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The last few family vacations have been in Hawaii, so we decided to do something different this time and go to Iceland. Kristin, our nanny, grew up there and planned her vacation there at the same time, so we had a friend to visit. Day 1: Arrive Reykjavík.
We arrived in the airport around 7 am, having left California at 7 am the previous day. We dragged ourselves to the hotel and slept a few hours, awaking in the midafternoon, and strolled downtown. Reykjavík is a nice, walkable town of 250,000 or so. Our neighborhood, about 1 km from downtown, is full of large housing blocks ranging from nice old stone buildings to gray concrete blocks. In the evening we decided to go swimming, a popular activity here and just the thing to tire the kids out so they'd sleep. We asked the hotel clerk for directions to a pool since it was outside the range of our guidebook map. She spoke English well enough, but her directions were ridiculous. Her: "You follow this road until you cross a large bridge. There are a few bridges, but you look for one larger than the others. Then you see on the left a brown house. Actually it is a bank now. Then you turn right. I don't remember the name of the road. Then you turn left, and right, and left -- something like that. Then you should see signs." I was happy enough to proceed on these directions, but Laurie was doubtful. In the end we had to ask again, not having recognized any of the landmarks. We identified the brown "house" on the way back, a large 5-story office building. The pool had a dozen different areas, some with hot water, some for lane swimming, and some shallow areas for kids. There were a couple of waterslides and basketball nets. Most of the people seemed local. At least, they all looked Icelandic and I heard no English. Man, they just let it all hang out here. My bathing trunks covered far more than anyone else's, including the women. The countryside is lovely here. Rolling green hills with cattle grazing, big green mountains in the distance, streams and rocky crags everywhere. You can see why the Vikings found this a good place to settle. A tourist pamphlet refers to the Icelandic horse, brought here in 900 AD and kept of pure stock since. Viking ships were basically large canoes with single square-rigged sails, 40 feet long and wide enough to sit two across. I can't quite picture how you get horses across the ocean on such a thing. The horses are small for horses, but still. Do you bring an adult horse, which may put up with being restrained for many days, or a colt which is smaller but energetic? Towards 11 pm "night" fell. The sun was below the horizon, but it wasn't really very dark. The
watery blue color is really pleasant. I think it reminds me of winters in Canada. Very different
from California sunshine. We stayed up until midnight, when it started getting perceptibly lighter.
Day 2: Reykjavík
I like the Icelandic languages because of its echoes of Old English. "Togið" say the doors. Tuggeth. The Germanic roots of English are so much more pleasing than the Latinate roots. The bad thing about Icelandic is that it has the maximum amount of gender agreement. It's worse than German, because numbers have to agree with the object and greetings must agree with the gender of the person you're greeting, so you have to guess right (less of a problem here than in San Francisco.) The object that things agree with is sometimes implicit, so for example if you ask for three coffees you are implicitly asking for three cups [accusative case] of coffee [dative case], and it is the gender of the unspoken cup with which the number must agree. Unlike in French, they insist that accented letters are different letters than without accents, and they are alphabetized separately. I've tried to put in all the necessary accents in place names. We drove East to see Geyser (the namesake of all others.) The geyser named Geyser itself has fizzled, but one nearby erupted satisfyingly every 10 minutes. Later we went to Gullfoss, a large and beautiful waterfall. At both places the kids hiked and climbed their little hearts out. They probably climbed 300 feet up at Geyser and 100 at Gullfoss. Both sites were nicely unstructured. No admission fees, and minimal safety barriers. The associated restaurants were frightful: $7 for a baloney and Cheez Whiz on Wonderbread sandwich. We should remember to pack food when touring. At Geyser there were several pools with water ranging from tepid to boiling. The hot ones seemed to have tubes going quite deep, lined with a remarkable celadon color. The running water left orange streaks from iron. There was warm to hot water running everywhere. After Gullfoss, we headed toward a small glacier marked on the map. The road got narrower and bumpier until (after a sign saying 4x4s only) it became little more than a grader track through the volcanic rubble. The character of the track changed as often as every few hundred feet as it wound through different layers of rock. Our Suzuki 4x4 did quite well. We were