Iceland likes this song a lot

Get Lucky

6/5/13 - 6/9/13, otherwise known as Adventures in North Iceland, Part 5

6/9/13, Sunday: Travel Day 2!

We sleep surprisingly well at the guesthouse despite our lack of sheets, then have a slow morning before heading out on the final leg of our trip back to Selfoss. Loudi takes over as DJ/navigator and gets us to our first stop, Jökulsárlón (Ice Lagoon!).

We stage another sleeping picture and some other tourists find this amusing. We have no idea what they are saying, but one of them comes up to me and wraps her shirt around my neck like a scarf and tells me to go back to sleep. We are a little confused, but this is amusing, so we go along with it and take some more pictures.

Then we try to skip stones, get stones to land on the little ice floes heading out to sea, and do a little souvenir shopping before rolling out for the next stop (aside from a quick dinner pit stop in rainy Vík).. Eyjafjallajökull!!

We decide we really want to see Strokkur (geyser!) and Gullfoss ("golden falls"), which are kind of near Selfoss, but a little out of the way, so we head that way and don't stop for any of the smaller fosses along the way. They are nice. Strokkur requires a bit more work for staging a sleeping picture. It goes off approximately every 10 minutes, but it's not exactly clockwork. This leaves me lying on the wet-ish sand for...a while. Then we shop a while at the 66 North store and head home..

..but not before convincing Christian to do this:

6/5/13 - 6/9/13, otherwise known as Adventures in North Iceland, Part 4

6/8/13, Saturday: Travel Day 1!

The midnight sun starts to take a toll. Apparently staying up past midnight in a cheese tub and then conferencing all day and travel in general can result in illness. 

We leave at 9am and after packing I sleepily decide to walk to the party van in my socks. Putting on shoes while wearing my backpack seems too challenging. However, I get too comfortable in the van (I managed to claim the whole back seat) and forget about the critical step of going back into the guest house to get my shoes, which is a shame, since they are my new bright green running shoes. Sad.

Laura tells me Camille got no sleep due to walking alone on the beach all night and Loudi hit her head on the van, tweaking her neck for the rest two days. I think I must have been asleep already because I have no memory of this. The party van is seeming more sickly than party-like.

Next thing I know it, we arrive at Goðafoss. When it's time to vacate the car, I realize I have no shoes. (Not totally true, since I have another pair of sneakers and some flip flops, but they are not really ideal for hiking.) We walk across a lovely bridge, check out the waterfall, then Camille and I fall asleep. Christian embarrassingly/hilariously falls over and pretends he wanted to be on the ground in the first place. We depart from the falls, I call the guest house and they say they'll mail my shoes to Selfoss (yay!!), and then I go back to sleep just a little bit happier.

Bridge:

Waterfall:

 Nap:

The second stop is Myvatn, a big lake with cool craters around it. Turns out Myvatn translates into "fly water". This might have been good to know. There are swarms of flies all over the place. We walk a short distance around the lake, until I give up first and run back to the car. Laura follows soon after, and then the others. We devise a system of getting back in the van where one person whips a towel around to shoo the flies away while the others very quickly open the door, hop in, and then close it again. It is mostly successful. The front of our van is another story... I have no words, only this picture (credit goes to Laura):

 Maybe the lake was worth it?, not sure..

We drive a short distance to Dimmuborgir, home of the Yule Lads. (We do not see them.) I get some ice cream and feel a bit better. Loudi gets some too and continues her streak of photo bombing by inserting into one of Laura's pictures. This stop is otherwise pretty uneventful.

Back to sleep in the car. Next stop is Myvatn Nature Baths. They are nice:

Camille befriends the other french smokers outside while we have lunch overlooking the steaming blue pools.  They aren't quite tempting enough to justify the price for an hour or so since we can't stay long.  Luckily, smoking pays off occasionally (or knowing someone who does) since Camille learns that there are hot pools inside some nearby caves that are free.  We find the caves just a few miles back along the road beneath a surface fault trace (where I plank for the second time in Iceland and then promptly fall asleep on a sunny rock).  The water is clear and strikingly blue, but also strikingly hot according to those who actually touch it.  Pool one is too hot, but pool two proves somewhat more manageable.  Loudi dips her toes in while Laura and Camille slow cook themselves (note Laura's legs below).

