Distance: 59.82km | Climbing: 281m – Click here for GPS Route
We enjoyed a late breakfast and a customary late start, not hitting the road until 10:20am (this was supposed to be a holiday after all!)
Back on the Kattegattleden, we enjoyed a relaxed cycle around the city of Varberg, sticking to cycle paths wedged between the town and the coast.
Once past Varberg, the Kattegattleden passes through the Getterön Nature Reserve, one of the most famous bird sanctuaries in Sweden. We stopped here for a morning coffee, enjoying the views out over the expansive wetlands.
It had only taken us just over an hour to cycle from our hotel that morning to the nature reserve. Nonetheless, we chilled out here for an hour savouring our coffee. I did say this was a holiday after all! Eventually, we forced ourselves back on our bikes and pedalled out into the midday heat of the Swedish countryside.
The next few hours were mostly spent following the back roads of the Kattegattleden along the main railway line north to Gothenberg. At one point, at Limabacka, the route did a circuitous 18-kilometre loop around a peninsula, so we straight-lined our way along some backroads here saving ourselves 11 kilometres. These shortcuts were proving invaluable as Elana was starting to suffer from the long days in the saddle having never done an extended cycle tour before, or much regular cycling either.
We continued cycling into the evening, taking regular breaks, but still aiming to hit the 60-kilometre mark in order to make our cycle into Gothenberg the next day a little shorter. Elana was in need of a rest in order to recover before our cycle down the east coast of Denmark, so we were aiming to take a full day off there to recover.
Unfortunately, being the weekend (and Sweden!) the hotels were incredibly expensive and the cheapest we could find was €85 for the night with a shared bathroom. With that in mind, we planned to wild camp that night to bring the costs down.
Thankfully we weren’t caught out like on our previous wild camping attempt, and there were lots of woods around where we could hide away our tent. We aimed for a forest on the west coast that had a track leading into it, and arrived here on the 60-kilometre mark as planned. We pushed the bikes around 200 metres up the trail and then went off the side of the trail, hunting for a nice clearing where we could pitch our tent.
We were very lucky to find the perfect spot, almost immediately. There was a large rocky outcrop sticking out of the hillside, making for a perfectly flat plateau that we could pitch our free-standing tent on top of. A more perfect forest camping spot would have been hard to find.
We set up the tent, cooked up dinner and retired to bed for a relaxing night before our final day of cycling in Sweden.
Irregular Adventures 