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August 8 Tuesday sunny Bicycle touring Norway The houses in this mountain area of Norway look top heavy. They are made of logs with the top room larger than the bottom of the house. Some are dark-stained and quite plain. Others are intricately carved with fancy designs and stained with a fine clear lacquer. Sharon and I stopped our touring bicycles at a small town to have a yogurt. There's a tiny folding plastic spoon beneath the cover. Cool! Now that's good thinking! Unlike those yogurt things in a tube. What were they thinking? Talk about messy to eat. We wait for our Kiwi bicycle touring buddies, Arran and Rebecca, to catch up. After waiting fifteen minutes we decide we must have missed them when they bicycled past. A quick check with four German walkers we passed earlier confirms our suspicions. The Germans see a red squirrel go behind a tree and are ecstatic about seeing real wildlife. Gee willikers. Guess they haven't been to Canada. We bicycle into the next Norwegian town just as Arran and Rebecca finish buying groceries. Sharon and I have to pick up a few items in the grocery store. "We'll meet you by the river for lunch," they say as they pedal off. We buy food and then set off in the direction they left. At a bridge, the water is far below, making it very difficult if not impossible to get to. And there is an industrial area surrounding Amot. We can't find Arran and Rebecca, so we turn our bicycles around and return to a grassy area by the road edge. That way, if they haven't left town we'll see them bicycling out. After lunch, they still haven't come by. We figure they must have already left town, so we get on our touring bicycles and begin to head out, only to meet Arran coming the other way, looking for us. We had mentioned taking a smaller road that they weren't too interested in, so he was coming back to say good bye. He thought just leaving us at the grocery store without saying good bye was pretty uncultured. We ride with Arran to where Rebecca is waiting by a stream. Her fair skin has burned quite badly in the past couple of days. We can see her glowing painfully red as we pedal up. "Should we camp together again tonight?" I ask them. "If you can stand us another night," Sharon adds. "I was just riding back to say good bye," Arran responds. Rebecca has a sore bum, so they were planning on doing a short day - 70 kilometres. We all pedal down the road and stop for ice cream at a one horse town. It's 4:22 PM. The ice cream store closed at 4. I can see a light on in an upstairs room of the business. I'm sure their favourite soap opera must come on at 4, so they close the store. We sit at a table with a stool that has three legs - must be a male stool. An old geezer dozes inside the gas bar. Just too much work, a guy can barely keep up. We mount up and ride our bicycles out of town. A short distance from town we come across a barrier to a lake. We deftly slip our bikes around the end of the barrier, and find another great free camping place amongst the trees and rocks by the lake. Our Whisperlite stove won't light. I clean the jet, but still no go. The instruction sheet says that when burning gasoline the additives in the gas make the stove fuel line clog, requiring more frequent cleaning. I guess a year is frequent enough? I try to remove the cable from the fuel line, but it won't budge. "Pull harder," Arran suggests. I get the pliers from our bicycle touring equipment bag and tug mightily on the end of the braided cable sticking out of the fuel line. It still won't budge. "Pull until you think you're going to break something," Arran says. "And then pull harder." I follow his instructions to the letter. "I'm pulling so hard I think I'm bursting a blood vessel," I say. "They're hard to get out the first time," Arran understates. I wiggle and twist the braided fuel line with the pliers. Nothing. Maybe if I heat the fuel tubing it will expand, so I can pull the cable out? I grill the fuel line over Arran's stove. When it's a nice cherry red I yank mightily. The cable jerks out. It is supposed to be now used to ream out the fuel line. But I can't get it back in. I decide to take a break to eat ... using Arran's stove to cook our supper. They have finished their dishes and go to bed. I continue to work on the stove. I still can't get the cable back in. There seems to be a blockage at the bend in the tube. I try to shove a smaller derailleur cable through, but it gets stuck too. Finally, I give up and go to bed. |
