Tuesday, July 15th. I was greeted by sunshine in the morning and basically perfect weather. My morning routine was a bit slower than usual and it took me 3 hours to get ready for the cycling. I “sacrifice” a lot of time in the morning, so everything is properly packed for the evening.
I left the shelter around 10am and was looking for a toilet because there was none. I was hoping to find one at the local church but had no luck. I met there a local elderly man and had a very interesting chat with him for about 20 minutes. He told me about his town and the region I’m visiting – truly a very educated man. We said goodbye to each other and I continued my route towards Leirvik. Few kilometers before Leirvik, I crossed three truly amazing bridges: Spissøybrua (280 m), Bømlabrua (998 m) and Stordabrua (1077 m). I took hundreds of photos before it started raining, just after I passed the bridges.
I met Doug, a cyclists from Australia/UK and we had a chat about our routes. My visit to Leirvik was short and I moved on despite some moderate rain. My way to Fitjar was a bit exhausting: I was tired and the rain came and went faster than I could change clothes 😅 About 10 km from Fitjar there was some heavy rain which really convinced me to stop and seek a camping spot. At 7pm, I’ve found one camp site 3 km from Fitjar, however, the owner wasn’t available. Just around this time, the rain stopped, sun came out again and I reconsidered my decision to call it a quit. I tried to reach Sandvikvåg to get to the last ferry in order to save some time for the final Bergen approach.
Luckily, in the meanwhile, the weather got much better and I was able to catch the ferry from Sandvikvåg to Haljem at around 8:30pm. The ferry was – again – free of charge and got me over the fjord in just 40 minutes!
At this point, I’ve been way ahead of my schedule and I had to plan the next steps “on the fly”. There was a shelter some 10 km away from the port, so I tried to get there before it really got late. I’ve visited Osøyro on my way and had to battle some difficult and steep hills before getting to the shelter place near Søvik around midnight.
Setting up the shelter wasn’t easy: it was located on the edge of a nearby forest and lake. I took few wrong routes and had to search for the shelter in the darkness. After finding it, the shelter was difficult to access but barely large enough to hold my tent. There were many insects around, including one peck, so I had no time for my evening routine and just retreated into my tent.
I’ve checked the return route from Bergen back to Germany but everything looked grim: the Bergen/Oslo train was full (no bikes allowed) and it took too much time (7h) for the route, resulting in a bad connection of trains. My second choice was a ferry from Bergen to Hirtshals, but it seemed impossible and out of reach due to time constraints and a very tight schedule. Anyways, I went indecisive to sleep…
103.92 km, 8h56m, 11.61 km/h, 52.52 km/h max.