able to blast along the bumpy road at 60 km/h, and fjorded a stream 18 inches deep. (I'm surprised to learn that the word fjord is not Icelandic. Vað is their word.) At the end of an hour's drive on the road (made entirely of bumps, as we told the kids, since they ran out of flat bits) we came to a big open area with a stream at the end of it. About a mile beyond the stream was a hill which looked like it might be the rim of a glacier. We drove up to the stream, but it looked too deep to fjord in the Suzuki. I stepped in and it went up to my knees on the second step, so I decided not to risk it, especially on our own 30 miles from civilization. But Laurie bravely fjorded it on foot (getting soaked up to the knees in her jeans) and walked up to the top of the rim while I stayed in the car with the sleeping kids. There was a narrow but very deep (100 foot drop) waterfall there, but no glacier. Disappointed, Laurie came back, fjording the stream again. Her boots and jeans were soaking, so she took off her pants and rode in her underwear. We put her socks over the defroster vents which dried them after an hour. Then we decided we were hungry enough to want to eat before we got back to our hotel, but of course Laurie had no pants to wear into a restaurant. We had the idea to stick her pants out of the window with the window closed on the waist to hold them. It worked OK, but they flapped violently against the rear passenger window and we were afraid it would crack it. In the end we made it back to the hotel and had dinner there. The kids (Stephen especially) were utterly amused by Laurie's pantslessness. You'd think that after 2 hours they would run out of pants jokes, but no. Example: "We'll tell people we went to Iceland and saw London, France, and mommy's underpants." Max kept saying "Bad pants! Bad pants!" This is probably what they'll remember from the trip. At Geyser we saw a family of four hitchhiking: two parents and two kids around 12 and 16, and about 8 large dufflebags. They were still there when we came back past that point 2 hours later. Who would have space for them? Day 3: ReykjavíkI took the morning off by myself and went downtown. I had a latte and kleina (unsweetened cinnamon doughnut) in a coffee shop and read, then did the same at another coffee shop, then sat on a bench and read. Very pleasant. In the park, work crews were maintaining the gardens and trees. Unlike in the US, they were all women. The dynamic was different. In the US, crews alternate working and leaning on shovels and watching, while here the young women worked in pairs, sitting down and chatting while they did whatever they were doing. I think in the US, more would be done with big machines rather than hands. Not because it's more efficient, but because running big machines is fun. As elsewhere in Europe, the service workers are clean-cut and well spoken and probably well educated. I can't decide whether this is a great virtue, or a waste of human potential. In the US, people rarely seem overqualified for their jobs. Generally the opposite. On the way downtown was a building with a dozen businesses each with "studenta" in the name. All were closed at 9 am, though the building was unlocked. The folks on the street and in cafes around 9 am looked rather bleary. The kids slept until 11:30. Then we took them to a park with a bunch of rides, many motorized. They had a pretty good time and are thoroughly tired. The best one was some kid-sized construction equipment, backhoes with real hydraulic power. The pressure was limited so they were fairly safe. But overall, there was much less concern for safety than in the US. The children seemed quieter but about equally rude as American kids.
I was out in the sun all day without sunscreen, and have no sunburn. In California I'd have roasted. The kids (fairer than me) seem OK too. It's surprisingly little problem not to speak the same language as most people. The kids just blab away to other kids, and never seem to notice that they don't understand. Max keeps saying, "Is this Iceland? Let's go to Iceland." In the movie The Iron Giant, the title robot is said to have landed (in pieces) in Iceland. Max keeps expecting to see him. I pointed out some iron (red ore) deposits to Stephen and Max was like, "The Iron Giant??? Where?" Judging from Laurie's side of a phone conversation with the people from whom we're renting our cottage, they seem to be saying something like, "just head up route 82 and you'll see it. A big wood house on the right." Day 4: Reykjavík to Akureyri
