Norwegian Summer 2026 – Day 11: Haugastøl to Myrdal, riding the Rallarvegen, snapping derailleur cables

Breakfast came first, and I have to report that Norwegians put their brown cheese on a pedestal. Literally. There was a lovely tiered wooden stand set out with the spread, and the brunost had pride of place on the top tier like it was accepting an award.

Our new friend for the day was Swantje, from Aachen, Germany. She’s between two jobs at the moment and taking a forty-day bicycle tour through Norway, and she’s on day 7 and seems to be doing great. We’d actually sat down with her at dinner last night and just picked the conversation right back up over breakfast.

Turns out she’s a materials scientist who’ll be working on new foam glass insulation technologies. Cool stuff! She had a shorter day planned than us, so we said our goodbyes at the hostel and rolled out first.

The weather was moderately better than yesterday, though it was six of one, half dozen of the other: less rain, but a strong headwind. Just as we were set to leave it started to sprinkle, so we had our rain coats and gloves on, but no rain pants to start. It was about 50F when we left. Chilly.

The day split into two halves, riding-wise. The stretch to Finse gains only about 700ft over 17 miles, but between the headwind and the rolling road we definitely weren’t making great time. We arrived around noon and ducked into the hotel to warm up and drink a cappuccino. That’s when we noticed all the Star Wars memorabilia, and a quick Google confirmed it: Finse is where a lot of the snow planet “Hoth” scenes were filmed for “The Empire Strikes Back”.

After warming up and snarfing some leftover pizza from last night’s dinner, we pressed on. The second half would be more of a challenge, with rougher “roads” and other hazards like even more wind, rain, and some pretty significant snow to cross in a few spots.

A quick word on the Rallarvegen for the uninitiated: it’s the road used by the people who built the railroad back in the late 1800s. It crisscrosses the current Bergen–Oslo line the whole way, and we’d often find ourselves rolling next to abandoned railroad segments that had since been replaced by tunnels or rerouting. The main corridor is very much in use, though, with about four passenger trains each way per day plus freight.

The rain was worst at the highest elevations (about 4400 ft), which was also when it was coldest. We definitely needed our rain pants now; we were pretty well prepared, but still ended up with cold, wet hands and feet The best thing to do was keep descending, and eventually the rain quit and it warmed up. Eventually being the operative word… several hours later. It was quite the descent too, through a beautiful wide-open valley, the sun poking out for the first time all day. Things were looking up.

Worth mentioning that the Rallarvegen only opened up last week. It had some “issues,” let’s just say.

The terrain was really interesting up there. No trees at all, so the only shelter from the wind (straight out of the west) was whenever the route tucked us behind a mountain or a hill.

For about 10 miles past Finse we kept climbing. Finally, we crested.

From there we began to descend, more or less. There were still plenty of uphill segments, especially where the trail follows a flat lake and the trail rolled, but the trend was clear and we started making much better progress.

We were nearly to our hotel, around mile 35, when I heard Liz yelling for me to stop. She couldn’t shift. Sure enough, her shift cable had snapped. My heart sank. This is not an easy field repair, if it’s doable at all, and not being able to shift would end our riding until we found a bike shop. We already had train tickets booked for tomorrow back toward Oslo. So things were bad, but not nearly as bad as they could have been: that cable could have snapped 10 miles earlier and we’d really have been in for a mess.

Thankfully we were less than 20 minutes from our hotel in Myrdal (an interesting spot, a hotel served only by a long-distance bike route and a tourist train that descends to Flåm from the main railway station). So we could check in and compose ourselves rather than trying to jerry-rig a trailside repair. I did have a spare derailleur cable, but a lot had to go right to pull this off, and I wasn’t optimistic. Worst case, we’d adjust our plans, take the train back to Oslo, and find a bike shop, which with only a few days left in the trip would radically alter the endgame.

I went out to the bikes to do an investigation. I managed to remove most of the old cable, but the frayed head was still stuck in the shift lever.

To get the old head out I had to slightly disassemble the lever, but my multitool’s Phillips bit wasn’t quite small enough for the job. The hotel guy came to the rescue with a smaller screwdriver, and I got the garbage cable out of there. After that it was a matter of resetting the lever, then feeding the new cable through the shifter and the housing (one long piece), which miraculously worked. A mistake on my part added a little stress when we had to sort of restart the whole process, but eventually we got the cable wired in and adjusted. With no cable cutter or end crimper, I’ve got the excess secured with zip ties.

It may sound simple, and ultimately it was — a repair that wouldn’t phase me at home —  but I honestly can barely believe we pulled it off mid-trip. We’ll find out for sure tomorrow when we descend to Flåm, but I think we may have dodged another bullet!

Stats for today: about 5.5 hours of ride time, 2900ft of climbing, and 38 miles. Zero adrenaline left in the tank! Dinner was lefse, cheese, chips, and N/A beers from the hotel bar. Tomorrow we’ll need to resupply in Flåm and eat a lot at the hotel breakfast!