The Plan
If everything goes to plan, I’ll start my bike trip on the tail end of May. This will be the first time I will be on the road for a long time. I am no stranger to self-supported treks & camping. But this is new. The length, complexity and variability of this trip is large enough to be fuzzy in terms of planning, I cannot plan a day-to-day itinerary.
Route
My tentatively planned route is about 4000 kilometers and I have almost three months to finish the route, from Hamburg, Germany to North Cape following the Danish and Norweigian West coast. If I can end in North Cape early, there’s ample opportunity for me to extend my trip in a variety of ways in a variety of directions, but that’s not up for consideration at the moment.
My general day-to-day plan is,
- Have food & supplies for at least three to four days.
- Have a daily updated route that’s about 400kms ahead. Note down camping & resupply spots for the next four nights.
- In case I am camping in the wild unsupported, keeping an eye out for water refills, I will have equipment to carry about 6 to 8 litres of water and a water filter.
The buffer of 4-days will allow me to handle any unpredictable situations that come in my way, including bike related slowdowns.
Rest and resupply
Even though Northern Norway is sparsely populated, there are small towns, gas stations, super-markets and other conveniences along the West Coast of Norway. And I will go through four or five big towns where I can comfortably stay under a roof, repair & resupply.
Camping & cooking
Norway is expensive enough to warrant cost-saving measures for a period this long. That would mean cooking a lot, and camping in the wild. Commercial campsites are cheap and come with warm shower, but buying food from restaurants or bakeries can get expensive. My general plan is to camp in the wild more than few times. It’s not allowed in Denmark or Germany, but in Norway it’s legally allowed to camp anywhere as long as one operates within a few special rules.
Coffee
As life would have it, I can’t start my day without coffee. At home I use an Aeropress to make coffee every day, but for camping I think the method is too complicated and fussy. Pouring hot water from one pot to another on a potentially uneven surface is something I would want to avoid as much as possible. After much deliberation, I settled on a camping french press. This would give me ample amount of brewed coffee with the least amount of faffing around. Coffee beans, I will carry pre-ground. Not the best way to store and carry coffee but I can’t be bothered to carry a grinder with me.
Food
Cycling long distances is a high calorific endaveour; I will to carry energy bars, bananas & boiled eggs. In my experience, those are excellent at boosting my energy levels while on the road. However, as for as cooking goes, I will keep it minimal; or what I like to call cooking from the first principles, mixing ingredients, heat and spices.
Books
Since I won’t be carrying my regular entourage of entertainment devices, such as video games and movie playing machines, I chose a few books to load up on my e-reader.
- Wilderness Essays by John Muir
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Everything in it’s place by Oliver Sacks
Hamburg, Germany