This post - the 300th in my phlog! Also the longest ever! - is a long overdue account of my experience riding the "Saariston Rengastie" route through the Finnish archipelago back in July of 2024. I wrote up the first four days of it later that July shortly after getting home, but then got distracted by other things and somehow it took me six months to finish it up! Thankfully I kept a brief pen-and-paper log of the tour which I could refer back to for details when finishing it off now.
The Saariston Rengastie is Finland's most popular cyclotouring route. Most English language material on the route calls it the "Archipelago Trail", but I prefer the other name one sometimes sees of "Archipelago Ring Road". Not only is this a faithful translation of its Finnish name (and also the Swedish "Skärgårdens ringväg", Swedish being commonly spoken in the archipelago), it also makes it clear that the circuit is a loop. I completed the loop in the clockwise direction, starting and ending in Turku, the beautiful former capital city I was lucky enough to live and work in some years back, and which frankly still "feels like home" to my wife and I even though at this point we've now lived away from there for longer than we lived there (it sure doesn't feel that way). There are a few recognised shortcuts along the route, but I did the full thing, which is around 250 kilometres (155 miles). I split it up quite comfortably over five days. If you want to follow the journey along closely as you read, you might find it handy to refer to a map:
=> A nice overview map of the Finnish archipelago
Turku is the birthplace of a lot of things quite central to my identity as "Solderpunk", including Circumlunar Space, my short-lived aNONradio chiptune show "Half Hour of Power", the Gemini protocol, but most relevantly here my love of cycling and also my scratch-built bicycle "the Franken-Peugeot" (admittedly the bike has somewhat outgrown the "Franken" moniker, with many of its original co-op-scrounged parts having been replaced over the years and, goodness, it even has some Nitto bits on it now, pricey stuff artisanally forged in Tokyo by a 100 year old company for maximum street cred). My original intention for this tour was to ride the Rengastie on that bike, this seeming only fitting and being something I always wanted to do while living there but never ended up committing to. Unfortunately that vision didn't end up happening, mostly for logistical reasons associated with the process of getting the bike to Finland via airplane from Central Europe. I took another bike, the only other one I own, the one I've made passing reference to in this phlog more than once (I think?) but still haven't ever written anything about. It's a Batavus Champion (hence the name of this post) from the early 90's, an entirely unremarkable entry-level steel road bike that I bought with no intention of touring on, but hey, it's blue and white, so very appropriate for a Finnish adventure, and more relevant to the decision to take it instead of the Formerly-Franken-Peugeot, it has a few modern conceits like "quick release wheels" which are conducive to travel. With the quick addition of a Tubus Fly rear rack and some slightly wider tyres (28mm Continental "Contact Speeds", called "Basketball" by the Rivendell folk) it served adequately as a somewhat over-geared "sports touring" bike.
While the planned distance on every day of this trip was shorter than I had previously ridden in a single day before, this was the first time ever that I've ridden that kind of distance more than one day in a row. You would think, rationally, that I'd have been nervous in the lead up as to whether or not an "easy" ~50km ride would continue to be easy after doing it repeatedly day after day. Instead, about 95% of my pre-tour nerves and worries were focussed exclusively on the simple act of getting to my starting point on day one. This involved taking a tram from my house to my city's main train station, two trains from there to the airport in the country's capital, catching a flight to Helsinki, and then a bus from there to Turku (unbeknownst to me, I planned this trip at a time when all rail connections between Helsinki and Turku were stopped for about a month to allow for work on the tracks). If I missed any of these connections due to delays, or any service was cancelled, or my bike was lost or damaged in transit, or just about anything else went wrong, my whole plan would fall apart, as I had accommodation for the whole tour booked out in advance.
