This post has been written half in the hostel, half in the train (I am taking the train during the day this time to see the countryside, not to write long blog entries!) and in rather a hurry (which didn't reduce the length), so sorry if it is a bit confusing...
Also, I will upload pictures some other time, but they will come, I promise!

Just a short addition to my last post: when I was writing it, I was expecting more visitors to come but wasn't sure they would come and for how long. They (a ringer colleague from Kiel and his girlfriend) came and stayed for several days working with me. It was really great and finally life at the bird ringing station was the way it was supposed to be all the while. So thanks for restoring my hope in bird ringers and making my Sweden-trip end on a good note. On the other hand, it was also the perfect time to leave, because it was getting really cold the last few days and the night before we left, snow was falling on the mountains!
After that, I must admit, so far nothing went according to plan: I meant to leave the station one day later due to a bad weather forecast for Friday, but - once again - the weather forecast had lied and the rain was only to come that same night. So leaving on Friday morning and trying to get to Trondheim before the rain starts and then staying in the youth hostel there until the rain finished at around noon on Saturday was the better option, as I would not loose a whole day and it would still give me the chance to get to the coast. So that's what I did and I even (almost) managed to arrive in Trondheim before the rain started. The problem was, that in the youth hostel they didn't have a free bed. The (unfriendly) lady there told me that probably everything in the city was booked out, saying that she already told several people to try the other options. She was so unfriendly, in fact, that I considered cancelling the reservation I already had for last night, but I knew I would need a place with internet and this was the easiest option. To be honest, of course, I have a very limited sample to base this observation on and it is not representative at all, but from my own experience, being friendly is not something that you would easily accuse Norwegians of, anyways. All minding their own business and not bothering about others, which isn't always bad either but still. So it probably wasn't just her. I must say this does not make the country more inviting. Even though I don't really like the false friendliness in, for example, the US, it does make you feel more welcome.
Anyways, I was really tired from the bike ride and had to discard the idea of passing through the city to find a nice and quiet space to sleep in the countryside. I was even too tired to go and try and find a space in another accommodation. All of the other options were hotels, and far from knowing if they have space at all, obviously the real problem when it comes to solo travelling is that accommodation other than in hostels is usually ridiculously expensive. So my best option was to find a quiet bridge in the city to sleep under. Which, eventually, I did. There were some pedestrians that gave me strange looks but it was better than getting all wet. In fact, after pulling my sleeping bag over my face and ignoring feeling like a criminal, I had a really cosy night, while the rain continued - as forecasted - until the late morning. Of course, in Norway and Sweden wild camping is legal, which is nice, but I don't think this also counts for cities, so technically what I was doing was not quite legal. Which is strange, because it was also not my preferred option of spending the night and so I had basically become a criminal without ever wanting to. Either way, nothing happened other than passer-bys giving me strange looks which I happily ignored. Since I had to wait for the rain to stop, I was also spending most of the morning under the bridge in my sleeping bag, where it was nice and warm, reading - markedly my book on critical urban geography and as fate would have it, I had just arrived at the chapter about homelessness. I felt very well understood there.

