in a sudden downpour it's possible to deploy the umbrella rapidly, wait a few minutes and then carry on, completely dry.  Also very useful on campsites, and very occasionally as a sunshade. From Bergen the North Sea Cycle Route goes south on cycle tracks at first and then, just when you are thinking that Norway is going to have cycle tracks everywhere, it dumps you onto a road just in time to climb a steep hill.  It doesn't mat...

The small campsite in Leirvik was my introduction to the NAFcamp organisation.  The NAF is the Norwegian equivalent of the AA or the RAC, but they also produce an excellent campsite guide with a very good general map of Norway. The guide is free from any NAF campsite. I met Gunther on the campsite. He was a little gloomy. Seventy years old, and estranged from his family, he warned me that the decade between sixty and seventy had aged him twenty years. Even so, he aimed to cycle 2000km every month. He was pessimistic about the weather, too, but as I cycled away from Leirvik over the huge bridges that led to the island of Bømlo the sun came out. The road snaked around the heads of small inlets of the sea and it rained off and on, but in a not-unenjoyable way. I stopped at a petrol station for coffee and sat in the sun to let my jacket steam dry and a passer-by ordered me to turn my face to the sun. I was wasting a golden opportunity! Orchids on Bømlo The island of Bømlo...