Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Minor miscalculation

The loose guidelines we have set for ourselves on this trip:

1. Rest every 3rd day.
2. Ride as many miles in a day as we want, more or less.
3. Stop and stay awhile anytime we want.
4. Lounging on the beach and kite flying is encouraged.
5. If we need a comfy bed to sleep in, find a comfy bed for the night.

Using those guidelines, I put together a spreadsheet a couple of months back to estimate how far we would get in the time that we have. We didn't have the official route maps yet, so I had to find the distance totals for the North Sea Cycle Route for each country online. This is what I found:

Germany: 357 km (221 miles)
Denmark: 550 km (341 miles)
Sweden: 380 km (236 miles)
Norway: 350 km (217 miles)

The spreadsheet showed we could ride about 45 miles/day, resting every 3rd day and we would have a few weeks to hang out in Scotland at the end. All of our planning has revolved around this. Then we received the maps for Norway in the mail. And the maps say it is 1130 km. Oops. That's only 485 miles off. So we have added another guideline:

6. Taking ferries or trains to cut off sections of the route, as needed, is acceptable.

The Norway section has a lot of fjords and many of them have ferry service available to cut across the water, rather than riding around. No problem!

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