Out in the country, it looks less like Ireland. The colors are less lush, with more reds and purples of desert flowers. There are lots of nice new houses. We just passed one with a large modern art stainless steel sculpture out front. About 6 feet tall, in a sort of 3D letter H shape. We went through a tunnel that must have been 4 km long, down a couple hundred feet under the ocean. It makes a nice shortcut, but costs 1000 ISK ($14.) We saw a stallion and a mare, er, playing leapfrog in a pasture by the side of the road. Or that's what we told the kids. They make babies by playing leapfrog. Stephen: "Oh -- you're joking!" There are horses everywhere here, all recognizably the Icelandic ponies. I imagine the government must regulate against the introduction of other breeds. Laurie says they look like stockier Morgans. We went to a party for Christine's sister and brother-in-law at her sister's place. We chose our seat randomly, but the folks around us spoke good English. The fellow across from us, Jonas, is a high school geography teacher so he gave us some pointers to good scenery. We're planning to go to Mývatn (pronounced Mee'watn) tomorrow. As apparently is common at parties here, they sang songs to well-known tunes with words provided on cards at each place setting. I don't think they were original, but no attribution was given. It was easy enough to follow along, though I understood little. One song was about the pain of learning Danish and had one verse that was Danish grammar exercises. Everyone sang along in rhythm with no apparent difficulty. Most people here of our parents' generation speak Icelandic, Danish, and English. Danish is less common since independence, but they still learn 3 languages, the third now being either French or German. After the meal, toothpicks were brought out with some ceremony. Then we trooped into the house for coffee (liqueurs, mostly, coffee being in short supply here.) According to the guidebook, it's de rigueur to remove shoes when entering someone's house, but everyone here kept them on. There was a baby stroller outside the front door as we entered the party, but we thought nothing of it. Later it turned out that the baby was sleeping in it. They say they normally let babies nap outside, whatever the weather, because it has always been done that day. Day 5: Akureyri
A quiet family day. We slept in, went hot-tubbing. I was feeling under the weather, so Laurie took the kids to the park while I dropped off our laundry at a hotel (we couldn't find a Laundromat) and got food at the local "Bonus Pig" market. I got some packaged meat that I couldn't identify from the Icelandic. It tasted like pork chops with paprika seasoning. After dinner I translated the name (Rauðvínlegna) as "red wine uterus," so I'm glad I waited. Every little farm and cluster of houses in Iceland is named on the map. We got a detailed map, but it marks our place Ýtrivík) incorrectly, 40 km north of where it really is, so I have about as much confidence in it as in my translations. The place we're staying in gets most of its rustic character from cheap construction. It's all knotty pine: the walls, the doors, the door frames, the floors. They provide no sound isolation. The curtains do little to keep out the light. At first I was annoyed by this, but it's actually a nice part of the Iceland experience to have light at night. I sleep fine anyway. The view is spectacular. Across the clear blue bay are snow-capped mountains (1000 M high according to the map) and all is green and lovely. It's nice to sit in the hot tub and admire the view. Hot water is cheap here. They don't even seem to meter it. Our cabin has an elaborate water system with several gauges and knobs. The hot tub is continuously filled with fresh hot water and it drains out into the ocean. I can't guess whether they drill wells locally for hot water (a mile deep, said the geologist) or pipe it a long way. Piping must lose a lot of heat, as well as causing melting and frost heaves or something in winter. You get the feeling that when the geothermal heating technology became available, the Icelanders, having frozen their butts off for over 1000 years, vowed to never be cold again. The hot water is never shut off, which is OK because it almost never gets warm enough that you wouldn't want some heat on in the house. The drinking water in our cabin tastes very good, as good as any bottled water I have tasted. In Reykjavík it had a lot of sulfur and maybe iron in it, and was drinkable but not delicious. The fruits and vegetables at the supermarket were sad and wilted. They are kept in a special room set off from the main supermarket behind a plastic curtain, probably to retain the cold (which is not cheap here.) I must remember to appreciate how good the fruit is in California. Here, you get 20 small greenish strawberries for $5. Laurie and the kids went rock hunting at the rocky beach around noon. Stephen found two quartz crystals, 1 inch diameter and a bone, not fossilized but somewhat eroded. He's convinced the bone is from a dinosaur, and is determined to shop around for opinions until someone confirms this. He asked for a play date with his school-friend Nicholas, since he is an expert on dinosaurs. I took our week's worth of laundry into town looking for an Allmenningsþvottahús (a
launderette.) No luck. Maybe it's expecting too much to see the exact word on a sign; after all,
American launderettes are as likely to say something like "Scrubby Bubbles Cleansing Emporium."
Anyway, the Hotel Edda was happy to launder a sack full of laundry for $20.