Well, I finally left Trondheim, as the rain had stopped, to bike towards the "real" coast. Trondheim is situated at the Trondheim-Fjord, of course, which, technically, is also part of the coast, but I wanted to see the open sea. I had lost half a day due to the rain and my knee hurt after the last day's a little bit too rough journey. As I said before, my bike is not made for mountains (this is not an excuse, the gears are just not set for this and I never bothered to try and change this as I had never intended to bike in the mountains) and obviously my knee is not made to bike through the mountains on a bike that is not made for that. The road along the fjord was nice but also hilly and quickly had to decide to reduce my planned journey. In fact, these past five days were really the only ones, along the whole way, where I was completely free to decided how far I wanted to go, only having to be back in Trondheim on Friday to catch the train to Oslo. For the rest of the way I will actually have to make sure I will get somewhere, which will be different. But for this reason - and because of the hills, and because of the weather, which - contrary to what the forecast had promised - was not so nice after all - I decided to not go on until the coast. I biked into the mountains on my second day and after going uphill for quite a while I decided I did not want to go downhill again and then uphill back from the other side, so I just decided to turn around there.
I slept under the stars for the second and the third night, but each time I was woken up by rain in the early morning, so after that bridges became my best friends and I just literally biked from bridge to bridge to stay there over night. Luckily, due to the amazingly huge amount of lakes and rivers there, bridges are easy to find.
Apart from the weather and unfriendly people, the landscape and everything else was really beautiful, especially as I biked along fjords, rivers and lakes all the time. I stopped taking pictures very soon, as it all looks pretty much the same but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable. On the first day I accidentally ended up at a bird sanctuary - I just saw a promising looking place heading downwards from a hill that I decided to check out and arriving there, there was a bird watching tower. No signs or anything that would direct you there but once there it was a really nice place with lots of information boards (partly even in English). I don't have a spotting scope, of course, and with my binoculars I couldn't identify much more than the white-tailed eagle that sat basically across from me, while I had a late lunch, which was already worth it.
I continued along the shore of the fjord, sleeping in the sand accompanied by some ducks and shorebirds. Also, on the second night I could finally wash myself again. I think the water in the fjords is not very slaty but I preferred to bath in one of the many rivers rather. Also, of course, the water in the fjord directly in Trondheim does not look very inviting but much more importantly, sleeping in public was one thing but I wasn't going to actually go swimming there naked - the police might have come after me still. Plus: swimming was not the best option anyways, because the water was really cold and it wasn't very warm outside either. But at least I was close to clean and I could even wash some of my clothes in the river. They dried after the rain on my bike once I continued my journey. I must also say that the rain there was never really hard rain, more of a drizzle - which made it not so bad to be outside. I don't think it ever gets warm enough there for real heavy rain...
The third day then I slept up in the mountains after a long climb an my knee hurting more. I went for a long walk there instead of continuing my cycling trip, which was nice in its way. I was also appalled to find that Norwegians just put houses everywhere. There doesn't seem to be any planning or anything, literally everywhere, where it is nice and where a road goes, there are also houses. Every few kilometers there is a sign indicating a village but houses are spread out much more evenly over the landscape thatn theses signs would make you assume. Accordingly it was also rather difficult to find places not only to sleep but even for a lunch break that was not right on somebody's doorstep. In the mountains it was different but for the rest, in that part, there is really not much nature left, which came as quite a surprise to me, seeing that the population density is really low - but most people seem to have two houses at least and they are very spread out so they still manage to ruin the whole countryside with very few houses. I don't want to sound too negative and I know that it is different further north but I was quite surprised that I had gone this far north and still nature was hard to find - at least close to a paved road, that is. It was all cereal fields and houses. It seems like Norway thinks that because the country is so big and they have relatively few people living there, they do not need spatial planning but I dare say it wouldn't hurt to have some at least!
Oh, and before heading into the mountains, I passed through a place called "Orkdal". I wondered - you know... But the people there looked perfectly normal and I should mention that in this very place was the only time ever that a Norwegian lady - seeing that I was lost - stopped me to ask if she could help me find my way - which she did. So... By the way: the Norwegian language is rather funny because I can mostly understand what people want from me, or what is written on signs, because it is rather similar to German and Dutch. So whenever someone said something to me, I would usually understand it, but I still had to answer in confused English "sorry?", so that they wouldn't think I could really understand them. Also, of course, everybody just immediately switched to perfect English when they found that I was a foreigner.
As it was raining - yet again - in the afternoon and night of the fourth day, I went all the way back to the bridge that I had found on the way there, where I knew I could sleep sheltered from the rain. I decided to stay there for two nights and not bike the fifth day but just walk as I really needed my knee to be better and I had gotten tired of all the hills. Also, it was close to the bird sanctuary where I thought I might as well spend a whole day. I also had some work left to do for university, which I could do then. It was a funny feeling that the bridge became my "home" for two nights. I could actually leave my luggage there and could bike to the supermarket without it. I biked like drunk due to the lack of weight on my luggage rack! I could wash myself and my clothes in the river and I could watch the tide come in from the nearby fjord. The water didn't taste any saltier - this time I tried. It was a big relieve the next day, to be able to take a walk with only little luggage. It was also a strange feeling to leave all the rest behind in a sheltered but still public space where theoretically people could go. Of course I had all my valuables on me but still. I have gotten used to leaving my bike with luggage outside supermarkets for while I was in there but this time it was for almost a whole day. I am a very trustful person - and of course, this whole thing would be impossible if I were not - but this is still a country that I know very little of, I didn't know if people regularly came to under the bridge or not and all these things. Well, I enjoyed my freedom and tried not to think about it.
Finally, on the last day, where I had to be back in Trondheim early, to be able to use the internet of the hostel and finish a lot of work I still needed to do, the weather was really, really good and warm. Of course, on exactly the day that I spent mostly indoors! I hadn't planned to spend any time in Trondheim sight-seeing as I had thought that I had already had enough of the city after sleeping under the bridge for a whole night. I rather wanted to enjoy the ride along the coast for the last time. I must say, the city looked very different and much more pleasant in the sunlight and I actually wished I would have had another day to spend there (the picture here is of the view from the hostel overlooking the fjord in the sunshine). But I had already booked my train so that was not really an option. And after all, it is still a city. I mean, it is special in many ways, for example as the rich can basically walk from their doorstep right onto their yacht but for the rest of us, it is just a city with some nice views over the fjord.
I enjoyed the shower in the hostel but not as much as I had expected. Interestingly, I also barely slept, which was only partly due to the fact that one guy in our room was snoring terribly. It seemed that my body couldn't sleep in a real bed any more?! I was really tired in any case, especially as it took me until 11pm to finish all my work (and I didn't even start writing this blog until the next morning).
I also checked the weather forecast for the south for the next few days, which didn't make me very happy either. But maybe, when the weather forecast is wrong when it predicts nice weather, it might also be wrong when it predicts rain. I still hope that it will be easier to find accommodation down there, where more tourists are but from my internet search it does not look too promising. But then, maybe I sleep better under bridges after all.

