cycling where the sun refused to set

I'd cycled through the Lofoten islands before, some years back. I KnEw I would encounter 480 hours of continuous daylight in the 20 days I planned to cycle and camp there. Still, I was baffled to watch, as it neared midnight, the sun refuse to set. It would head for the horizon only to boomerang its way back up, as if changing its mind. Though I could only watch this play out on the rare cloudless day...

...the clouds and the rain. The rain and my not!waterproof tent. These were my constant companions, my first three days in Lofoten. A recipe for a disastrous trip. Yet I found myself smiling and laughing as the rain splashed down on my gray helmet, down my yellow raincoat, down my speeding blue bike. Cycling on the bottom edge of mountains that dwarfed me, with only the flat endless sea on the other side, I was as far as I could possibly be from the concrete jungle of my current home, Shanghai. And rain or no rain, I cycled on, with the wind on my back rustling everything, Everything, in its path and around me - all the trees and fallen leaves and stubborn birds. Everything, that is, except me, as I was accomplice to the wind, and we flew, smooth as silk, kilometer after kilometer as if inch after inch.

---

---