18 july it is just doing weather

In the last week there have been a few days where as I said yesterday , the men are separated from the boys. I am talking heavy rain and winds approaching storm in your face. I was almost blown off one off those arch bridges that connect different islands, they are 40- 50 metres high in the middle and have a little rails of about 1 metre high to keep you from falling off.
By the way the Norwegian s have spent billions building these bridges and tunnels to enable people to keep on living in these remote areas. on top of that they have hundreds of ferries crossing fjords, I crossed 6 in the last 3 days on a tourist route called route 17 ( www.rv17.no ).
I digress, the summer is hiding somewhere but I am not too bothered, my wife always says that it is just doing weather , we make a judgment as to whether it is good or bad and adjust our mood accordingly. Now that I am putting this in practice I find it easy to just cycle in whatever the weather throws at me, I adjust the clothing. Talking about clothing I can now definitively burst the myth of the breathable wet weather gear, it just does not exist ! The only time a rain coat breaths is when it is dry and there is a little breeze and it is not too hot, which is the time you don't wear it !
So no more complaining about the weather but there is plent left to winge about, my bike crapped out on me a few times although some genius in sortland has seemingly fixed, touch wood.
Then there are my fellow human beings, a few nights ago I found a nice camping ground and had barely pitched my tent or a young german couple arrived and proceeded to pitch their tent right on top of mine although there was half a football field available, no idea what goes on in these people's mind, maybe they are just very social.
Now I have to listen to this endless drivel about the setting up of a tent, it is as if they are reading from an instruction manual and they then confirm every stage with eachother as in : now we can put ze peg in the corner, okay das ist gut. Oh dear , he just said the wrong thing and she is pissed off, no speakies anymore, fuckin great ! He is still young and hasn't learned yet that after a long day driving through the rain she will pounce on you at the first opportunity.
An hour later I went to the camping kitchen to do my cooking and i open this door and am gretted with what looked like scene from a Bangkok prison, the one you see in druggie gets locked up doco's, where countless people are stacked in a little cell trying to find space and privacy while doing whatever they need to do.
This kitchen was 2.5 x 2.5 metre with one little window, it had 2 little kitchen tables in it with chairs, one wall was occupied with 2 sinks and another wall had to cooktops on it. There was a finnish family in there with 3 kids, one of whom was in a stephen hawking wheelchair, 2 woman doing dishes, a guy waiting with dishes en then me !
The men with the dirty dishes started to loose it, he put his plastic tub on one of the elements that I just turned on and then his wife came in seeing what took him so long, she picked up the towel and was going to give him a hand until her eyes met mine and I gave her the dirtiest look imaginable, out she went. In the meantime the finnishe father talked non stop in a monotomous voice as if he was reading from the Koran. I felt this rage coming up, the kind that you see in Mcdonalds customers when they try to stand out from the crowd by individualising their mass murdered burger with some extra lettuce and when things go wrong the go away and come back with an AK47 to settle the bill, that kind of rage.
Finally 2 nights ago I camped at a picnic spot alongside the road as is common practice in Norway, they don't rape and rob tourists they we we do in New Zealand, and around midnight this car pulls up and starts hammering in pegs right next to my tent, by this stage I am thinking my tent must have some pheromone on it , anyway he hammers away and then starts to cut down trees the whole night, this guy snored like nobodies business, frenzied knife attackes came to mind.
You see it is not always easy going on the trasvelling trail, and then I have not even mentioned the thousands of Campervans or as I like to call them Holiday Delivery trucks, we'll keep that for later as the experiences build up !