Sunday, May 16, 2010

Overnighter at Marttila

I've had plans for an overnighter to Marttila for some time now, and yesterday the time was right. Toni Lund had also expressed interest in this and this weekend suited him as well.

The summer just started a few days ago, so packing the bike is easy. I took some food, a stove, water, spare clothes, a short sleeping pad, a bivy bag and a small silk liner, but no sleeping bag.


Riding towards Paimio on the smallest roads I could find.


In Paimio Toni Lund joined me.




Finally the trails begin.


Soon it will be dark enough for...


...using some major lights.


It was quite dark when we arrived at the lean-to. I had been riding for 4,5 hours and 75 km. The air was very warm. Despite having a relatively low energy level after riding fairly hard I was still comfortable in a short sleeved jersey and bike shorts.

We started a fire and transformed our sandwhiches into delicious toasts.


At some point we went to sleep under the sky. A nice bonus of having had the eyes lasered is that now I can actually see the stars when sleeping under them. Around three o'clock in the morning it started to rain, and then we moved into the lean-to.

The next morning. We got up around 5:45.


The lean-to.


Morning view.


Breakfast.


We started to ride at around 7 o'clock. There were lots of boardwalk ahead.








Not everything was rideable.




Toni demonstrates his cyclocross riding technique.


On a large rock in the middle of the mire.


Soon after this we arrived at a dirt road. We were running out of time and decided to take the fastest road back, which for me meant about 2,5 hours of riding. We managed to ride maybe half of the trails in the area, so we definitely need to returns sometime. The saldo of this day was around 4 h 15 min on the bike and 60 km.

Just a few hundred meters before we arrived at the dirt road, my Thudbuster broke. The blue elastomer broke after four years of usage. However, the package contained several of them, so fixing this is a piece of cake.


A slide show with more pictures is found here.

Thank you Toni for the ride. It was a fantastic mini-adventure. Check out Toni's trip report as well.

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