Cycling Berlin - North Cape

We won a medal!

 

wpid-wp-1434292428451.jpegToday we arrived at Bodø, the next milestone of our trip and received a medal for competing in the Midnattsolrittet bicycle race. A race? Yes, we didn’t plan on participating and we weren’t in it officially. But after we had done already about 65km of our route to Bodø a few racebikes started overtaking us. They became more and more and at some point I decided to keep up with a few of them. So we increased our speed and it felt surprisingly easy with the help of some strong tailwinds. Eventually the road send us against the wind and so we lost them. Up came a big junction where a policeman stopped all traffic for us and made sure that we would continue in direction of the race. Naturally we obeyed. Had he not seen our huge pannier bags? At a roundabout we had caught up with a few slower race bikers. Some volunteers of the race organisation started cheering for us and so Simon got more and more motivated and I was struggling to keep up with him. On a long uphill stretch we started overtaking quite a few tired race bikers. Probably amateurs I figured, but what would they have thought, being overtaken by two touring cyclists on their heavy bikes and 20kg extra luggage going uphill? Were we taking the piss? I felt a bit sorry.
Our wind shadow must have been pretty impressive though and so one or two cyclists followed half a metre behind us. At the finish line I had a photo finish with a race cyclists that had lost a pedal and was only cycling with one leg.

 

Jwpid-dsc09148.jpgust after the finish line the competitors were given a medal and to our surprise we got one, too. I think they all enjoyed the luggage we were carrying.
At that point we had done about 25km of the race and we had not been slow at all. The reward was a huge fruit bar, some chocolate milk and, what I longed most for, a proper shower. Our medal gained us access to all of that.

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