Day 6: Akureyri with a day trip to MývatnMax: "Dad! Stephen lost his marbles." (His magnetic marbles rolled under the bed.) We headed out to lake Mývatn (pronounced mee'watn). The name means midge, for all the flies that come from it. They were everywhere. (Laurie neglected to tell me this until we got there.) We parked and hiked up the Hverfjall (pronounced Quair'fyall) crater, a symmetrical cinder cone about 150 M high. We hiked up the low side, then walked around the rim to the highest point. The kids did well, but Max started losing it toward the end while hiking down. Inside the crater are messages written in white stone on the black ash. We told Max that the crater was the Iron Giant's footprint, which delighted him.
We drove on to Námafjall (pronounced nowma'fyatl,) an active volcanic area and the site of a large geothermal power plant. The tourist site has bubbling mud pits that reek of sulfur. The mud, apparently clay formed by the action of sulfuric acid on the rock, is boiling hot and is bubbling constantly. Some mud pits have lot of little bubbles and some have one bubble spot where foot-diameter bubbles make satisfying "blorp, glurp" sounds. The barriers as usual were minimal; I imagine a few tourists get boiled in mud. We kept Max close.
We went onto some of the construction roads to look at the steam wells. There were a dozen or so of the wells that we saw over a square mile, all connected with 12 inch diameter insulated steam pipes back to the power plant. One of them was blasting forth an enormous amount of steam. You can see the steam rising from many miles away. See the pictures from the top of Hverfjell. We got within 40 feet of it, and the sound was tremendous, like standing behind a jet plane taking off. The rumble made the ground shake. At first I thought the steam release must be abnormal, due to a rupture or something, but I later found a picture in a brochure of a similar steam plume.
The wells seem to be made by just lowering a big can mouth-down over a steam vent and weighing it down so it doesn't lift away. The one we looked at close up had two large concrete weights chained to it. The guidebook says that the wells drilled here probably triggered an earthquake in 1975. Overall, the Icelandic approach to natural resources seems pretty rough-and-ready. There were lots of tiny roads through the area, so we took one and drove up a small peak that gave a good view of the crater we had hiked up. Mysteriously, there was a cache of several 600 kg bags of road salt along this tiny track in the dirt that we had to fjord a foot-deep stream to get to. We went on to Dimmubörgir, a conglomeration of weird lava formations. They don't look like they were chunks ejected from volcanos; rather they look like they extruded from a field of lava vents. There is a remarkable hollow cavity called Kirkja (church) of 3 M diameter, with 2 main entrances and a couple of small tubes off it through which we were able to wave to each other.
On the way back we hit another bird on the road. This one made an alarming thwack on the windshield, eliciting an even more alarming gasp from Laurie. We were glad the kids were asleep so we didn't have to answer hours of questions. So much of what we saw seemed otherworldly. The bubbling mud and sulfur springs were completely unnatural colors, and the sulfurous smell is not nice. Although it's beautiful in its way, it's not restful. Afterwards, you feel the opposite of the way you feel after spending a day in a redwood forest. You can see why brimstone is associated with hell. The lava formations with birch trees are quite beautiful, though. The plants are only there because they did something intensive in the 1940s: planting quackgrass and birch. Otherwise it'd be blowing black sand. I like that all the scenic places are free and unstructured. By having no booths or lines or gates, the attractions feel much more a part of the whole countryside. And you can see either the designated sites, or just footle around and see whatever is there. I thought some of the most interesting sites were off the beaten path. I'm glad to be driving instead of on a tour bus. We ate dinner at an odd fancy restaurant in the middle of nowhere at which two tour busses were parked. $42 per head for the buffet, though they didn't charge for the kids. The decor was metal kitchen chairs with silk tablecloths and bow ties on the waiters. The food was fine, but unremarkable. It's also hard to believe in fancy dining when it's broad daylight outside. We've had to stop several times along the roadside for the kids to pee. On the way back from Geyser a few days ago Stephen had a particularly long arc going, and I told him he had a Geyser pee. He thought this was hilarious, and has been declaring his open air pees to be Geyser pees ever since. Also, a bottle of fizzy water opened after being shaken is said to have geysered. Day 7: AkureyriA slow day, after yesterday's strenuous hiking. We all woke up around 9 am, feeling rested. We went into the park & pool, and Laurie took Stephen swimming while I watched Max playing on the drivable cars and the trampoline. After a while Max wanted to swim, so I took him in. The pool had a different character from the pool in Reykjavík. Less exposed flesh and more kids. Also, it was 2 pm rather than 10 pm. I forgot a towel so Max and I dried off under a hot air hair dryer. For lunch we had hotdogs at a stand outside the park. Stephen ate 3. The kids did well at the park. They had a nifty hydraulic digger, this one more powerful than the ones at Reykjavík and with powered rotation too. Stephen says I should build one with tracks that work.
