Saariston Champion
------------------

## Introduction

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[1].

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.

## Arrival in Turku

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.

## Day one

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[2,3,4].  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!

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.

## Day two

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[5].

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.

## Day three

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.

## Day four

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.

## Day five

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!

## Conclusion

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!

[1] https://www.rengastie.fi/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/saariston-rengastie-kartta-2024.jpg
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/my-first-s24o.txt
[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/visiting-my-s24o-site-in-the-snow.txt
[4] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/wifi-in-the-forest.txt
[5] http://hearthstories.org/
[6] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/embracing-the-universe-like-a-blazing-star.txt

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