28th June 2023 (sunny and warm) 54km

After a very good sleep, waterfall and all, we were up at 7.06am and after packing the inside of the tent, decided to let the outer dry in the most welcome, morning sun.

Puttering around over breakfast, I moved the tent and put too much pressure on the front curved pole and it snapped.  It's not something that you can replace. It would be hard enough to replace a pole in the country of origin, but in Norway, not a hope in hell.  Tried a patch up job with a bit of webbing and superglue, but will have no idea if it's successful until we set up tonight.

Cycled away from our site at 9.40am on an undulating, but primarily downhill route, after coming down from the mountain.  After visiting the snowline four times in a week, our legs are tired.  Consequently we are researching our routes a bit more thoroughly.   Today's route was going to be all on small roads, over tunnels etc, including a 1000m climb, but we decided we needed easy, so chose the 610 along the river Gaula which would then mean a 20km ride up the E39 to Forde.

This morning we were seeing a lot of waterfalls and white water, plus great reflections in lakes we were riding alongside. Consequently, photos were taken at a great rate of knots.
Definitely glad to be out of the snowline and cycling in sunny weather.  It was a beautiful morning,  the water was perfectly clear, but not quite warm enough to tempt us in for a swim, especially when we knew the toughest part of the day would be the afternoon. 

Currently we are in the village of Sande, where we have just purchased lunch and are sitting alongside a somewhat dirty lake enjoying our coffees to finish.

At present we've covered just over 30kms and we have just over 20kms of steep climbing, to hopefully finish our day.....can't be too late as we need to see where Vango is at.  So in one fell swoop I could have wiped out our accommodation for the trip. As you might imagine, I'm pissed off with myself. We will wait and see.

Took off on the 25km ride to Forde, up the E39, hoping that we would be surprised and we were. The gradient was brilliant. However, what you gain with one, you lose with another. This afternoon we were on a main road. No country lanes with hardly any traffic. This was plenty of vehicles of all descriptions.  The most disconcerting thing is the speed, as you are allowed to travel at 100kph.  Obviously we had to tone it down a bit in order not to frighten the truck drivers, but our bulging quads were bursting to unleash their untapped power....

The traffic was being diverted around the old road which will eventually be just for cyclists.

We were actually very lucky as there were a lot of roadworks on this stretch of the E39, with a huge job going on of building a new tunnel.  This slowed the traffic down but we have to say that on the whole, they were very good, as were we. We would pull over and stop if we thought a queue was forming, conversely, they would give us room.

Heading for a big town of Forde and it was much bigger than either of us expected.  That bodes well for three reasons.  Supermarkets in abundance.  Banks available.  If Vango's repair doesn't hold out, we have an option to buy another tent as the town has suppliers.

Staying at Fordecamp, where a very nice, helpful guy checked us in. Put Vango up and all seems well at present. Not sure how long we'll be here, as some rain was forecast.

We settled ourselves in to the very nice lounge where we were the only people all night, charged our phones, updated the blog and ate dinner.  Outside, the forecasted rain was little more than a drizzle from time to time.

The camp owner Bjorn, came in and had a chat to us for about an hour. Very interesting guy.  He introduced us to a Finnish comedian called Isml, so if you need any more distractions in your life, you might want to look him up.

We had our latest night for weeks, turning in at 10.30pm.