Thinking of Asian metal related music reminded me of Senyawa who are from Indonesia

Great band, on the more experimental side of things

What a beautiful looking drum. How does it sound?

Where’s the experimental music community at?

I had an old laptop that I removed the screen from and it still booted. Perhaps if your screen has broken in a way that the GPU detects as a hardware failure, it might prevent booting? Maybe removing the screen entirely might solve the issue? Or at least disconnecting the internal cable from the screen to the motherboard…

That reminds of this interesting article on the order of words : https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know

Yeah, it’s not unheard of for it to snow in London in March! Maybe not so recently, but it can happen. Are you camping? You’ll definitely need to plan for more layers, which means more stuff / bigger bags.

If you take the A897, look up the Marc Beaumont NC500 route. There’s a turning at Kildonan which takes you up and over the hill instead of going to Helmsdale so you can avoid the busy A9 for a bit longer. I couldn’t do it as the bridge at the burn was flooded so I had to go via Helmsdale instead.

I did the NC500 a couple of years ago so I know the North Coast part of your route. It’s great, Kyle of tongue and melvich especially. I did it in August though. However one of my favourite parts of the route was the A897 from Melvich to Helmsdale which is not on your route (maybe you could come back that way?)

Anyway i think it’s a great idea. Not sure what the weather and daylight hours are like in March though. Probably not too bad.

It’s a bit different there. I didn’t actually stay in a wooden shelter in Estonia for example, but the app shows official wild camping locations. The places I stayed were designated sites that had a fire pit, long drop toilet but no wooden shelters, so I just used my tent. Still a great system though, and much better than what we have here in the UK :)

I used the Danish Shelter app, and the Swedish one (Vindskyddskartan), although they are marked on most OSM maps too. The official apps have a bit of info about the camps though.

There’s also an Estonian one (RMK loodusega koos) and I think a Finnish and Latvian one too, but I can’t remember the names. Edit: Just found the Latvian one, it’s called LVM Geo on the play store.

My route was from London to Stockholm via the Netherlands, Germany, and the west coast of Denmark. Then a ferry to Turku, cycle to Helsinki, ferry to Tallinn. Then I went through Estonia , Latvia, Lithuania and finished in Gdansk. So most of the countries bordering the Baltic sea, but I didn’t go north of Turku/Stockholm. That would take too long to go all the way around the top!

Yes I usually did. The shelters in Sweden and Finland generally had a supply of logs which made it pretty easy. It was useful for saving camping gas which was running low, and for drying clothes/towel etc. Keeps the mosquitoes away too!

Ha, no that would be amazing if that was all I was carrying :) That’s three water bottles, frame bag and handlebar bag in the picture (and two small rear panniers not pictured!) Fully loaded bike at Latvian border