The Icelanders are fiercely protective of the purity of their language, devising Icelandic words for computer, cell phone, and other scientific and technical things rather than borrowing. Neologisms are hotly debated on radio shows. Indeed, I don't remember seeing an English loanword on signs or heard one spoken in conversation. All the recognizable words were ancient. The high school teacher we met at the party said that the way to preserve a small language was for its members to speak other world languages as well. Isolation leads to stagnation. But given that nearly everyone speaks English, it's surprising that English expressions don't gain currency. It's different from the way English has borrowed wholesale from every language it has come in contact with. The language book says there is no equivalent to "please," courtesy being shown in other ways. Such as by not burning their villages and stealing their women? [OK, that will be my last cheap shot at the Vikings.] Day 8: Akureyri and HriseyWe ate lunch at a picnic stop advertised off the road between our cabin and Dalvík. It had one picnic table. A plaque there memorialized a priest, born in 1871, who founded KFUK. It turned out not to be an alternative radio station but a translation of YMCA.
We took the ferry to Hrísey Island. The kids liked being on the boat. Max found the railing a bit high to see over, but there was a large port near ground level that he could look through. But he put his head too far through and got it stuck until we extricated him. This made him very, very sad and he dozed through the rest of the ferry ride. We disembarked onto the island and took the hiking trail leading halfway around it. All the
houses are at the southern tip near the dock and the rest is pasture. At one point, birds defending
their nests took offense at our presence and starting flying low over our heads, shrieking at us. We
decided to be scary mammals and growl back at them. There were several plaques along the way
explaining sights, birds, and history, but there was one very mysterious piece of art with no
explanation. It was obviously carefully made some time ago, since it's thoroughly rusted. It's
mostly made from iron and galvanized pipe with strange concrete and metal totem heads on top, and
grass growing on the top like hair.
Near the end of the hike we saw some fish drying racks with some dried cod heads hanging from them. There were a lot of racks, maybe 8000 square feet, but only about 50 square feet had fish. The cod heads made a rustling sound in the breeze as they rubbed against each other. The town seemed surprisingly well-maintained, given the lack of any apparent industry. Everything was clean and freshly painted. The guidebook says the island has an exclusive on raising Galloway beef cattle and has a fancy restaurant serving the same. I saw no cattle on the half of the island we covered. On the ferry with us were half a dozen tourists and several moms taking their kids out for a stroll on the island. The island had a peculiar ground texture which Laurie says looks like Arctic tundra. It was all humps of 2-3 feet diameter and 8 inches height, like scaled down skiing moguls. Everything had a thin ground cover. One of the signs suggested that the island used to be forested until cutting for firewood denuded the island. Could this be true of the rest of Iceland? Every house had their front door open. The houses were of normal construction with front doors like any other, but they were all hanging open. One was swinging in the breeze. One guy was lying half in, half out of his front door sunbathing during a brief opening in the clouds. On the way back we stopped in Dalvík and found a real grocery store, with a butcher counter and better fruit. I got some pears and oranges to ward off scurvy. Day 9: Akureyri
We've lost Max's fleece. I suspect it blew away from the porch in the night. Max finally got a chance to sit in Stephen's seat while we were talking to Kristin. (He needs a forward-facing baby seat, while Stephen uses a booster seat and regular seat belt.) After wanting Stephen's seat for so long, he was happy just to sit there doing nothing. Anyway, we foisted the kids on Kristin and had a grown-ups day. On Sigrunn's recommendation, we had dinner at Friðrik V, a nice restaurant in downtown Akureyri. We went with the 12-course tasting menu. The chef came out to explain each of the dishes. They were:
