Prague to Bergen, the long way
(click on a photo to enlarge)
In July, four of us rode our bikes from Czechia to Norway. Our journey more or less followed the route shown below. Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen. We took a few ferries across vast seas, and — toward the end of the trip — we took a couple long train rides. All in all, we rode our bikes about a thousand miles.
Our crew was Wiley, Henry, and Orion, ages 15 and 16, and me, the paunchy guy on the right.
Recently, when I’ve traveled — and especially by bike — I’ve made a point of dropping into long conversations with strangers, and taking their portraits if they’ll let me. Not this trip, though. The people of Czechia, especially, were uninterested in making eye contact with a tourist.
More to the point, I didn’t have the attention to engage deeply with strangers. My body was maxed by full days of biking; my mind was filled with the antics and dramas and endless hilarious jabbering of these bozos.
Of the places we traveled through, it was Denmark that thrilled me the most. There was humor in the landscape, a sense of style, a feeling of age & cultural depth that felt both real and current — less preserved-in-amber than other touristy spots in Europe.
These are some fellow travelers we met in Gedser, Denmark.
Eating on a budget, the boys became experts at navigating discount European grocery stores. Lidl. Aldi. Rema 1000. I admired their very different approaches to choosing their on-the-road meals. Henry ran the numbers — how could he get the most protein/calories for the fewest kroners? Wiley, infinitely practical, would find himself a pastry (for comfort) and something vaguely nutritious to wolf down. Meanwhile, Orion entered the store with a sort of magical ambience about him. What would he find this time? A new flavor of Pringle? Salmon pâté? Caviar for $3 a jar? He tried all of these and many more, sometimes squinching his nose in disappointment when he finally got a taste (he tried to pass off the pâté to the rest of us, but he ate a second jar of the caviar with potato chips). I was impressed by the kids’ tenacity, but ultimately I had my own nutritional system — ice cream, chocolate croissants, a bowl of phở whenever I could find one, and a steady supply of “butter keks.”
On our first night in Berlin, within hours of our arrival, the boys met several Spanish exchange students outside a kebab shop. They hopped on a tram across the city. There was some romance, too, at least for a certain member of our party. Once I heard about it, I was impressed for sure, but also I was pissed. We’d pedaled 75 miles that day. I wanted to sleep. Instead I was drinking a beer alone in the hostel lobby, too tired to talk to anyone, waiting for the kids to text. This turned out to be the most challenging aspect of our whole trip: our divergent requirements for rest. Henry and Orion could go, go, and go some more, and when they started to fizzle, a Red Bull would easily iron things out. Less so for Wiley, who needs his hours of sleep. And me? All I wanted in the evenings was to shut the motherfuckers up. But often I felt lucky, too, to be in the presence of these overstimulated teenagers and their many discoveries. Each new city held its specific wonders. The graffiti of Dresden. Swimming in the canals of Copenhagen (the city pictured below). But nothing compared to their first hours in Berlin, because how can anything ever be as good as that?
Back in June, a week before we left on our trip, Wiley developed the worst case of poison ivy I’ve ever seen. Forearms and lower legs above the sock line. At the ER, he got intravenous steroids in an attempt to slow the spread; then it was prednisone for 3 weeks. Now we were in Europe. Even without the 70-mile days, the heat wave, the late-night carousing — just with the drugs alone — his immune system would have been shot. So it was no surprise when he came down with a cold in Berlin. He rested and then rallied, but a week later, after Copenhagen, the cold came back, this time with a banger of an ear infection. In Hirtshals, at the very top of Denmark (where there was no doctor who would see him), I had to decide whether to press on toward our scheduled ship to Norway. Wiley had vomited twice that morning, his fever going up. Now we were walking our bikes two miles to the port, but his balance was whacked. He veered widely and appeared to be a bit loopy. In a parking lot, I tapped on a driver’s window, asking if he’d take us to the boat. Neil, his name was. A Brit. He dropped us off and then drove Orion and Henry back to retrieve our left-behind bikes. Then we sailed to Larvik, Norway, where Wiley got antibiotics and slept for a day and a half.
Sometimes I was bored, sometimes lonely. Some mornings I woke and wondered about the purpose of travel. Often I was sick of my phone and the frictionless navigation it encouraged. I hated the boys’ phones, too, and the ways their cracked screens displaced boredom, allowing every destination to be experienced the same. I worried about humans and I disliked them, too. I was tweaking because I wasn’t making anything. But when I was on my bike — on busy streets or deep in the woods — everything seemed just right. In motion, I wasn’t worried about any of that shit.
In Oslo, two nights in a row, I hung out at a park that — in its ordinary liveliness — brought me a sense of satisfaction I hadn’t realized I’d been missing. People out in little clusters: couples salsa dancing; old Muslim ladies chatting; dudes getting high; young women cooking barbecue on the grass. At least a dozen different ethnicities. Old trees. Fiercely competitive ping pong among city strangers. Sofienbergparken, it’s called. If I could, I’d spend two weeks there, getting to know this park’s people over time, taking their summer portraits as the sun sets at 11:00 at night.
The original plan was we’d ride our bikes from Oslo to Bergen, but whoever made that plan must have been on crack. Instead, we took the train three hours to Haugastol, where we set out on a gravel trail known as the Rallarvegen. It was cut in the 19th century as the service road for the building of the Bergen/Oslo railway. Rocks, lichen, sheep, rushing water — that’s about it. We camped for two nights at Finse (my hammock strung between two rocks), and climbed our own route up to the Hardangerjøkulen. Wiley and I hung out by the glacial pools, while Henry and Orion explored the glacier, and I worried about them, because who else was going to?
Then: 21 Switchbacks, 3 flat tires, 1 road rash, 4 dehydrated dinners out of bags, 1 lost shoe. In a matter of hours, we’d descended over 3,000 feet, to the Aurlandsfjord.
We hated Flåm; we disliked Bergen — both cities oozing with tourists squeezed out of cruise ships like caviar from a tube. We conveniently assured ourselves we were nothing like those tourists. Also, we were ready to go home. The trip wasn’t perfect, wasn’t meant to be, but the floating sauna came close, and the leap into the sea.
July, 2025