There never was so much trepidation. Not in my life time. Once upon a time it was thought that three zeros in the following year would cause digital systems to fail leading to chaos and doom but, when the count down to midnight on the 31 December 1999 came and we all welcomed a new year and a new millennium, time continued into the 1 January 2000 and nothing much out of the ordinary happened.

This year I am moving house and came across an old cycling journal from the millennium. It takes me back twenty five years when I lived in Oslo. I had a month Summer holidays from work. The previous year I had cycled around Iceland and became overawed by the North Atlantic island's wild volcanic landscape and had a strong desire to go back. So, in July 2000, I flew in with my Scott mountain bike and after revisiting much of the Ring Road, set off from a coastal valley in the northeast inland to the interior across lavafields and black sands. It took me eleven days to cross the island and when I reached the Ring Road in the southeast, I felt a great sense of pride in having achieved what is the longest and toughest crossing of Iceland. Once I returned I spent a fair amount of time writing  up a journal and sticking photos and maps in a photo-album. It was then largely forgotten about as the years rolled on until this year while sorting through  the clutter I had accumulated over a lifetime ready for the move when it turned up in the attic in a cardboard box, unopened  for almost a quarter of a century. It certainly  took me back to my younger self and this is what I'm sharing.

The Story begins in 1992  during an Inter-rail trip when I stopped in Malmo in the southernmost tip of Sweden and held a map I had got from tourist information of the whole of Scandinavia and pouring over the map thought what a great idea it would to cycle all the way north as far as the road goes. However a few years would pass until I did cycle all the way north to the North Cape and back during the Spring and Summer of 1998 during which I hatched the idea of moving from London where I was based at the time to Sweden. In February 99 I arrived by ferry to a snowy Gothenburg looking for a cycle messenger job. Unbeknown to me there was high unemployment in Sweden at the time and lots of Swedes migrated to Norway for work. Some one suggested I do the same. The year before I had had a windfall so earning money wasn't urgent. I waited  until the snow receded in April and set off touring, cycling across to Stockholm, then north into Central Sweden and across the frontier to Norway, eventually arriving in Oslo, where I did find a job working in the distribution side of Aftenposten the country's biggest newspaper, but could wait until September to start, leaving the Summer free to continue cycle touring in which I took the ferry to Iceland and the rest is documented in the following pages.