This story is brought to you by pesto. Pesto with basil, pesto with tomato, pesto with pepper, pesto with chilli, pesto that comes in jars, pesto that comes in tubs, pesto in pasta, pesto on a biscuit, pesto that leaks onto your bag and leaves a greasy and eternal reminder of its presence, I have eaten so much pesto and still want more. Its balance of convenience and quality is unparalleled, and its wholesome colour invites the weary life-liver into the blissful fantasy that "it's probably good for you". It should be noted that chocolate spread also contributed significantly to the success of this trip, but it lacks the wrist slapping tang of pesto that puts you off eating the latter out of the jar. Therefore I am utterly sick of the stuff and will not eat it again until I find myself standing once again in the car park of a foreign supermarket with an empty stomach and a bag of shopping, on another saddle borne campaign.
Eat pesto with noodles and pizza cheese to vary your diet.
The starting point was chosen not unreasonably as the place where I was about to not live anymore, namely Utrecht, the Netherlands. There I had passed a quite wonderful year living and working among excellent folks. The idea of Norway as a finishing point was born out of a simple desire to see its beauty and a vague notion that it would be a sensible thing to cycle towards home and then get a ferry back to Scotland. There is no ferry from Norway to Scotland, despite the feeling while staring down a map that "there really ought to be". So Bergen on the Norwegian coast was chosen as a destination due to the cheap early morning flight to Edinburgh, booked for a month after my departure.
The next planning step was to sit down in front of Google Maps armed with the knowledge that I once cycled comfortably from somewhere near Haarlem to somewhere on the pseudo-island of Voorne-Putten, South of Rotterdam in a day. Then I measured the distance between these vague points with my fingers and started walking them North from Utrecht, writing down the names of towns that I would aim for on each day. This allowed me to put the list at the bottom of a bag and ignore it for a couple of weeks before getting it out again and noting with mild interest that a few of my actual campsites (see map below) were quite close to the mark, spatially if not temporally. The list convinced me that the thing could be done and allowed a ferry booking ahead of time, and that is purpose enough.
“Verbatim diary quotes look like this imposter.”