Norwegian Summer 2026 – Day 0: Packing

So today we’re not headed out — we’re packing for the trip that gets us headed out tomorrow. We leave Madison in the afternoon, fly to Detroit, where we have a 5 hr layover, then to Paris, and then finally to Oslo, landing around 4:00 PM on Wednesday. Today is Monday. Which means today is the day we cram the entire trip into a couple of bike bags and pray the zippers hold.

The big job was the bikes: getting them stripped down and boxed up into their travel bags, ready for the airport. In the past we’ve hauled them to the bus stop on the trailer of another bike (with Harald’s help, of course!), which is its own kind of fun — same packing, different way to get them there. He was up for it again this year, but we decided to keep things simple. Or so we thought.

Here’s the wrinkle — we’re car-free for now as we passed our car on down the line to family in Rockford. In a great orchestration of automotive conveyances, we’re actually planning to buy neighbor AJ’s Subaru in a few weeks, which he agreed to let us borrow to get to the airport. Well, it turns out to be juuuuust a bit too small for tomorrow’s operations; we got the bikes in just fine, but then ran out of room for, well, the humans. Great in theory, mildly inconvenient for hauling two bagged-up bikes plus two people plus my dad, who’s playing chauffeur. The bus was always an option for any extra humans, but it certainly added a bit of extra logistics.

As we were standing there doing the fuzzy geometry in our heads, our neighbor Brian came biking home from work, stopped to chat, and just said, “Hey, why don’t you use our car?” Theirs is a Volvo, a smidge bigger, and that smidge was exactly enough. We rolled the bikes back across the street and loaded them into the Volvo instead. Crisis solved by a guy on a bike. Fitting!

After this all went down, Liz and I looked at each other and said “We have such great neighbors!” and we do. Apparently it takes a village for Bliz to go on vacation. Josephine from across the street will be dog/house sitting for us, Emily is on tap to give Jules her lunchtime snack (mandatory!), my dad’s going to continue his walks. Wow. Anyway, I digress.

So tomorrow we’re all set — bikes loaded, gear sorted, dad on standby. That’s the packing done.

As for the trip itself: roughly two weeks of bikepacking through Norway. We’ve got a great family friend over there named Geir — he was Liz’s dad’s graduate student at UW-Madison some fifty odd years ago — and we last visited him about 10 years ago, and 10 years before that, so apparently we’re on a strict decade schedule. We’ll see him toward the end of the trip. Funnily enough, he’s actually over here right now watching Norway in the World Cup — their first time qualifying in thirty years, so they’re rightfully thrilled — which means he won’t be home when we roll through, but we will.

This’ll be a bikepacking trip a lot like our Colorado one last year, just (we’re hoping) a fair bit less remote. Colorado had us genuinely struggling to find water, resupply, and places to sleep. The Norway routes are largely gravel roads, but they pass through small towns pretty often and seem well traveled, so we should have a nicer time of it. The wildcards are a little lingering snow up high and weather generally — but weather’s always a maybe, so it’s no big deal. We’re packed for most of what it can throw at us.

We are bringing the full camping kit, although I told Liz I’d be perfectly happy never to unpack it — if we can string together huts and little hotels the whole way, fantastic. But it’s nice to have the tent if we get caught out in the rain, or just stumble on a spot too good to ride past. Either way, we’re really looking forward to it. We’ll try to do daily updates depending on signal and how things are going.

One last thing: I shot a timelapse of us packing one of the bikes, sped up 30x. It runs a bit over two minutes — so you can do the math and see it took me a bit over an hour. And honestly that wasn’t even the full ordeal; there was a fair bit of standing around scratching my head before I hit record. Boxing up both bikes ate the better part of the day, when it all comes down to it. Enjoy.

Tomorrow: airports, layovers, and the long haul to Oslo. We’ll find out then whether two bagged-up bikes and one borrowed Volvo were enough planning to actually get us off the ground…?