Tonight* we are ending the first leg of our centipede of a trip with a windy night near the airport. Without a doubt it has been a good start but I think we are still unwinding from the craziness leading up to our departure and that brutal eastbound jetlag, good thing we will be here three months. Iceland was not initially in the plans but came on as a surprise stop because of a cheap direct flight into Europe. For a country that exists not on a landmass but a giant glacier of ice, it has been a pleasant surprise with a few gotchas.

 

First, what got. Oh my things are expensive here and it caught us off guard a bit. Not one travel blog really outlined that it is nearly impossible to have a (one-person, we shared and didn’t eat much here) meal for less than $20 or do any tourist activity for less than a $100. It is even crazier with the exchange rate of ISK because you’ll say things like, ‘Yea let’s get a bottled water and a baguette for 10,000’. Granted we are at peak tourist season on an island economy, and we had looked at things ahead of time for booking car, snorkeling, etc. but was definitely taken off guard, it sorts of just adds up on each little thing. You expect the like a London or New York to be this expensive, but yikes, I think it made up for the cheaper airfare.

 

After getting into Iceland we needed to blow off some steam (see what I did there) after coming off two nights of little sleep, a long flight and a week of packing and moving at a furious pace to be out of the Seattle and Portland residences.

Naturally this means a challenging hike. We chose Glymur and got lucky. This was the second largest waterfall in Iceland (over 650 feet!) and had a spectacular path that took you right up near it then around and over it just needing to do some old-fashioned river-fording. Fun story on that later. This was my favorite spot in Iceland, the photos don’t do it justice and those are astounding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had put off booking the Blue Lagoon, the famous hot spring here they widely marketed as a luxury spa. Even attempting days in advance, no luck. So we went the local way to the Warm River to unwind. This region is actually called the GeoThermal valley,

driving by you see just steam emanating from random spots across the landscape, it’s pretty wild. Along the river there would be small pools at a constant rolling boil. The river was packed, the unfortunate side effect of being a much less arduous hike in. We tried to find the secret unpopulated section further ahead but instead found a ram who took exception to us. The funny bleating ‘bahhhs’ they let out are much more threatening from a couple feet. We did not find our own spot on the river but did finally get to a section where you couldn’t see a hint of human activity in all directions. We doubled back to the hotbed of tourist river-basking and found a good soaking spot.

Then onto embarrassing things. Ashley fell into a river! Ha, in front of like a whole group of people as we were fording the mid-calf deep ice water, shoes and socks held high, she goes and steps on the slippery rock and splashed down on her butt and had squishy shoe for the rest of the hike down Glymur.

This has to be so, so much more embarrassing than pumping diesel into your very much not diesel rental car that when signing the documents to rent explicitly said, don’t put diesel in the car. Then having to walk into the convenience store to tell the clerk who was not a day over 14 what you just did and seeing if they sold siphons (nope) then needing to call a mechanic to tow you out. Having to repeat in plain English the very, very stupid thing you did, and having to say, ‘no, not a little bit of diesel, I filled the whole tank. Yep, I put 40 liters of your very expensive fuel into my car…’ Really makes you feel like you are an adult who can do things. No need to worry about us, the important thing is the ability to catch errors when they happen!

 

* post-script, our writing will probably lag by at least a few days especially during this early road trip because we are changing location so much, right at the moment we are actually in Prague already finished with Berlin! But we will catch up, just having too much fun to be computzing.