Catching the bus

The trouble with putting off telling about these difficult moments is that it's not really easy, even with some time elapsed, to know how to admit to being an absolute goose.

At Biri, I decided to follow the stages outlined in my guidebook and to attempt the walk to Lillehammer in one day. There was a suggestion that this day would involve much less climb and descent than the previous few days had involved. That wasn't true.

I should have known this because I had plotted out the root on a mapping tool that I am using, and it can quite quickly show the ascents and descents that the track will take along the way. And when I looked at it later, it was clear that there wasn't any less climbing to do than the previous days.

So attempting to walk 29 kilometres was a really foolish thing to do. By the time I was approaching Vingrom, I must have looked pretty terrible. Terrible enough for a German cyclist coming from Trondheim to stop and check whether I was still okay. While I might have wanted to appear positive, that certainly wasn't the case. In light of his concern and my own view that I would be arriving in Lillehammer sometime after midnight at the rate that I was going, it was time to catch a bus.

The Norwegian ENTUR app came into its own. I quickly found when the next bus was coming past, where I needed to be to catch it, how much it cost, pay the fare, and have the ticket barcode ready to activate as the bus approached. Perhaps 20 minutes later I was at the Lillehammer train station, and even though it was still early, the hotel had a room ready.Read more