Day 35: Get in Stupid, we’re going shopping

With a short day ahead of us, we took our time making breakfast and taking down camp. Sunday night was significantly less crowded in the campground than Saturday (which makes sense) and so there were no bike tourers staying with us last night, but it was nice to have a quiet night and slow morning.

Most of the ride today was gloomy and overcast unfortunately. This is especially a bummer, because it means we don’t have a lot of good photos from today. Hope y’all enjoy our writing :).

The major town we went through was Sortland. Sortland was a very industrial town, which was odd in comparison to everywhere else we’ve been. All the restaurants and cafes were in malls, and almost all the stores were as well. It was if someone had dropped midsized town America strip malls in Norway, and told the town they could only build stores in them.

However, I was looking for some Norwegian style pants, and so went shopping. I first started with the outlet store in town, but nothing really fit well. I did manage to pick up a nice camping pillow for Darragh, for a very good price there. We then went over to Sports1, where I found a shirt and pants that I like! I don’t think they work well together, but I’m a fan, especially of the pants.

I love that I could wear these pants into a restaurant, and no one would even think twice about it.

Darragh patiently waited for me as I tried on a few round of clothes, but I’m happy with these! We’ll see how they with out in Bellingham.

After a lovely lunch in Sortland, (see pictures below) we took off for our afternoon of biking. The skies started to clear a little and we got beautiful views of the fjords and surrounding areas.

The ride to our dinner location was uneventful. We were on a busier road, so just cranked out miles. (Not that any mile isn’t beautiful here. Just that this was just the standard fjords + mountains that we’ve been well acquainted with).

Our dinner stop was supposed to be this lovely restaurant called ”Andøy Friluftssenter”, but they were closed on Monday’s. Luckily, the owner was there, and had some sandwiches out. He was very nice to us and we bought the 3 remaining sandwiches he had. (Hopefully no other hungry bikers come through!)

The owner chatted with us for a bit, and told us his family owned the property for 150 years. He started a restaurant + campground there 27 years ago as a family business. We were glad we stopped! And even more glad for the food! As you can see, there’s not a lot of other restaurants around here, and eating just bars/snacks wouldn’t have been fun.

We pulled off and found a campsite just 20 minutes down the road for dinner. And when I say found a campground, we looked at 3 different spots for them:

We got into camp around 6:30, probably the earliest we got in all trip! So we got the drone out and played around with it some. Here’s some photos of us, and around the campground.

After a bit of planning for tomorrow and some blogging, it’s already 10pm! (I know I sound like a broken record, but it’s amazing how bright it is. It makes it really hard to keep track of time. I’m wondering if this will help with jet lag as we go back to the states!)

Tomorrow we’re headed to Andenes. Our plan is to stay there for two days just make sure we can do some whale watching! (Which Darragh is only a little excited about 🤓). We’ll likely do laundry again, and take showers! From there, we only have two days of biking to Tromsø, and four days to do it, so we’re figuring out what we’ll do in that time! We’ll let y’all know when we figure it out!

A night time photo at 10:45pm.