Entering Finnmark

Day 36: Baddereidet-Alta (110 km)

This morning I set a new time record taking down my tent and packing my bike. The reason was that we were attacked my mosquitoes the second we left the tent. I was hoping they would be less active in the morning, but they were very much awake and very mean.

When we started, we first had a long downhill ride and then reached a petrol station soon where we stopped for a coffee. Then we continued and reached the Alta fjord after a while which we had at our left hand side for the rest of the day – it’s very long.

We had quite strong headwind all day. From 11:30, we started to became tired and hungry and looked out for a shop, café, petrol station or any place where we could sit down and have a lunch break. There wasn’t anything though, so we just stopped along the way and had some of our supplies. In my case this meant chocolate and nuts for lunch.

When we continued, the E6 which we followed all day, went through a number of tunnels. Most of them we could avoid by following the old E6 which runs almost parallel (no idea why they built the new one really), but one of them implied a rather long and hilly detour. So the distance today to Alta became a bit longer in the end than Google Maps had made me believe.

My most important mission today was to reach the Vinmonopolet (state-owned monopoly store for all wine and other drinks containing more than 4.7 percent alcohol) before 17:00. At 16:58, I left the store with a bottle of cava which will be opened at Nordkapp.

We had dinner at Peppes Pizza (no reindeer after all) and found a tent spot on a mowed field outside the centre. Right before we came to the centre, we stopped at a traffic sign showing that Nordkapp is only 240 kilometres away.

The weather was, apart from the wind, good today. And the forecast is decent to good for the coming days.