Sort of corny, but it made for a pleasant evening. The chef told us he closes the restaurant every January and goes tasting around the Mediterranean. His wife was a waitress. Sounds like a nice life. After dinner we had tea. They had no decaffeinated black tea, so Laurie chose a Hibiscus rose herbal tea. When she added milk it instantly turned into little white floccules floating around. I guess the hibiscus is acidic enough to curdle milk. The waitress brought her another cup, chamomile this time. We were the best-dressed couple there. Some were dressed nicely, but one guy was there in a baseball cap. The menu was in Icelandic and English, with a few glitches like "sweat and sour sauce." I think it would bother me living here: although most people speak English, none are what you'd call highly literate in it. The quality of badinage would be strained. During dinner I could see people cruising the strip out the window. The same cars full of guys went around again and again. I timed one circuit at 70 seconds. Afterwards we went out and cruised around the same circuit. I put the car in 4-wheel low so I could shift gears more. Pretty cool. It reminded me of the 80s. Teenage male hair fashion is definitely of the 80s era. We went back to Helga and Óskar's place where Kristin had put the kids down and hung out for a while. They were watching Leno in English with Icelandic subtitles. Their 12-year old was still up when we left at 11:45. Day 10: Akureyri
Laurie and I woke up deliciously late, with no kids yelling. We had coffee at the Cafe Karolina and read email. It works perfectly well here. Things are going fine in my absence. Touring the cultural capital of Iceland (according to a mural) we visited an art installation in
a big house devoted to it. It consisted of a video projected on one wall of a tall drinking glass
with a swirling vortex in it. I think multiple vortices were superimposed to get the effect. And
there were bubbles rising and clinging around the edge. It was accompanied by weird music,
consisting of bowed saws and soprano voice in quavering, rising nonmusical pitches. It reminded me a
bit of the tornado scene in the Wizard of Oz: black and white picture, similar vortex shapes, and I
think the W of O may have had similar sounds effects. It played in a loop; we watched the last 3
minutes before it cycled and we fled. There was seating for 40 but except for the attendant, we were
the only people there. I think the attendant may have been the artist, so we tried to look edified.
Admission was free. I suppose the government funds it.
We also toured a small museum of modern art. Everything there was distinctively Icelandic. My favorite piece (right, with wheels and horns) was described as "strictly functional," but couldn't commit to what that function might be. It mentioned a hat rack or a drinks table as possibilities. If you look closely at the wheels, they can't turn because the largest radius of the wheel is larger than the depth of the forks. There are lots of big jacked up 4x4s towing trailers driving through. We've probably seen ten
today. They may be aiming for the same overland route we're planning to take. There seem to be a lot
of people getting off tour busses ready to hike. Some have preposterously large packs. One fairly
small woman had large packs front and back, while her large male companion had only a small
backpack. I had to restrain Laurie from forcibly redistributing things.
Day 11: Akureyri to Reykjavík.We set out from Akureyri around 9:30 am, managing to pack the suitcases more cleverly into the car so the kids could sit comfortably. We planned a route through the interior towards the glacier Langjökull (cannot be pronounced by English speakers), hoping to finally see some ice in this country. We planned a route on roads ranging from highways to "trail, not maintained." We have a 4x4, so no problem, right? Óskar, who has a Land Rover and knows the area well, thought it looked reasonable though he hadn't been on the exact roads. We headed down route 752, a one-lane dirt road on which we could average 70 km/h, then onto a gravel road, then onto a road through a stream bed made from rocks from 2-6 inches in diameter on which we could average 30 km/h. Then the road continued through a gate off the road that looked like it hadn't been opened in a few years. It was completely fallen apart and needed careful handling to move it. The road was dirt with large rocks, though sheep pastures with gates every kilometer. We could sometimes do 40 km/h, but often had to slow to a crawl. We went through 10 km of this, gradually deteriorating, until it crossed a mucky stream with large boulders limiting the options to a fairly steep entry and steeper exit. I thought I could probably make it given a little speed, but there were fairly large rocks at the exit that I didn't want to bang the undercarriage on at any speed. Getting stuck would have been bad. We were 10 km from the last farmhouse where I wouldn't count on them speaking English. I told Laurie I wouldn't think less of her if she wanted to turn back. She gratefully accepted and I saved face. On the way back, our tire tracks stood out dramatically, suggesting the road hadn't been used in a while.
