Mark Holbrook

It is now the last evening of my journey.
The first evening I tried to do a 'Talking Head' interview with myself.....it failed because I couldn't make the Technology work properly and probably a Jolly Good Thing Too partly, because I was so dismal about the chances of pulling it off, and also because if my daughter had seen the Reverse Mohican which a moments distraction had added a certain frisson to my pre-wedding coiffure then not only would my walking-her-down-the-aisle have been in question but so would my very presence. Well...the Reverse Mohican received attention from the hairdresser-in-waiting at the wedding venue (see short video, a wee square lady) , I put a brave face on the No Walking Down The Aisle Thing (see photo) and off I went into the Rain with a send off lunch from Trish and Graham in Hull ( well they will say it is the posh place not quite in Hull but you go to Hull to get to them if you get my drift). Also I had to visit Vlad the Manipulator because my arm didn't work proper.

And Rain It Did.

Not just a bit of rain you understand, monsoons of the stuff.

Day after day after day of rain. It was really quite hard not to interpret this as You are Meant to Turn Back.

Anyway......washed out I got to Stavanger....and en passant I wish I had known about the ferry from Holland but anyway....nice hotel at Stavanger airport and Kari flew out the bike hibernated in an underground garage and we hired a car. And It Rained.......every day except the last day when we hiked to Pulpit Rock and it was glorious , no not glorious

GLORIOUS.

Then Kari left and finally I looked at a map. And Why Not Before? You ask....well because I would have chickened out.....it would have been enough to get to Norway...It is just so damn big! If you pivot Norway about Kristiansand it doesn't just reach Morocco it gets into Nigeria!

So....eventually it dawns on me that it is 5000 km to Nordkapp and back to the same latitude as Stavanger.....and it won't stop raining. So a radical rethink is called for and I go east to cross the mountain spine with the hope that the lee will give me some relief....and so I came to make my journey north through Sweden.....boring and dry I hoped

but it was boring and wet...

Anyroad the latitude number grew Sweden became Finland and Finland became Norway and Norway finally ended at Nordkapp. The final stages were almost pilgrimage-like....the light had an extraordinary quality and of course it just went on and on! People started building cairns and tying things to fences and trees and then it ended.....

In a Great Big Carpark!

Don't get me wrong, the cliffs were amazing (and yes there is drone footage but I couldn't make it 'dive' " but a Carpark? At the End of the World? Douglas Adam's couldn't make it up! So at the monument a Turkish bloke I had met a week before arrived and I have no Turkish and he had no English but we embraced under the globe and he cried and my englishness said it is time to leave.. ..

And so the GPS said 'Go South' and I did into Lappland. Rain was now with added Reindeer and stewed Reindeer, as I camped , became a staple.

Cabins were great....and cheap....but wild camping is approved so before I left the arctic I wild-camped just for the bragging rights and.....it rained. Now camping in the rain is quite nasty but packing up camp in the rain is horrid, horrid, horrid especially when you have had to obey a call of nature on the foreshore observed by a herd of the previous night's supper.

And then I got close to Russia.

Very close.

Fences started appearing all over the place. Kari wanted pictures of the Gulf of Bothnia but I couldn't access the coast....but of course I could fly over it and I did. As I journeyed down through Finland to Estonia, Latvia (land of killer drivers), Lithuania (Pink Soup Anyone?) and Poland Diana asked me if 'I intended to drive the whole Nato eastern border?' So I got out the maps but the ferry routes didn't seem to really serve in getting me back. So Poland became Germany....all of a sudden the roads got better....Germany became France and things at campsites sort of disappeared over night if they weren't locked down....France became Andora where nobody remembered Boris the First despite me asking everyone I met....Andora became Spain and I closed the circle at Loarre. The oldest castle in Spain and this time it

Didn't Rain!

It tried to, there was a humongous electrical storm over the next hill but it didn't cross us (Me!) And so into the heat.....and I return a different bloke. A year older (my 67th birthday spent embracing a Turkish biker (male) in a big carpark somewhere north of 71 degrees ) having dropped my bike in a carpark less than a day from home and with three people just being able to lift it realizing that the whole project was doomed from the beginning........

except it wasn't.Read more