"A journey becomes a pilgrimage as we discover, day by day, that the distance traveled is less important than the experience gained." - Ernest Kurtz
On May 8th the Dutch bicycle guide will be published about the pilgrim route from Oslo to Trondheim: Het Olavspad (The St. Olavs Way)
How much I have looked forward to this, to bring you this wonderful news! These last weeks were full of redactions and checks, advices and corrections. Work on the millimetre scale. Literally! It is at the printer at the moment, but available for order in advance. My very first bicycle guide! I hope this is the beginning of many more to come...
This guide is presently only available in Dutch, but will be translated to English in the future. When there is sufficient demand, the guide might be translated to Norwegian en German as well. If you interested, please contact me.
Het Olavspad
Gudbrandsdalsleden Noorwegen : Van Oslo naar Trondheim
Fietsgids bij de pelgrimsroute naar Nidaros
A bicycle guide in Dutch on the St. Olav’s way. Published in a format that fits in a bike handlebar bag or in a map sleeve on top. It is spiral bound so pages can flipped over easy. This bicycle guide is in full colour, richly illustrated and contains:
Read more and start your order...
For all the North-German, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish readers who want to order the guide: I might be able to bring it along with me this summer when I go to Norway and Sweden again. Saves on shipping costs (See the part about planning further along).
And now?
Well I had hoped to have plenty of spare time to cycle the world around once more, or to the moon and back. But instead I’m hopping in between destinations far outside my comfort zone (but are oh so very interesting): giving presentations and interviews.
How ironic: I write about a pilgrimage on the bicycle, about the wonderful Norwegian nature, about rest and relaxation, being outside all day, feel the sun and wind on your cheeks… And in the mean time I’m on a desk chair instead of a saddle, I hold a keyboard and mouse instead of my handlebar, and see the wonderful nature through my own texts and photo’s on a screen in front of which I’m sitting far too long, for months on end. Yes, much too long! You know it’s too long, when you discover things are disappearing from the screen and you start to check if it fell on the ground… Or when you write with pen and paper and start wondering where the save button went to… Or when Remy called me “pestkoppie” (Dutch for bully in an endearing way), but I understood “Paste-Copy”. Otherwise I’m fine. It would be very worrisome when objects disappearing from my screen are found on the floor in front of my desk chair.
Interview and presentation
To promote the guide, I started giving presentations and interviews. These are all in Dutch but if you’re still interested, you can find links to them on the Dutch part of the site viagaia.nl.
What’s interesting, even if you don’t understand Dutch, is that I have an introduction clip of four minutes for the presentation on Youtube, which gives you an impression of the St. Olavs way by bicycle. I narrated it my self, but you can enable subtitles which are automatically generated, on the bottom right on the video player. Enjoy! (4 min.):
Planning
Meanwhile the preparation for the next journey is on it’s way, but it hangs in the balance if it is possible to go to Scandinavia this summer. The St. Olavs Way in Norway is a route on it’s own, but in the future it will be combined with a Swedish part and a route to connect the two pilgrim routes. Last summer it wasn’t possible to do the complete route because of COVID-19, so I keep my fingers crossed for this summer!
Remy and I have plans to cycle around too. A lot of them even. Depending on the developments around COVID-19 we made plans A to Y (yes, 25 plans are enough). More on that later.
About the newsletter On Two Wheels
Until recently I wrote this newsletter only during journeys by bicycle (as in Remy and I). The line between work and hobby for the development of bicycle routes is a fine one. Last summer I went cycling through Norway ‘for work’, but during that time the sense of being on vacation never left me completely. The writing about the journey was a logical part of the journey too, even though it could be seen as a form of advertising.
For now the newsletter of On Two Wheels will cover both the bicycle journeys and bicycle route projects for Via Gaia. Maybe the dividing line will become thicker or some other reason will come up to split the newsletter up, but for now I’ll leave it as it is. There’s always the option to unsubscribe if you don’t want to receive the newsletter anymore.
Warm greetings, also from Remy,
Gea van Veen