Italy

Gallipoli

Santa Maria De Leuca

Vieste

Vieste

Pack your bags baby, we're goin' to Italy!!!

Tomorrow my girlfriend Sarah and I are leaving for Italy.  Around a month ago I found a flight from Düsseldorf to Pescara, Italy for 20 euros round trip and decided to pull the trigger.  While we will only be there for 5 days, we should have a great time.  Pictures and updates to follow.

English Evening

English Evening is a project Brad and I have put together were we will be teaching specialized English courses here in Münster.  We meet every Tuesday night at 7:00pm for two hours and focus on the most important beginner to intermediate subjects.  If you are in the area, stop by Kiosk 24 at Hafenstrasse 24 in Münster and check it out.  Only 10 euros, what a deal!!

A video slideshow of our bike trip.

The long last day of the trip.

A trip like this cannot be complete without one truly crazy day, and for us it would be the last day.  We were camping 5km outside of Birkeland and we had planned to catch a 4:30pm ferry from Kristiansand, Norway to Hirtshals, Denmark.  It was only 35km to Kristiansand, so we took our time.  Brad did some fishing and I was trying to dry out my clothes.  As I set my soaking wet shoes out on some rocks near the shore of our campsite, Brad was casting for Trout when he dropped his new iPhone in the river.  He pulled it out and quickly shut it off.

We knew we were cutting it a little close when we left at 2:00pm, but still, we only have to travel 35 km.  As we began we would face some of the hardest terrain and definitely the hardest wind of the trip.  While climbing some of the mountains along the way, the wind could nearly stop us.

We arrived in Kristiansand with about 30 minutes to load onto the ferry, however, the port was not the easiest to find.  There was no street signs to guide us and when we did finally find our way, there was a festival going on in the city that we had to travel around.  At one point in the city Brad and I became separated and we took two different paths to the port.  While he was riding he needed to hop something in the road and when he landed both his tires landed in a tram track in the middle of the street.  It violently threw him to the ground (and a mud puddle) and as he picked himself up, he roughed up some bushes in frustration and stood up to see the ferry float away.  After missing our 4:30pm ferry we would have to wait for a 8:15pm ferry instead.

This would change our plan a little bit as we planned on arriving in Denmark around 7:00pm and riding for 2 or 3 hours, now we would arrive at around 10:30pm.  As we discussed our options we checked the weather report to find out that we would be facing a 35km/hr headwind throughout the next day in Denmark.  So with 70km to go to our destination of Aalborg, Denmark we set out to finish the trip that night.  We rode through the night with calm winds and with no hurry to get to the train station and after arriving in Aalborg around 5:00am we began our train trip back home to Münster.  It would be a very long day with us taking 7 trains and 15 long hours to travel but we had completed our 1550km adventure.

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Telemark

Before leaving Bovallstrand, we thought long and hard about our next step.  If we were to bike north to Oslo and then south towards Telemark, it would add at least three days to the trip.  We decided instead to take a ferry from Strömstad, Sweden and Sandefjord, Norway.

While planning this trip, one of the things I wanted to visit was the area where the Kittleson name came from.  Over the past few years I have learned that they lived in the Telemark region of Norway and they left for the United States from the Porsgrunn port. So as we left Sandefjord, we biked towards Porsgrunn spending Sunday night in Larvik.  Museums are closed in Europe on Mondays so we were unable to visit any museums, but we were able to check out the area.

After leaving Porsgrunn, it was time for the biggest decision of the trip, how we would get to Kristiansand, Norway.  By far the most common way would be to follow the coastline and major cities of the south, but we wanted a little more adventure.  It took about an hour of research but we had come up with our plan.  We would ride straight west towards a series of lakes in Telemark and then south to Kristiansand.  This would give us the chance to see more wilderness as well as more of the Telemark region.  While the total distance would only be around 250km, it would be much more mountainous and the most challenging of the trip.



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