First light on the Atlantic Road

The ferry left Kristiansund at ten past six, and by the time the ramp went down the rain had already started. Not heavy — the fine, sideways kind that gets into everything and then stays there for a day and a half.

I had four days, a bike carrying maybe eighteen kilos of luggage, and a route that looked, on paper, almost flat.

The paper lied

It always does. The Norwegian coast doesn’t have mountains so much as it has constant, unglamorous vertical: 40 metres up out of a fjord, 40 metres back down into the next one, sixty times a day. Nothing you’d photograph. By the afternoon of day two my legs had stopped distinguishing between the climbs and started treating the whole thing as one long, uneven gradient.

The trick, eventually, is to stop counting them. The road goes where the water lets it go, and the water was here first.

Day three: the bridges

Everything I’d come for happened in about ninety minutes.

The Atlantanterhavsveien — eight bridges strung between skerries, the biggest of them curling up and over like something half-finished. There was a break in the weather around eleven. Not sun exactly, but the cloud lifted enough that the sea went from grey to a colour I don’t have a word for, somewhere between slate and green, and I stopped on the Storseisundet bridge for long enough that a coach driver waved at me.

Worth every one of the sixty small climbs.

What I’d do differently

• Book the huts. I didn’t, and slept one night in a bus shelter in Bud. Character-building. Not repeatable.
• Bring proper gloves. In June. Yes.
• Go slower. Four days is enough to ride it. It is not enough to be there.

The last morning was clear and cold and I rode the final 60 km into Molde with the wind, for once, behind me. It felt like a favour I hadn’t earned.