We went a little farther down route 1 and onto route 704, where the road was marked "maintained: gravel or earth" all the way (on our expensive 3-volume 250,000:1 map). It started out much like the previous road, then deteriorated to trail beside a riverbed with large stones, After 20 km of this, it changed into dirt with frequent large rocks that we had to wind our way between. The car lost a few chunks out of the undercarriage. I figure a car weighs a couple thousand pounds so a few pounds of metal lost can't make much difference, but Laurie seemed alarmed. After a guesthouse, seemingly the last thing on the road people cared about, the rocks got much worse. We had to creep along in low range first gear, barely able to keep the engine above idle. The truck bounced and swayed as each wheel climbed down one boulder and up the next. Amazingly, Max slept through most of it. After 500 meters which took us 10 minutes, we met another truck, a larger Chevrolet with fat tires. He said he'd come through the other way, and it was worse than what we were in, and that the next 37 km had taken him 4 hours. We decided to turn around. We could see how much faster his truck could handle the rocks, probably a factor of two. We backtracked over another 40 km of bad roads back to route 1. By this time it was 6:00 pm and there were no more shortcuts to the glacier to try. We took the big road into Reykjavík and went to bed. 12 hours on the road to cover less than 400 km. My arms and back were tired from the difficult driving. We did see some beautiful scenery though. Day 12: Reykjavík.Laurie felt under the weather so I took the kids out to the city park. We did mostly the same things as the last time. Then Laurie took the kids on a boat ride to Puffin Island. Puffins can dive 60 M deep. Each pair lays one egg per summer. They live 35-40 years. There were 40,000 puffins on the island, but it was very quiet. They don't squawk like other birds. For the last several months, Max has insisted on wearing his Spiderman costume all the time, only changing to Spiderman pajamas at night. We told him we didn't bring his costume on the trip, though we actually did in case he couldn't live without it. He quickly forgot about it and stopped asking, but today as we were unpacking he glimpsed it in the suitcase and Laurie let him wear it. The end of 12 blissfully costume-free days. Laurie got the kids disposable cameras to take pictures of puffins. Max used up all his pictures before they even got on the boat. The kids were being difficult and we didn't dare take them to a fancy restaurant, so we retired early to the hotel room and ate room service. I did check out the rotating restaurant atop large hot water tanks on the highest hill in Reykjavík. It would have been a good opportunity for Laurie and I to set a new record for most expensive restaurant meal (entrees were $70,) but alas it was not to be. Day 13: Reykjavík, Bláa Lónið and HomeWe woke up around 9 am and went to wash the rental car, to eliminate any evidence of off-roading. Then on to the Bláa Lónið (like Blau'a Lo'nith,) a pseudo-natural geothermally heated lake between Reykjavík and the airport. The water is a brilliant blue color because of some silica salts that occur in the ground there. Hot water flows in at various points around the pool, so the water temperature is constantly changing as you swim around. There was a strong wind, so plumes of steam were visible from afar and wet skin was uncomfortably cold. Both Laurie and I got massages, done while floating on your back in the water. The one annoyance was the busloads of tourists taking pictures. Oddly, in this monument to geothermal heat, there was only cold water in the changing room sinks. There seems to be no local paper in English, except for a gay-themed one in Reyjavík that makes most college papers look professional. The letters to the editor are simply the guy's un-edited email, some of which may have been spam. Anyway, there was an article about a new power plant they're building, and the chief engineer was quoted as saying "with 700 megawatts of hot water, the possibilities are limitless!" Yeah, I thought, you can shower, or shave, or make tea. Later in the article it describes a golf course heated by underground pipes so as to remain playable all winter, so there were grander possibilities than I imagined. I'm so used to heat being expensive. As a kid I'd get yelled at for leaving the door open longer than necessary in the winter. But the possibilities really are different when heat is free. In the airport, the check-in desk told us the flight was an hour delayed, but it turned out be only 20 minutes late. We made it anyway and headed home. On the plane, Max (still dressed as Spiderman) got away from me in the blocked aisle on the way to the lavatory, and was pushing buttons on the entry keypad for the cockpit by the time I caught him. 16 long hours later, we got home and fell into bed. I'd highly recommend Iceland as a destination in the summer. There is at least as much to see as in Hawaii, and the cooler weather is nice.
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