Wow, that's a hell of a trip! Hats off to you. You must have had an arse of concrete by the end
It was a hell of a trip! We wild camped virtually the entire 13 weeks, which is easy to do in Scandinavia, only stopping in suburban Oslo (Nordberg) to spend 3 days at the home of our friends Oyvind and Berit, and at a way cool campground in Hellerup, Denmark preparing for our departure back to the States. The cycling was fabulous, especially in Norway, and we rode though countless tunnels there (including several of the undersea variety), over many, many vast bridges, around numerous fiords, and across heaps of stunning islands. We benefitted from being there during the mildest and driest summer in quite an extended number of years and at a time when the U.S. dollar was particularly strong. Nothing against the other 3 nations but, if I were to return, I'd allot all my holiday making to Norway: that country is analogous to one huge National Park! As it was, 51 of the 91 days were spent in Norge. It was hardcore travel in some respects, especially when compared to the several other long-distance independent bike tours we've done in other parts of the world but pretty tame compared to extended winter ski tours in Sarek and Hardangervidda! For instance, one of our biggest challenges was starting early enough in Helsinki in order to travel through the majority of Lapland before the peak of the insect hatch.
As
@Smear stated upthread, we didn't travel through polar bear country. Norway is home to a sizable polar bear population but they are located in Svalbard/Spitsbergen, an archipelago situated over 800 kilometers north of the northernmost reaches of the Norwegian mainland. We did travel through European brown bear (cousin of the North American grizzly) country in Finland and, to a much lesser extent, in far northeastern Norway but took the usual precautions we take when doing so in western Canada and the U.S. That doesn't include bringing a gun along. The North American bear population dwarfs that of Scandinavia, where they were once hunted to near extinction many, many years ago but have been making a comeback over the past several decades. I believe many have crossed the Russian - Finnish border and gradually spread westward repopulating prior habitat.