In the end, everything worked out just fine, although it was certainly a close call. My flight landed on time but was delayed on the tarmac waiting for its gate to open up. When my bike, partially disassembled and squeezed into a travel bag, finally emerged on the bulky luggage conveyor, I grabbed it and ran, or rather did the closest thing to running I could do with a large and heavy bag awkwardly hanging off one shoulder, for the bus station, getting there just as the driver was preparing to close the final cargo hold door. They took it on board and we were moving less than a minute later. Two and a half hours later I was in Turku. I reassembled my bike in front of the Tuomiokirkko, the city's iconic medieval cathedral, and was relieved to find that everything seemed to be in working order. I rode it to the hostel boat I was staying at that first night. Not only had I planned this trip during a period of rail service outage, I'd also unwittingly arrived on the first day of Turku's famous yearly rock festival Ruisrock, meaning that accommodation options were slim. I had brought two pannier bags to attach to the bike for this trip, but they were empty while the bike was packaged up, and I had everything stuffed into a hiking backpack, one of the tall and narrow ones designed to keep the weight as close to your body as possible. On the way I discovered that wearing this, with stuff in the top "brain" compartment, at the same time as wearing a bike helmet makes it completely impossible to straighten my neck out, which was weird and uncomfortable.
After a lacklustre night of sleep (surprise, the people in the cabin next to mine came home from the music festival at 4am) but a solid breakfast (including four grain porridge, such a delight after slumming it on monograin for years), I rode to a friend's house. I had packed everything I needed for the tour into the panniers, and squeezed the now empty bike travel bag into the hiking backpack, along with a small number of non-cycling clothes, and I left the backpack with her for the time I was on the road. We spent some time catching up and I met her son for the second time, but the first time since he's old enough to speak, or really even be aware of what's going on. I think I probably actually left at around 10:30, or maybe even 11:00. This was later than I wanted to get going, as the first day was supposed to be the longest (around 65km), but really it was still fine.
After having what felt like a really lucky day en route to Turku, with none of the possible problematic scenarios I'd been panicking about for weeks having manifested, I almost had an extremely unlucky first actual day of the tour when I narrowly avoided being wiped out by an inattentive truck driver as I rode through a pedestrian crossing while the light was clearly green. This was such a terrible shock, specifically the moment when I realised there was just no possible doubt anymore that the driver hadn't seen me and wasn't going to stop. I yelled something, I don't even know what, except that it ended in "you dickhead!" (this was a little bit of a retrospective disappointment, as I can still curse in Finnish and a loud v-word was definitely warranted here, but I guess there was just no conscious thought involved). I swerved to one side while yelling this and thank goodness the truck served about a half second later. I anticipated and braced myself for the corner of his bumper to clip one of my panniers but somehow we actually entirely avoided contact. There can't have been more than 30cm/1ft between us at the absolute most. I'm pretty sure this must have been the nearest-to-probable-death experience I've had in my life so far, and while I was certainly in a kind of shock for thirty second afterwards (during which the truck driver did apologise and ask if I was okay), I recovered surprisingly quickly and this didn't delay me at all. I was a certainly overly cautious for the rest of that day about assuming that any cars would stop when they were supposed to, if that's even something you can really be "overly" cautious about, but it wasn't really very long at all before I was too far out of built up areas for there to even be crossings or roundabouts or other things where that was a possibility.
The start of the ride out of Turku and toward Parainen was very familiar and tremendously nostalgic, it being the same route I used to ride all the time when I lived there, on the way to "my" S24O forest where I camped in 2018 and also where I participated in the first ever ROOPHLOCH in 2019. Before long I realised that when reassembling the bike I evidently hadn't tightened the stem clamp enough because my bars would sometimes rotate forward slightly. I stopped and tried to tighten them again, whereupon I realised that the little ridge on the body of the stem which the bolt's nut was supposed to catch against, to prevent the nut turning together with the bolt instead of tightening further, wasn't doing it's job. I'm not really sure why, it doesn't look worn down or anything. I remembered then that when I switched to this stem on this bike I'd had to hold the nut in place with a crescent spanner while tightening it. I hadn't brought that spanner with me, having forgotten that detail. I really should have stopped off at the Biltema hardware store just outside of Kaarina and bought one to fix this then and there, but for some reason I told myself it was only a very minor inconvenience and if I was mindful of not leaning forward on the bars too much I'd be fine. This turned out to be wrong when I realised not much later that day when riding over bumpy surfaces the bars would actually rotate forward quite a lot and quite suddenly, and this sure makes braking a lot harder!
