Death of a Wheel, and a Night in Hell

The day after the Ho-down! It brought with it the 50 year storm that they were looking for in 'Point Break'. When sleeping in a tent the noise of gentle rain on your dome sounds vicious, so when we awoke to torrential rain, it was a fairly scary sound, and didn't inspire much movement from the 2 of us. After half an hour the volume of rain seemed to back off a bit, so we dashed out to have another crack at getting my rear wheel apart. Failing again pretty much planned our day for us. Now I had to go and find a bike shop, which would take a while, and would leave us with only a few hours of riding time, so a rest day was declared.
Whilst I kitted up for my day of bike repairing, Jon affixed my rear wheel to his back rack (in the rain, what a good friend). He then crawled back into the shelter of the tent as I started the ride up the now muddy dirt track back to the main road. The rain had penetrated through to my skin everywhere by the time I made it to the little town of Fevik where I found bugger all. I was then resigned to pedalling all the way back to Grimstad, which we passed 10km back the day before. I rode as hard as I could, knowing that it was Saturday, meaning the bike shop might not be open, and even if open, might be too busy to help me. But after an hour (with a bit of being lost) I arrived to find an open bike shop with no other customers. The other customers apparently deciding that today was too wet and you would have to be silly to be outside on a day like this.
An hour later I emerged from the shop with a whole new wheel. My original wheel had 2 broken spokes, which was easily repairable, but on closer inspection there were another 8 spokes ready to break on the next bumpy road. This was due to my chain jumping over my cogs at some stage and crunching against the spokes. So a new wheel it was, and then back to camp through the endlessly pouring rain.
Upon my return to our beach camp I found that Jon had had a very productive day, managing to finish off his supply of chocolate and the communal liquorice! It was about now also that we noticed a puddle at one side of the tent... that seemed to go under the tent... and out the other side of the tent too. We dragged the tent out of this now apparent low point (which seemed like such a nice spot for the tent yesterday) and found that Jon had been lying in a 4cm deep pool, which had been slowly seeping through to the inside of the tent.
The afternoon dragged on with me catching up to Jon on the chocolate consumption, playing some harmonica and talking shit. About 7 in the evening the rain stopped for the first time all day. We were straight out and into the open air, happy to stretch our legs and survey our surrounds. The amount of rain had been incredible and a lot of the grassy area above the beach had been washed away. The beach was covered in litter and the water was brown with silt and mud.
Back at camp we were thinking about dinner when 2 friendly ladies strolled over and started asking us about what we were doing and having a good look at our bikes, our gear and even inside our tent. At the completion of this snap inspection they invited us to use the kitchen in their rented hut which was just a 5 minute walk away. We met the 3^rd of their party when we got to the hut. They turned out to be 3 friendly christians from Oslo. So we cooked and chatted and went on our way, happy to be dry and have a warm meal in our stomachs.

The next day the storm had mostly passed. It rained hard just as we were finishing our packing and starting our ride, but that is something we have come to expect. As we were leaving the beach area we passed a massive cherry tree which was being weighed down with too many cherries, so we decided to help by removing a shopping bag full of deliciously ripe cherries to munch along the way.
The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, and for Norway, fairly flat. Arendal was the only exception for the day, being both busy and hilly. The water front town of Arendal was in party mode, with the national jet boat race series being in town for the weekend. Most of the streets were closed to traffic, so we had to detour up some bloody steep hills, and even this we didn't do well, as when we came back to the water front we were still in the middle of it all. We weren't going to cart our bikes back up these ridiculously steep roads, so we pushed through a partly closed barrier and followed the water front right through the media and corporate areas. We got a few strange looks but no one stopped us.
Later in the day we moved inland and came into very flat country dotted with little lakes. We looked to camp at most of these, but found all of them too wet from the rain the day before. Eventually we found a lakeside area that was steep enough to be dry. Camp was made and Jon collected some blue berries whilst I tried my luck fishing, pulling in what I think was a small redfin, which proved to be damn tasty. When we set up camp for the night we found most things were either wet or damp, including my journal and map. Even though the clouds were much thinner this night we still dug some trenches around the tent.

The Monday started with the collection of blue berries. We collected berries for an hour, ending up with about 1kg in the bag, and half a kg in the tum. We actually checked the prices at a supermarket and found that blue berries were selling for $60 per kg. Some quick maths suggested that we had picked over AUD$100 of blue berries in 1 hour.
Once riding, the day was spent crossing 2 peninsulas. There would be a beautiful downhill taking us to the tiny ferry piers, where we would load our bikes on next to numerous others and enjoy the scenery of the short rides. The ferry would then leave us at the bottom of a very steep climb to the top of the next peninsular. At the top of the climb we would be looking at nice gentle rides in the cool sun, slowly taking us to the next downhill ride to the next ferry.
During the day we passed through the small ferry towns of Risor, Oysang, Stabbestad and Kragero. At Stabbestad we arrived just as the ferry was pulling away, which meant we had to wait for an hour and a half before the ferry came back. Once we had climbed the hill above Kragero we found ourselves in a fairly residential area, with lots of small communities crowded onto the steep land above yet another fjord. We had to ride for a while before finding a grassy bank beneath the main road. The area was surrounded by houses on both sides, the fjord and private jetties below, and the road above, but there was good tree cover and we were hoping some friendly fellow would come to share his beer. No beer arrived, but we did chat to a few people, had a good dinner, got the bikes cleaned, tried to catch a fish and had a good stretch.
The community that we camped in this night was called Helle. We made many jokes when entering 'Hell', camping in 'Hell', and again the next day when leaving 'Helle'. This also happened to be the end of the second month since leaving Braemar, so 2 months after starting this adventure, I had arrived in Hell. We of the bike touring world are easily amused.