Yesterday we had a lovely Thai dinner with Wej’s former collegue P’Yu. Pla Nin Yang, chili paste, panaeng and a lot more. Wonderful – we will have to cycle 16.000 km before we can have that again so thank you P’Yu and Micke for hosting us and providing such a delicious dinner.

We left P’Yu and her family at 9.00 sharp. It was foggy, light rain and wind from the side. Soon we were out on the big road which is long and rather straight. The fog made it feel like we were cycling in a glass of milk. Fortunately the road had wide shoulders so it never felt scary when the trucks overtook us.

W knew from the start that this day would be our first day with a more normal distance, i.e. +90 km. The local radio station back in Göteborg also had expressed interest in making an telephone interview with us in the afternoon. All this made us speed up a bit, and another reason was that there was nothing to see along the road due to that compact fog. We were later informed that the interview was postponed to another day.

We had lunch at a local kebab/pizzeria in Falkenberg and we had a very interesting and inspiring conversation with the owners. I will tell more about this experience when there is more time.

Close to Getinge I suddenly noticed that I had almost no braking power left. My brake pads were completely worn out and it had come fast, which isn’t all strange due to the conditions we ride in. The road was flat, the shoulder wide and very little traffic so we decided to ride on to the next gas station a couple of kilometers away.

Changing brake pads normally takes a few minutes. 3 of the 4 took went just fine but the 4th got stuck and damaged. Instead of just throwing it away and take a new one I tried and tried to make it fit. When my fingers were completely numb I threw in the towel and took a new one which immediately fit. I think I wasted 40 minutes getting both cold fingers and feet to save the value of less than a take away pizza. Sometimes things has to be seen in the right perspective.

Entering Halmstad was simple. Our GPS brought us almost right on spot. We had used the www.warmshowers.org network for long distance cyclist to contact a local cycle traveler who were happy to host us for the night. We quickly discovered that our host Erik Olofsson had been to the same places in Tajikistan as we so we had plenty of topics for discussions.  Thank you Erik for being so kind to host two wet cyclists AND their bikes IN your apartment.

Now when dry again we look forward for an even longer distance tomorrow.

Some statistics:

Number of people who gave us thumbs up from their cars:   2

Number of autographs signed: 1 for each of us

Number of batteries consumed for our electrically heated inner soles: 2 batteries, two times each = 8