=> My 2018-09-22 phlog post "My first S24O" | My 2019-01-05 phlog post "Visiting my S24O site in the snow" | My 2019-09-22 phlog post "WiFi in the forest"
I passed through Kaarina and Parainen relatively quickly, being very surprised by an S-Market "Starship" grocery delivery robot along the way, and stopping briefly for lunch at a supermarket. Before too long I arrived at the first ferry journey of the trip. Two other cyclists took it with me, two young blonde women, probably in their twenties, who frankly looked like models fresh from a cycling magazine advertising photoshoot. They were on identical carbon race bikes, wearing identical aerodynamic helmets and technicoloured plastic wrap-around sunglasses (it was completely overcast all day, but there's some kind of weird eliteness signalling thing going on with roadies and sunglasses), sporting matching lyrca outfits branded with "Le Coffee Ride" across their chests. Maybe they were both on some kind of team, or in some kind of club? It was far too late in the day, surely, for them to have any hope of zipping along the entire ring road in a single day, which I know is a thing some roadies have done, but they were also each only carrying small ~10L backpacks which seems extremely light packing for a multi-day tour. Maybe they started out in Naantali and were doing the short loop which turns back at Nauvo?
Shortly after arriving on the archipelago proper, I was genuinely shocked to discover that, except for when passing through towns, the Rengastie does not have a separate bike path. Cyclists complete the route on the same big wide road as cars. There are very large and clear signs immediately upon arrival instructing drivers of this fact and telling them to be careful. This is the complete opposite of cycling in "mainland" Finland, where a big part of what got me so into cycling there in the first place was that you essentially never have to mix with traffic. To be fair, the very nature of the archipelago ring road means that traffic is not constant. You just can't drive for that long before you need to take another ferry, and the ferries are frequent but not that frequent, so cars basically come in bursts of one ferryload every hour or so and in between those it's pretty quiet. And in my experience the drivers did, without exception, show excellent awareness of and consideration toward cyclists. Still, it was totally contrary to naive expectations.
The weather forecast had called for rain on the first two days of my trip, but I was lucky and didn't get rained on at all while riding. However, this first day was windy. Really windy, just about non-stop, and naturally it was a headwind. The further into the archipelago I got, the stronger the winds became, which I guess makes sense as there's less land and fewer built up area to block winds. My panniers did an excellent job of catching the wind. Ordinarily, at home, I'd immediately cut a leisure ride short if faced with wind like this. On a commute I'd battle through, but my commute is short. So I'd never really ridden in conditions like this over a long duration before. At some points I was in my lowest gear, riding in the drops to try to reduce my surface area, but just grinding along at 10km/h. Leaving the ferry, I had fully expected the lycra twins to "drop me" almost immediately, but in fact they didn't pass for me maybe half an hour, and even then did so only relatively slowly. Not that I was actively trying to hold them off or anything, which would have been absurd on so many levels, I was just surprised and slightly gratified to have confirmation that, yeah, this was indeed tough going even for people who were better equipped for it than I was. Despite the strong wind and the decided lack of fun battling through it, I couldn't not be happy making my way through the idyllic scenery.
At some point, my cycle computer abruptly malfunctioned, first showing me absurdly unrealistic speeds in excess of 100 km/h, then going blank except for blinking "mph" at me. Oh well. Knowing I was not too far out from where I was supposed to spend the night near Nauvo, I just focussed on keeping on moving forward, even though I was getting pretty darn tired at this point. Unfortunately I got into a kind of tunnel-vision state this way and actually missed the (clearly signed) turn off I was looking for. I kept telling myself that surely it had to be just over the next little hill, just around the next corner. By the time I decided something had obviously gone wrong and pulled my phone out to check my location, I had overshot the turn off by about half an hour. I took no time to wallow in despair at this revelation but turned right back around and enjoyed a tailwind for the first time. Finally found the place I was staying a lot later than I had expected to, maybe around 18:00, quite tired and exceptionally hungry. Due to the failed cyclometer I don't actually know how far I rode this day, which is something of an injustice because taking into account the half hour overshoot and return I strongly suspect I may done in the ballpark of 75km, which would be a one day record for me if true, which I could be extra proud of due to the wind factor as well.
