Remote areas and wild animals

I start in Sundsvall with a fast race down the city mountain and my biggest fear is that I realize at the end of the race that I forgot something in the hostel. But I didn't. The following ride is nice but not spectacular. This changes when I come to a point where my map with the route says that there should be a road straight ahead and where reality has no street like that. From now on I decide to find my own way. And that is not as easy as I thought. A new railway has just been build and many minor streets in the map are now moved or just end somewhere at the rails. Some of the streets I choose are more like paths and at a certain moment I ride a track that is not used by cars since the snow melting this year... Another one seems to be the old E4, the highway along the coast, with some rests of asphalt going straight North. Especially the tracks in the forest are difficult but also fun to drive and take me to places you don't see from the normal road.

In these four days I often leave the official route and search for my own ones. That's more exciting and I can do some short cuts. On Wednesday morning I see an elk standing on a forest track. It turns its head, looks at me in the same surprised way I look at it and decides to walk on into the forest. Wow, I never expected something like that. A few kilometres later I see five huge animals far away in the grassland. They start moving as soon as I stop biking, but through the binoculars I see that five impressive deer are fleeing. I'm thankful for these encounters. And I realize how many animals I already saw on this trip: badgers, marten, roe, mice, eagles and other birds of prey and now also elk and deer. It is amazing what you see when biking. Oh, I also saw a lot of snakes, but all of them where flattened fauna aka road kill.

Umeå (more, more) welcomes me with sunshine after a cycling day that started with a lot of clouds. And I enter the city via an old bridge that is limited to pedestrians and cyclists. I have three days off in Umeå due to the fact that I biked here in a day less then planed. My couchsurfing host welcomes me and I live for three days in an nearly empty dorm (empty because of the summer holiday). I spend my days discovering the town, relaxing and preparing an interesting change in my trip...

About the map below

To show you how I drove from Sundsvall to Umeå I included my track on a map. You can zoom in and drag the map with the mouse. I cycled about 360 km. The distance between both cities is 220 km as the crow flies or 260 km by car following the E4. The track is mainly as I cycled it and not cleaned, only filtered to a maximum of 500 track points for a more accurate rendering in Google Maps.