 

I fall asleep again in the van and wake up at Námaskard.  I've never seen anything like it, but picture a hard packed dirt desert with bubbling steaming mud pits scattered about and an excruciating rotten egg odor (or just look at the picture).  Since I can't find any acceptable ground to pass out on, we decide to fake my first sleeping picture (it turns out the others had been taking pictures of me every other time I was legitimately sleeping up to this point), quickly starting a theme for the trip of me sleeping at various tourist attractions around Iceland.

  

Internet is not working and so Laura navigates us by memory a little bit too hastily to the left and we arrive at Viti crater rather than Dettifoss.  It turns out to be quite beautiful and provides a humorous snowy bed for the next sleeping photo shoot.  

 

On to Dettifoss for real this time, but our group communication breaks down at this point and I awake from my nap ready for another "20 minute stroll to a viewing lookout and back to the car" in my jammies and flip flops.  Turns out it was more like a 20 minute hike over snow and little streams. Perhaps the icy moat and water surrounding the now inaccessible bathroom and trailhead should be have been a clue. 

 

 Cold feet, mist, more of the flies, and some mud are all worth the view of Europe's largest waterfall (by volume)!  More miscommunications on the return to the car and we are off to see another fall (with the same name as our settlement: Selfoss!) rather than returning to the car!  Waterfalls photographed and feet totally numb we hit the road again and I take over as co-pilot/DJ for a while.  

 

Dettifoss!:

We pass some cool waterfalls, but don't stop again until the town of Egilstadir (which lies along a river where the Icelandic sea serpent may live) for a long bathroom/snack break that quickly becomes our dinner stop where we debate pizza toppings for far too long. (We settle on blue cheese and pepperoni on one half and pineapple and ham on the other half.)

Back on the road by 9ish and heading for our hostel in Höfn we take a short cut suggested by Benedikt with the warning BE CAREFUL! The road seems fine, a solid dirt road and not denoted a 4WD road on the map like most of Iceland. However, mere minutes into our shortcut-ing the fog rolls in and it's thicker than any fog we've seen before. We inch along, sure that no one is meant to drive in these conditions.  But we are soon passed by a car with an old grey-haired couple! We follow them as long as we can, but they are too fast, and by the time we emerge from the fog they are out of sight! 

 

The rest of the road to the hostel is green, lush, full of fjords, and rainy until Loudi spots REINDEER!!!  Peeing and reindeer photographing ensue before the final stretch to our hostel on Havannah St. (Hotel Höfn on Hvannabraut).  We finally get the key to the co-ed dorm around midnight and all decide to forgo the extra fee for bedding.  Christian opens the door, and excited to see a small room of bunk beds exclaims "Yessss!" while flipping on the light (he has clearly never stayed in a hostel before).  The man asleep gurgles some obscenities while pulling the covers over his head.  The light goes off again immediately and as we clamor around in the dark, Christian climbs up to the last bed which is above our new friend.  As he crawls onto it, the bed breaks beneath him, severely frightening both Christian and the stranger below for the second time in 10 minutes!

6/5/13 - 6/9/13, otherwise known as Adventures in North Iceland, Part 3

6/7/13, Friday

Camille got up early for a phone interview for a Masters program while Laura, Loudi, and I went off to pick up and redeploy sensors. Then again with the conferencing, this time with video cameras! There was a crew there making a documentary I think about one of the seismologists, and we may have made it into the Icelandic evening news. How exciting :-D (We show up around 16:15.)

Also exciting: Camille found out during the conference that she got into this really selective Masters program that she wanted. This prompted a post-conference trip to Vínbúðin and the grocery store for supplies. We also picked up our final sensor and made fun of Christian's sense of direction a bit, then showered, dinner, more apple cobbler, and WHALE WATCHING!

There were plenty of whales to be seen, and Laura tells me one even jumped out of the water a bit, but I only caught the first hour of the 3-hour whale experience since I fell completely asleep for the last two hours. I've gone whale watching 3 times now and have never lasted for more than the first half. :-P It was good though, and we got to wear these exciting warm safety coveralls. (Picture courtesy of Loudi.)

We tried to end our last night in Husavik with a final trip to the cheese tub, only to find that it was empty. Very sad. But probably a good thing that they clean it each night.

Sad picture courtesy of Laura:

6/5/13 - 6/9/13, otherwise known as Adventures in North Iceland, Part 2

6/6/13, Thursday

Ran again, this time back and forth along a number of the bridges that cross the river in Husavik, and then up a steep slope under a ski lift. It turns out the lack of hills in Selfoss has made us go soft. There was walking involved. I took my time on the way up and when I caught up with Laura, I found her trying to help a baby sheep get back over the fence to its mom. She was unsuccessful.