My accommodation for the night was a teeny little wooden cottage, just barely big enough for a set of bunk beds and a small table. It strongly resembled a "leikkimökki", which I guess is the Finnish equivalent of a cubby-house, basically a miniaturised summer cottage. I had rented one of about a dozen of these which were distributed in a semi-circle around a (marginally) larger building with a shared bathroom on one side and kitchen on the other. Surprisingly even my tiny cottage had mains electricity, so I was able to charge my phone. I wasn't sure at first whether I should take a shower or eat dinner first. Normally I would opt for the shower, but as mentioned, I was really exceptionally hungry by the end of this day and it felt like a good idea to get that taken care of. I had stopped at a small supermarket earlier on my route and bought a can of pea soup - classic Finnish outdoor cuisine and always what I took on S24Os in the Nordics - and some bread rolls, and I savoured these on a delightfully little picnic table setup behind the kitchen building on a raised bit of rock affording a nice view out to the sea. Then I had a shower.
Walking back to my cottage, I was very noisily accosted by a large dog belonging to a couple staying in another cottage four or five down from mine. They were travelling in a camper van, taking some time for themselves after the husband had left a toxic work environment. They offered me a beer, which I gladly accepted, and sat with them for a few hours talking before I headed to bed. During this time I was suddenly struck with really severe and painful leg cramps, which is something I've never had before in my life! They came and went throughout the evening, I guess the consequence of grinding through the wind constantly throughout the day.
I slept well in my tiny cottage! I got up to pee at around 3am. It was light enough outside that I could walk around safely without any artificial light. The horizon in the direction of sunrise was glowing bright orange in a thick and wide band. I had no trouble getting back to sleep afterwards. My legs felt just fine in the morning. Once again the forecast had called for rain from early in the morning until sometime around 11am and I'd been indecisive about whether or not to wait it out. But it wasn't raining after I'd had breakfast and didn't seem likely to, so I opted to leave earlier. I said goodbye to the dog couple when I left, or at least to the man, who was up having walked the dog early. As I left I stopped by the owner's house to drop the cottage key in the mailbox as instructed, and was surprised to find, at the bottom of the mailbox, a motley assortment of bike tools; a pump, a chain breaker and a single crescent spanner, all very basic unbranded no-frills examples looking, well, like they had spent the last ten years or more sitting in the bottom of a mailbox. I plucked out the spanner and held it up appraisingly, trying to judge the size of its jaws relative to the nut I needed to hold steady to tighten up my stem clamp. Just a little too big, perhaps? But I carried it to my bike, and it was exactly right! That problem was solved for the remainder of the tour.
I also did a factory reset of my bike computer to try to get it to behave again. In the beginning this seemed to help, although I set off without remembering to switch from the default units of mph to km/h. This didn't turn out to matter too much, though, because after not even an hour it gave up the ghost again, this time with all LCD segments staying stuck on. I gave up on it thereafter.
There were four ferries involved in this day's leg, from Nauvo to Mossala. I got to the terminal for the first one about half an hour before the next one was due to arrive. I bought some cheap and thankfully not too nasty coffee from the little kiosk / gift shop next to it and ate a banana I had bought earlier in the morning. There were three other cyclists on this ferry, one younger guy presumably riding the Rengastie solo like I was, on what I guess would probably be marketed as a gravel bike. He had two large panniers on the back plus an extra bag strapped to the rack over the top of the two of them, so I suspect he was probably camping. And an older couple who were on their way to the Åland Islands. They were not travelling light! They were towing trailers behind their bikes, the kind I am more used to seeing used to transport children or dogs, but they were full of camping supplies. The also had a tonne of stuff, in ordinary reusable shopping bags, strapped all over their bikes with bungee cords / octopus straps. It almost like they had decided on a whim to do this trip two days beforehand and had sworn not to buy a single new item specifically for the purpose but to just make do as best they could with whatever they had to hand. I saw this with admiration!
The second ferry trip was considerably longer than than any of the earlier ones. It lasted about half an hour and was the first one to have somewhere enclosed for passengers without cars to sit. The same younger guy from the first ferry was the only other cyclist on this one. We sat together in the small, rather cold below-deck area, but didn't talk at all. He was reading a Finnish translation of Sally Rooney's "Normal People", so for the first time on the tour I pulled out my Kindle, which I had loaded up before I left with the very recently released Summer Solstice edition of sundog Sloum's oustanding "Hearth Stories" project.
