This summer’s bike trip

I have now put together a final plan for this summer’s bike trip. In the summer of 2009 I biked around Iceland (figure 1) and last summer I biked the Westfjords and Snaefellsnes peninsula (figure 2). During these trips I kept a blog which you can see here below.   

This summer I and my son will bike the interior of Iceland (figure 3). The aim is to go north along mountain route 35 which is called Kjölur (green line on figure 3) and come back south along route 26 which is called Sprengisandur (blue line on figure 3).

We start the trip on Friday, July 8th. The plan is to bike across Kjölur in 3 days and Sprengisand in 5 days. We will rest one day in Bardadalur NE-Iceland. I will be keeping a daily blog if possible. That depends partly on access to the internet and power.

This summer is the coldest on record here in Iceland for the last 60 years. We still have winter in the interior. In fact Kjölur was only opened to traffic last week and they still have not opened Sprengisandur. I spoke to the road authorities today and they tell me that 13 large and up to 2 m thick snow banks are closing the road. They will attempt to clear the road during the weekend. It will therefor be very cold in our tents as we cross this barren and isolated part of Iceland. The roads will be gravel and rough and in some places the rivers are without bridges.  

You will also be able to see our location on the internet since I will be carrying with me a satellite transmitter (SPOT) which logs my passion every 15 minutes. I will post the webpages address for the satellite in the coming days.

The plan is to bike on averages 40-50 km per day. I am assuming an averages speed on these roads of 8 km per hour. This is probably an underestimate but it is better to allow for more time then less.  The plan for the trip is shown below. Last summer I wrote my blog both in English and Icelandic. This is to enable my English speaking friends to keep track of the trip. This is however very time consuming so this year I will only write my blog in English – thus assuming that most Icelanders can read English.

As you can see from the table below we will be biking between 5-10 hours a day, on averages about 6. The longest leg is day 3 (10^th of July). That day we will bike 83 km in 10 hours. In all we will cover 452 km. This is much less than last summer when I biked 1100 and in 2009 when I biked 1400 km. This however is all on rough gravel roads so I think this trip might be as hard as the previous ones.

One not of interest – According to the Icelandic radio the volcano Hekla is stirring so we might be biking with a volcanic eruption in the background!

Dagur	Leggur	Vegl km	Leið	Tímar	dagur	Vikud
1	Gullfoss-Árbúðir	43	F35	5,4	8	föst
2	Árbúðir - Hveravellir	45	F35	5,6	9	laug
3	Hveravellir - Þjóðvegur 1 Blöndudal	83	F35	10,4	10	sun
4	Flutningur				11	mán
5	Mýri í Bárðardal -Kiðagilsdrög	53	F26	6,6	12	þrið
6	Kiðagilsdrög - Nýjidalur	43	F26	5,4	13	mið
7	Nýjidalur - Versalir	56	F26	7,0	14	fimt
8	Versalir - Hrauneyjar	53	F26	6,6	15	föst
9	Hrauneyjar-Þjóðvegur 1	76	F26	9,5	16	laug
		452		56,5