Tour De Norge

Leave it to three engineers to A: forget to bring a paper map - B:bring a GPS that doesn't show roads, and C: bring a ferry schedule but don't look at it until it's too late :)

We managed to deal with the lack of a real map, but missing the ferry was a bit of a problem.

Joel and Leif and I had planned a loop ride near Rissa, on the other side of the fjord from Trondheim. I measured the loop part on the on-line map to be about 70km, which didn't sound too bad. (The furthest we had ridden up to this point was 80km in one day). Of course I was sort of forgetting about about riding to the ferry in the first place (10km out of Trondheim) and then getting to the loop that we were going to be on from the dock at the other side. I guessed that it might 10 or 15ks to the start of the loop, but it turned out to be more like 30. Oops. Now we were up to 40km and we hadn't even started on the loop yet.

We started around the loop and managed to find our way at each intersection with some half-assed tourist brochure and the gps. There were a fair number of hills on the first part but nothing too horrible since we were still somewhat fresh. As the day went on, we had to make a decision at some point about whether to ride a bit further back to the Vanvikan ferry, which costs $12 or so but takes you right into Trondheim, or go back to the car ferry that we came over on, knowing that we would still have 10k to ride after that. We all agreed to go for the Vanvikan ferry, since then we knew when we got to the dock at Vanvikan the ride would basically be over. We also knew that we had to go over one last very challenging hill to get back to Vanvikan, and by this point we were already well over 120km of riding (70+ miles). Anyway we struggled our way up that last hill with everything we had, then took the 5 minute downhill joyride into Vanvikan. Joel said "I'll go in and check the schedule". But when he came out he had a very strange look on his face. We had missed the last ferry back by 45 minutes. Ouch.

Now we had 2 choices, find someplace to sleep until morning or try to get back to the car ferry, which meant at least another 20km of riding, including going part of the way back up the steep hill we just flew down. Spirits were a bit low at that moment :)
We managed to find out that the next car ferry was due over in about 40 minutes, so we decided to try for it. When we got back up the hill we could see it coming across, so for the next 20 minutes or so we were pedaling with fury to make sure we got there before the boat. We made it with a few minutes to spare and got some fresh drinks and snacks on the boat. Then we had to finish up the 10km back to Trondheim. We pulled our aching knees and numb butts into Trondheim finally around 7:30pm, and we stopped for beers at the Kafe Filter. 2 beers later I finished up the last few miles to my apartment. When I rolled the bike into the storage unit it read exactly 167k. Which is about 103 miles by my math.

An epic ride which will go down in the history of Joel, Leif and Miles stories, and will only get better each time we tell it :)

A few pictures from the day:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mileslsmith/100MileBikeRide#