Route

Motivation for this tour

Boundary conditions:

• my grandma lives in Finland
• my girlfriend’s a teacher who had the month of August off from school
• I love cycling
• I had saved up some extra time at work
• we liked the possibility to camp in the wild like we did in Sweden last year

Equipment on this tour

This will be my second bigger bike trip after the trip to Finland we/I did last year. So we could reuse a lot of equipment from least year. However, as I had a bike accident last November and my bike was trashed, I now own a fancy new bike.

So here are some key componets:

• Cycle: VSF Fahradmanufaktur T700 Disc
• Tent: CAMPZ Lacanau Zelt 2P I was also really satisfied with this tent. Price to weight/size ration is really good. Only downside is that you have to build the inner tent before you can build the outer tent - which could be a downside when putting it up in heavy rain.
• Air mattress: Decathlon Trek 700 XL gelb XL I was so satisfied with sleeping on this. Highly reccomended!
• Sleeping bag: Decathlon Trek 500 10 °C XL
• Robens Pump Sack To inflate my mattress - worked really well.
• Back panniers: 2 x Ortlieb Back Roller - The default panier bags to spot German cycle tourists. ;) Have been happy with these for years.
• Front panniers: 2 x Vaude Aqua Front - I like the Ortlieb QC lock system better than the Vaude System.
• Lowrider: Tubus Tara (the Tubus Duo wouldn’t fit.)
• Rear Carrier: Racktime Add-It
• Saddle: Brooks B17
• Saddle Post Suspension: Suntour SP12 NCX
• Handlebar Front Bag: Red Cycling Products Front Loader III schwarz
• Phone Mount: Similar to this I have tried out many phone mounts for my cycle - but this one has lasted forever and never dropped my phone. Highly recommended.
• repairs:
  • tear aid type A
  • fiber fix spoke repair

Routing

Routing is not that trivial - the EuroVelo 7 website doesn’t publish the official tracks. So we’ll orient ourselves along the routes you can get from bikemap.net and use a combination of OpenStreetmaps (Cycle Layer) and OruxMaps.

Finding places to sleep

Sweden

Camping in the wild is allowed in all the nordic countries (“allmansrätten”). However, if you are really in the woods, it’s not so easy to find an even place where you’d pitch up your tent. However, there is a great Facebook group who are putting all the public shelters (Vindskydd) which are free to use on a Google Map: Vindskydd i Svergie Oftentimes including some images and additional info. So many places had a loo, firefood, and a fireplace. However, due to the extremly hot summer, we were only allowed to light a fire on our last night in a shelter. All other days before, there was stricktly prohibited to light a fire.

We found it great to put up the inner tent net inside the shelters to protect from the mosquitos.

Denmark

Even though I didn’t tour through Danmark yet, I also found a nice list of shelters here: naturstyrelsen.dk

All blog entries from this trip