This day was still windy, but not as bad as the first day, and I felt like I was making better progress. However, in the afternoon, with only one ferry left for the day, I all of a sudden started having the very unusual feeling of my left foot being rocked outward once per turn of the cranks, always in the same point in the cycle. My initial thought was maybe something was wrong with the left pedal. The airline required that the pedals be removed while the bike was in transit, so I'd (obviously!) reinstalled them, and maybe one had come loose? I stopped to check and my heart absolutely sunk when I realised that in fact the pedal was fine but the entire left crank was wobbling loose on the bottom bracket spindle. This was an entirely unexpected mechanical problem and a potential showstopper. I had never even removed the dustcaps from this bike's cranks before, and I did so filled with trepidation. I had a bunch of Allen keys with me, and if the bottom bracket bolt could be tightened with one of them, which some later square taper cranks certainly can, I'd probably be fine. But the more likely situation was that I'd be screwed without a 14mm socket wrench, which I certainly hadn't brought. I prised the cap off with my pocket knife and, yep, screwed.
In desperation, I tightened the bolt as much as I could with my fingers alone, shifted into the lowest gear and pedalled along gingerly. The weird foot kicking sensation returned in about ten minutes. I hopped off and flagged down a pair of cyclists coming in the other direction, a German couple of perhaps around 50 years of age. They had a lot of tools but of course they weren't carrying a socket wrench, what lunatic would? I realised my only plausible salvation was going to come from somebody living on the island. I did another hand tightening and as would luck would have it very shortly after rode past a house whose residents were in the backyard near the open garage, and I could see multiple cars in the garage plus a dilapidated old tractor and old caravan elsewhere in the yard. Figuring the chances were good that such people would own a decent set of tools, I very apologetically approached them to explain the situation. I was met immediately with nothing but friendliness and helpfulness and was soon on my way again with the bolt properly tightened. They even waved at me as I left! It felt incredible that what had seemed like it might spell doom for the trip was fixed so quickly and easily by simply asking strangers for help. Between this and finding the crescent spanner in the mailbox this morning, I felt I was having an extremely lucky day!
One more ferry ride and I arrived at my accommodation for the night, finding it completely empty. I phoned the owner only to be assured that the door was open and I was going to have the whole place to myself for the night, as he was short staffed due to workers being on holiday, and he had to spend the night on another island at the other accommodation place he runs (where I was due to stay the next night). Talk about a high trust society! This place was a little unusual, it had enough beds to sleep something like 15 people, but they were all contained in just two rooms, one of which had most of them and, I dunno, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on had more of a "cult compound" vibe than a "cheap youth hostel" vibe. But it was actually really pleasant to have the whole building to myself. I showered, made dinner in the kitchen (instant pasta this time, with crispbread as a side) and then spent the evening curled up on the comfiest chair in the place, reading more of Hearth Stories, listening to the radio I had brought along, and drinking lots of tea. I had no trouble with leg cramps that night, thank goodness.
My plan had always been that day three would be a kind of low-key rest day. While most of the ferries on this trip either ran quite frequently or would come to get you literally on demand, this leg included one which ran quite infrequently, and I didn't want to give myself too much ground to cover before getting to that terminal, lest an unexpected delay cause me to miss a ferry. But I completely overdid it. I think maybe when planning where I was going to stay I had confused the location of the place I did stay with another one I had considered. In that case I would have had a ferry to catch before the infrequent one, but as it turned out, man, it took less than half hour to get to where I needed to be, and I was hours early. Oh well. I climbed a nearby observation tower and enjoyed a wonderful view of the surrounding islands. I was up there for about half an hour, watching a small sail boat slowly making its way past the island I was on. This was very calming and felt like it lasted much more than half an hour. I came back down and returned to the ferry terminal and found some suitably spaced trees close by where I could sling up the hammock I had brought. I very literally hung around for another hour, reading more Hearth Stories. Eventually the ferry arrived. It disgorged a group of roadies, one of whom was on hands down the ugliest bike I've seen in my life, some Canyon thing with (like all modern "high end" bikes) a freehub mechanism that was literally louder than a modern car. Blech.