We ran down toward the bay to meet Benedikt and Christian in order to pick up a sensor, but our slow hill-climbing and sheep-rescuing made us a little late, woops!

Then came all-day conferencing with some epic coffee breaks wherein we ate more pastries in a single day than previously in any given month.

Completely conked out for an hour when we got home (lack of sleep + excessive pastry eating?), went out for dinner with the conference people, and then had drinks while Benedikt and some other knowledgeable Icelandic people edited out map for the trip back to Selfoss, adding cool things we missed and suggesting different routes and places to stay.

And finally, an 11pm trip to the playground inspired by the midnight sun.

6/5/13 - 6/9/13, otherwise known as Adventures in North Iceland, Part 1

6/5/13, Wednesday

After the epic journey to Husavik and our first evening of midnight cheese tubbing, we sleep in. This will be the only time we do this for about a week. We visit the riverside house of Eysteinn Tryggvason, a big shot in the world of geophysics and seismology, and set up a seismometer. This needs to take measurements for at least an hour, so we kill time by going on a somewhat long driving tour of Husavik. The town really isn't that big, and so the tour involves a lot of weaving around and bumpiness. All of this while holding up various iPads with geological and topographic maps of the area. Slightly overwhelming and almost car sickness-inducing.

We stop at a cafe run by one of Benedikt's cousins (or something) to read conference abstracts. He seems to know someone, or multiple someones, in every town. We pick up the seismometer and redeploy in a beautiful house with a very friendly dog ("hundur" in Icelandic). We worry about its excessive tail-wagging as a possible source of vibrations.

Next we go to the Husavik hospital, climb a ladder, and spend some quality time on the roof in the warm North Iceland sun (no joke, I may have gotten very slightly burned).  We check out the Canterbury Strong Motion instrument that Benedikt installs, then take a little time to lounge, do hand-stands (Laura is a maniac), and plank.

Back to the coffee house. After picking up the sensor yet again, this happens:

Then we go out to eat at the restaurant of one of Iceland's most famous chefs, although I don't think I ever asked his name. We check out the lovely view, and then check it out again wearing each others' eyeglasses. Laura starts her search for a tall, attractive Icelandic man to cook her some "rug bread" (Rúgbrauð, bread cooked in the warm Icelandic soil!). There's an apple cobbler on the menu that promises to lure travelers into staying permanently in Husavik, and we order a bunch of it. We'll see what happens..

The view:

Benedikt wearing my sunglasses:

Later that evening, Laura and I go on a fairly adventurous run along the river (through snow at times!) and up to Botnsvatn (a lake above Husavik). Or at least that's where we attempt to go. Somehow we lose the trail and end up in what seems like an endless field of what we've taken to calling "mush mush". Basically it consisted of mounds of hay-like vegetation, with lower-lying parts of varying degrees of mushiness. Maybe this becomes swampy in rainier seasons? We debate about going forward or turning back, and going forward obviously wins out. There are alien-like noises coming from the sky (apparently they were not so alien, and were actually emitted from this bird: Snipe! Hit play next to "Common Snipe song" and you'll hear the weird noise toward the end of the clip). We survive, reach the lake, and find that there actually is a nice trail (drivable, even) we could have taken. Fail. 

On the way back down, we wish we had our cameras because it is absurdly beautiful. Amazing view of the mountains across the bay and the midnight sun (it's about 11:30pm at this point). We pass a potential paintball course, run up a wiggly path (we must have been missing SF), see some horses doing this, then arrive at the cheese tub. We are later joined by Camille, Benedikt, and Christian. Cheese tub lap swimming, cold water spraying, and general story telling ensue. First rule of the cheese tub is that you must always talk about the cheese tub. Second rule of the cheese tub is that no story can be told or listened to fully clothed. 

This is Laura and Camille's reaction when getting sprayed by cold water (I am the only one to actually hop back in the hot tub to escape it..). I'm not sure it's very effective:

You can never have enough midnight sun (beautiful picture courtesy of Laura Weyl):

AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl-uh

We drove by Eyjafjallajökull (AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl-uh) this weekend.

Newscasters around the world trying to pronounce it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jq-sMZtSww

Enjoy! 

(Actual updates to come.)