A Week Ago Today In Iceland: At breakfast, people in our group compared notes about the day before. Those who did the medium route finished only a half hour or so before we did. They stopped to do things along the way and didnt get nearly as wet as we did. Our first activity for the day was a glacier hike. The glacier guides stopped at our hotel to fit us with crampons and to assign each of us an ice pick. This was not an everyday occurrence for the sixteen of us who were on our way to Falljökull. But for Thor and David, our guides, its what they did. When we asked Thor about the weather forecast, he said it was going to be terrible later in the day. Asked about how it would compare to the prior day, he commented that the prior day was fine, and that it was going to get REALLY bad after midnight. Interesting. We traveled to the glacier on a school bus, which sounds almost as weird as it felt. Like, here we are in a contraption just like the one Mr. Rehn used to pick me up for my first day of kindergarten. But instead of learning ABCs and having rest time after milk and graham crackers, we were given detailed instructions on how to put on our crampons and how to carry the ice pick without putting out an eye or impaling yourself. This was my third glacier hike [also Kennicott (Alaska) and Perito Moreno (Argentina)]. This one was steeper, and it was rainy, which meant running water. The guides showed us some moulins, which are waterfalls in the glacier that are created by a single tiny rock that absorbs some heat, melts an impression in the ice in which water swirls. And over time, it gets bigger and swirls an impressive hole to the ground. All caused by a tiny stone. At the end, we were treated to some Baileys Irish Cream on glacial ice, served by Chema, our other Backroads guide. Chema is the guy who would be the baseball player you could play anywhere on the field, or the magician who can pull the perfect thing out of a hat, or someone whom Jack Bauer would ask for advice in a pinch. We were shuttled westward on the ring road to a place called Tröllshylur, which translates to troll ... droppings. Its a place that is littered with rocks that look like cow pies, but are actually special lava formations. Or troll droppings. People around here believe in things like that. Our lunch was a picnic at a small four-room trout fishing resort near Tröllshylur. (If youre looking for a trout fishing adventure, let me know.) It was a typical excellent Backroads picnic. Backroads is serious about food! On the way to the hotel, we stopped at a museum dedicated to the 2010 Ejyafjallajökull eruption. I remembered how that volcano disrupted European air travel for weeks. Actually, an eruption two years later had more impact on Iceland itself than Ejyafjallajökull. Our final destination for the day was the Hotel Rangá. It is made out of lots and lots and lots of wood, which is unusual because wood is somewhat rare in Iceland as a building material. It was imported from Canada. All that wood meant luxury. It was impressive. The weather caused us to miss seeing puffins, which are cute chubby birds with small wings that can fly somehow.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 10:46:27 +0000
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