This was the longest ferry ride of the whole trip, at about an hour, and the only one which it actually cost money to ride. This one only runs during the summer months for the purpose of "closing the ring" during the high tourist season. The website listed both adults and bike as costing 10 EUR, so I'd expected to pay 20, but in fact I was only charged 10. I stayed on deck this time, as it was warmer and sunnier today than the previous two days had been. Less windy, too! Every single day of the tour was less windy than the day before, which I was very grateful for. Arriving on the island of Iniö, I rode off in search of lunch. Just a few minutes after leaving the ferry, I saw another rider coming in the opposite direction at great speed, presumably hoping to catch the ferry I'd just gotten off before it left again in the other direction. He had four panniers on his bike, two on the rear and two up front, each one in a different colour! He looked to be, I dunno, maybe 50 or so, with a scraggly beard, and wearing a singlet, with very deeply tanned arms and chest, like he'd been riding around in that singlet all summer long. I gave him a little wave as we were passing, and he responded right away with a big, wide grin and tipped his head back slightly / raised his chin a little in that gesture of acknowledgement I don't know the name for. He had surprisingly white teeth, or maybe that was just the contrast with his deep tan. Honestly, he looked like he was living his absolute best life as a multicoloured velo-nomad. We didn't exchange a single word but he was the most memorable person I "met" on the whole trip. I sure hope he made that ferry, but then, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been too bummed out if he missed it either.
I had lunch, then bought supplies for that night's dinner (pea soup again) from the one small general store on the island. It was still hours before I was able to check in at my place for that night, so I left my bike locked outside it and decided to walk around for a bit, figuring that, this being my rest day, it might be good to, I dunno, engage different leg muscles, or engage the same ones differently, or whatever it is that serious exercise people who know the names of their muscles do. Unsurprisingly there really wasn't that much to see or do, but it was a pleasant enough place to kill time. I went back to the general store and bought an ice cream. Eventually the accommodation owner arrived (having spent the earlier part of the day back where I stayed the night before). At this place I had opted to hire a tent and bedding as it was cheaper than a bed. The tent I was given was the cheapest and nastiest thing I'd seen in a long time. My first thought was "where did you buy this, Tokmanni?", but then I thought "No, come on, don't be hyperbolic, it's probably at least from Karkkainen or Motonet or somewhere like that". Later on in this trip, when I was back into Turku, I actually saw the exact tent for sale in Tokmanni for 17 EUR! I paid 20 EUR to rent it for a night. Sorry for all the obscure Finnish retail references, suffice it to say this tent was in fact exactly as cheap and nasty as it looked at first glance and came from a kind of discount chain store and came from a kind of discount chain store. The ground in the area was surprisingly hard. I had to hammer the pegs in with a rock like a genuine caveman. The pegs were thin and soft and bent easily. Thank goodness the weather was fine! I slept fine, but sheesh, if it had been an even mildly windy and rainy night I'm pretty sure I'd have gotten wet. This place's one redeeming feature, aside from the fact that it was actually manned so I didn't have to make the breakfast I'd paid for myself like at the last place, was that it had a wood-fired sauna on premises, and I sure took advantage of that.
While chatting to the proprietor of the place I'd stayed after handing back my cheap and nasty tent and accessories, I was advised that an upcoming part of the route, between Taivassalo and Naantali, was "dangerous and boring", but that there was an alternate route, involving taking one additional ferry, departing from Hakkenpää, which would feature a lot less traffic as well as being a lot nicer. I was a little sceptical about deviating from the official route, but took a mental note all the same. I took off and before very long at all got to the boarding point for the next ferry, from Iniö to Kustavi, which on the official route is the final one. With some time to kill before the next departure, I bought a coffee and sadly rather mediocre piece of cake from a rather charming looking little cafe called Cafe Alppila. The similarity of the name to "Cafe Alpha" from Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou did not escape me!