Just a couple more notes: twice I met cyclists that stopped to talk to me. One guy from Romania who lives in Germany now and has been cycling from Gothenburg to the north cape and back. We exchanged some experiences, and info on weather forecasts and road conditions. It was a nice chat with someone who knew what I was going through. And once, one of the many, many racing bikers around Trondheim stopped to ask me where I was going. He also gave me directions to get on a quieter road to Trondheim.
Actually, while this was by far not the only reason for me to turn around, on the day where I decided to turn around I had biked on a rather busy main road for several hours which was not nice for sure. It is interesting because, as I mentioned before, bike lines appear and disappear as you bike through Norway so you keep having to go on the busy main roads. Some cars are really nice about passing cyclists (well, they do so the way they are supposed to do by law), but many are just - sorry - a******s, stupidly risking their own lives and others' just to pass me without having to slow down, which will, in the end, gain them about two seconds - unless the kill someone on the way, of course. Nothing happened to me, luckily but I got pretty mad several times as cars raced past me without any consideration for either me or other traffic. This part didn't make my experience much better. Sometimes I felt like I wasn't allowed to go on the main road (basically a highway) with my bike, but then suddenly a bike lane came again or a sign for cyclists, showing me that, yes I was supposed to go there. Also, sometimes there were bike paths but I didn't realize that until it was too late to get on them. There were usually no signs and if there were signs indicating a bike path they never said where it goes, so sometimes I would rather stay on the road of which I knew where it went.
In Trondheim, on the other hand, there were some very good bike paths, but in the inner city cyclists are supposed to use the sidewalks (well, I don't officially know that but since everyone did I assumed so). This is both annoying for cyclists and pedestrians and especially so when you are in the city center (and lost). I never though that I would end up in the real city center since following the signs to the "sentrum" has failed to get me there several times on my first day in the rain but suddenly I was there and I didn't know how to get out of there. In case I haven't said this before: no so far I haven't seen any country in the world where cycling is even remotely as comfortable as in the Netherlands... By the way: walking is much worse than cycling still because there are also no walking paths next to the road, so I was still rather well off on my bike, in comparison.

And finally, just a word on the food: Of course, Norway is rather expensive, but then I also honestly never look at the prices of food, normally, so I find it hard to compare anything. But milk must be really cheap, that's all I know. It is funny that - no matter how rich or poor a country or its citizens are - milk always seems to be subsidised to cost only a certain price. I won't complain about this, of course, but I do wonder if it were not smarter to (also) subsidise vegetables, for example... I buy a lot of things now, which I wouldn't normally buy because they have a lot of packaging, but I cannot buy large quantities, especially not of milk products. I feel bad for that, but, well, I can't do everything. In Norway there seem to be a lot more supermarkets than in Sweden (or I was just in a more populated area in Norway), so I could basically go shopping as often as I wanted to. Taking less food with me on my bike, of course, makes it easier for me. So far, water was also no problem, as there are so many little streams with perfectly drinkable water, that I never worried about that. I never though I would ever use milk powder but my German friends had left me some and since I have it, I might as well use it. I must say, it is not such a bad invention after all, if you don't have a fridge and still want to have your müsli. It is funny, I never see many oat fields anywhere, but here there were so many, they automatically made me think of müsli!

I think, the weather is really nice here now (that I am leaving), but I also think that probably my wish to visit places north of 60° has been reduced to a minimum. I really don't mind rain - even if I have to sleep outside, if it was at least warm with it. But rain and 10°C is not really my idea of summer. But, I am headed south, so it can only get better now.

Next stop (with probably internet) will be Gothenburg and the ferry to Denmark in a few days. Wish me sun until then!