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ADVRider.com is a great resource for finding great people to ride with, to stay with and to make lifelong friendships with. Facebook not so much. S.A. Nancy is extremely good at communicating using various on-line media. Me, not so much. For this trip, S.A. Nancy was in communication with some people on ADVRider.com and lots of people on a Facebook page of the same name. From facebook, she had a long list of people who offered help and homestays. From ADVRider, she had a much smaller number of contacts. All but one of the Faceplant contacts that we were trying to meet fell through. One of these fell through at the last minute, after we had changed our plans specifically so we could work the homestay into our schedule.
The ones from ADVRider were far more reliable, all doing their best to accomodate us. Because of our changing schedule and the unreliability of FB people, up to this point we have only had two homestays, one from a facebook contact, and another from an ADVRider inmate.
The FB contact was gracious enough to offer up his Cat House even though he was not there. He apparently lives in a city and has a second home next to his mother. From what I can tell, he spends most of his time in the city, so the country home is home to his cats most of the time. Yes, Cats. What do you think I meant by Cat House? We were very grateful for his offer. It is good to see some FB people mean what they say.
The second homestay was a great guy in the Lofoten Islands of Norway. We were told we would be staying in the Boat House, and to bring our sleeping bags. We did not know what to expect. Our schedule kept changing and we did not know what day we would be there. Our host was most patient (I don't generally put names in my blog, so I will just refer to him as our host). When we got there, we were led down a muddy path through a cow field with two electric fences that had to be opened and closed. We parked the bikes next to the Boat House. Looked more like a Shack from that angle. This is what we saw when we got there. Remember, this is Northern Norway, it is cold and rainy this time of year.
The other side was much better. There were two cots inside, a wood stove, butane stove and kerosene lanterns. Our host had supplied us with wood for the stove and for the outside fire pit. Also water, some snacks and let us raid his strawberry garden. He even let us shower and let us do our laundry.
The weather was supposed to be rainy the next few days, so we chose to keep our bikes on a more solid surface, and our host was again generous enough to not only let us park our bikes at his house, which was a bit of a walk away, but dropped us off in the morning and picked us up to bring us back to our bikes in the morning. I cannot thank our host enough. He treated us very well and told some great stories.