As I mentioned earlier, each day of the tour was less windy than the day before and this was the first day that could reasonably be described as "mild". After the ferry docked and I rolled onto the Finnish mainland once again, I found myself riding at a decent speed pretty easily, and even shifted to my big chainring for the first time on the trip! This was the first time I really felt like I was doing something that might pass for "sports touring". There were quite a few other cyclists who took that last ferry with me and I was surprised to leave them all behind without making any effort to do so. I made it to Taivassalo earlier than I expected and enjoyed a very leisurely lunch. I felt a bit silly at this point as it was apparent I'd make it to my AirBnb near Vehmaa pretty early in the afternoon, and I was making such good time so easily I half wondered if it wouldn't have been possible to just crack on all the way to Turku this same day. Still, too late to change plans at this point.
En route to the AirBnb I passed a designated spot for swimming in...a slender body of water which I told myself was a river at a time, but which looking at a map now I suspect is maybe technically, I dunno, an inlet or something? Anyway, I had a nice swim which killed a little extra time. The AirBnb was actually a room at an "art retreat", whatever that is, an unusual and very characterful place converted out of an old school building. I was the only person there until the owner's family turned up later in the day, but the place is clearly designed to accommodate groups and was actually pretty nicely appointed. The showers were huge and luxurious and immediately after arriving I indulged in a long one. Afterwards I sat down to research this alternate route a little bit. It is in fact marked on the map, so I didn't feel like it could really be considered cheating. It turned out the ferry involved only takes pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, and I guess this means the roads afterwards are necessarily almost car free for a while, which I guess is the reason behind the assertion that it's safer. However, it also turned out that it ran in the direction I wanted only twice per day, once at 9am and once at 4pm, the second being way too late. I would need to backtrack a little on today's progress to get there, but only about an hour, so I decided to give it a go. If I missed the ferry I could just backtrack yet again and it wouldn't be any worse than if I'd left Vehmaa around 10am.
As previously mentioned, the owner's family were also staying overnight (in rooms at the opposite end of the building from mine), having a BBQ dinner to celebrate their daughter's boyfriend's graduation. They graciously invited me to join them, which I did, which was uncharacteristically sociable of me, but somehow on this trip these kind of spontaneous interactions with strangers felt effortless. Their daughter spent some time in Ohio as an exchange student during high school, and astonishingly had returned and taught her whole family how to play cornhole, which they had built their own equipment for and were just astonishingly good at. The mother decisively crushed everybody.
Got up and breakfasted earlier than any previous day and left around 7:45 before anybody else was up. Felt a bit bad about that after people had been so hospitable the night before, but oh well. I was making good time, feeling extremely confident that I'd make the 9am ferry and really looking forward to detour route, when all of a sudden I felt it. That weird little involuntary outward kick in the travel of my left pedal again! My mood deflated immediately as I realised the crank issue was back and any prospect of making that ferry had just evaporated. I was so surprised and so annoyed. I started walking the bike back the way I had come, toward a petrol station I had passed earlier in the morning, in the hopes that I could maybe borrow a socket wrench. I arrived there to find the place closed for another half an hour. So I walked the bike further, right back to the AirBnb, where I found the mother and daughter having coffee outside together. I hoped that maybe they might know somebody who lived in the area who I could borrow tools from. I didn't expect them to have any of their own, this not being their actual home and an art retreat not being the kind of place one would typically keep well stocked with tools, but to my surprise not only did they have one, but they let me borrow it for the rest of the trip! It turned out they actually lived in Turku most of the time, so we agreed that I'd leave it there with a friend who they could arrange to collect it from once they were back. Saved once again by the kindness of strangers, I really tightened the absolute mother loving heck out of that crank bolt and accepted a coffee and a second light breakfast before setting off again to complete the "dangerous and boring" final leg.
It's true that the road beyond Taivasalo was narrower and perhaps more winding than on the archipelago proper, but the drivers continued to display great attentiveness and consideration to cyclists as before and I didn't actually feel any less safe at all. As for "boring", look, there was no view of the sea, and of course no ferries, but unless you grew up surrounded by quaint wooden farm buildings all painted in the distinctive shade of red reserved for Nordic wooden buildings and were thereby inoculated against their charm, it could hardly be described as boring! I enjoyed the scenery just fine.
During planning I had somehow overlooked that there are actually two alternate routes for this final leg of the ring even if you aren't taking the car-free ferry detour. You can stick closer to the water and pass through Askiainen, Merimaksu and Naantali on your way to Turku, or you can take a more direct route through Raisio. I opted, of course, for the less direct route, because I'd ridden between Turku and Raisio before more than once back when I lived there but never between Turku and Naantali, and anyway, Naantali is kind of the quintessential archipelago tourist town. But the difference in length between these two routes is actually fairly substantial, and the distance I had planned on covering for my final day was based, without my realising it, on Google Maps defaulting to the shorter and more direct route, so I think this day ended up being something like 65km.
There was almost no wind on this day but it was really pretty sunny and quite warm, so the ride didn't feel quite as effortless as the day before, but it still proceeded without incident. The approach toward Naantali was a lot hillier than I expected! I had planned to hold off until I got there to have lunch, but eventually I was so hungry and ready for a rest that I had to give in and stopped at a gigantic K-Market just a little outside of town, eating my lunch on a little wooden bench outside with absolutely zero protection from the sun. I left again and I was in Naantali so shortly afterwards that it retrospectively felt silly not to have just pushed through, but I'm pretty sure that I in fact needed it. I stopped in Naantali anyway in the hopes that I could get a decent coffee, but for such a touristy place this proved surprisingly difficult. I was reminded that the Finns did not attain the title of highest per capita coffee consumption in the world by virtue of being choosy when I entered a cafe with quite high Google reviews and saw they only had one of those fully automated push-button coffee machines! Oh well.
The final stretch from Naantali to Turku was, in fact, actually pretty boring. At this point I basically stopped paying attention to Google Maps and was able to just follow signs. As a happy coincidence the route I ended up taking lead me through our old neighbourhood and right past our old house. I arrived triumphantly back in front of the Tuomiokirkko where I had assembled my bike six days earlier at about 15:45!
I had an absolute blast on this trip! I was very lucky with the weather, wind aside. I never got lost, although to be fair it's not the kind of route where you could reasonable get lost. Apart from the leg cramps on the first evening I had no trouble whatsoever being able to ride day after day and I feel like I could have kept up the same average daily pace up for longer, no worries. The simple lifestyle in the evenings of eating basic food, reading, keeping a log book, listening to the radio and just enjoying the scenery suited me extremely well. Eating supermarket baked goods and fruit for lunch was also, honestly, just great. I am not a foodie!
The bike I rode performed just fine. I had no punctures the entire trip. The mysterious failure of my cyclocomputer was the only technical problem which I wasn't able to solve, although I certainly had some luck with being able to borrow tools to address that weirdly loosening left crank. After getting home, I tightened that bolt up with the proper full-size flex-head 14mm socket wrench that own specifically for this purpose. I assume the reason the first on-road repair didn't hold is that the wrench I borrowed was a smallish one, the kind with exchangeable socket heads, and I just couldn't get as much torque as I needed. Since tightening it at home, it has never come loose again, even after a fairly spirited 70km or so ride I took with a friend later in the year. Nevertheless, I will never travel far from home without that tool in future just to be safe.
When I first announced that I was going to make this tour, I said that I hoped to prove true the claim of Sheldon Brown that "singlespeed touring is not as goofy an idea as it might sound at first blush". As it turned out I didn't end up doing that with somewhat last minute change of plans with regard to which bike I'd take after realising that disassembling the Formerly-Franken-Peugeot to the point that it would fit comfortably in an airline approved bag and then reassembling it would be rather a pain. In retrospect...I'm kind of glad it went this way. That first day with strong non-stop headwinds was brutal and I'd have been absolutely wrecked trying to ride it on the FFP, which I think is locked in at somewhere around 62 gear inches. I'm still kind of committed in principle to singlespeed touring being viable, but goodness, you really have to gear down a bit to be ready for all possibilities.
Transporting my bike by plane both ways using a cheap unpadded bag worked out fine, but I don't think I'll ever do it again. I mean, I'm trying to cut down on flying with or without bikes, and 2025 is locked in as a flight-free year for my wife and I. But beside the environmental concerns, even though it worked out fine this trip, it was extremely stressful for the simple reason that it so easily could not have, and, if I kept doing it, I'm sure it inevitably would. I definitely want to do more trips like this in future, but the train network here is extremely bicycle friendly so I will just take advantage of that. I don't have solid plans for when or where to go next, but when I do, you'll hear about it!
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