Just by the docks is a chunk of land with a preserved “old town”, with turf-roof houses, occupied mostly by government and tourism organizations. The passengers – me included – busily took photos of it as the ferry churned the water and rotated around to anchor at the terminal on the opposite side of the harbor.
Unlike loading in Iceland, this time the bicyclists were last to roll off the ship. We had to wait for the trucks to unhook from the floor and slowly creep out ahead of us. The good news was, the ship had been loaded so all the vehicles bound for Denmark could just stay on the upper decks, and relatively few of us were disembarking here.
The first thing I did was swing around the north side of the harbor and check out all those turf houses. I wasn’t surprised at all to see that they had been rebuilt with modern materials and then altered to support turf. At first I thought it was a bit anachronistic but, considering that houses looking very similar had stood on this same land for centuries and the form they were emulating originated from around here, was it really?
Locals know the old town area as “Reyn and Undir Ryggi”. The area at the end of the peninsula is “Tinganes”, a.k.a. Parliament Point. The reason there are so many government buildings here is that the area has been a seat of government for over a thousand years: Around the year 900 the Viking parliament first began meeting on this spot every summer.
I eventually emerged from the twisty maze of old town and found the coffee shop I’d spent a few hours at the last time I was here. Their “swiss mocha” was just as great as I remembered, and I took a selfie to boast about it with the family back home.
I lounged around there for a while catching up on work, then located the AirBnB I’d booked on the south side of town. I was a bit wired from the mocha so I got back on the bike and went creeping around town with the camera.
When it started getting dark I figured it was because of a change in latitude from the ferry ride, but I glanced at a map and reminded myself that the Faroes are about as far north as the southern coast of Iceland. The darkness was just the advancing seasons.
Some time in the depths of the evening, snacks in hand, Skyrim soundtrack back on the headphones, I blundered across the Gamli Kirkjugarður (old cemetery) right down by the harbor. I had no idea this was here, and it’s awesome.
Pretty sure this is the scariest picture of me I’ve ever taken.
When I finally got back to the AirBnB, I sat down with the remains of my caffeine energy and tried to plan a bike tour that would show me some of the islands but also get me back to the harbor in time. The first thing I learned was that the amazing three-way underground tunnel that just opened is off limits to bicyclists. Drat!
It makes sense, really. The thing goes 190 meters (620 feet) down under the ocean. The ventilation isn’t great, and can you imagine a cyclist huffing and puffing their way back up from there, breathing car exhaust the whole time?
It was quite hard narrowing down the route. I had to sit in the living room staring at tunnel and ferry maps and scrolling over elevation charts, weighing the annoyance of covering the same ground twice – which was inevitable on these islands – with the majesty of the views at the far corners of the country.
There was definitely a part of me saying “Why not just skip this? It’s like Iceland except less hospitable for biking, with more aggressive drivers and wetter weather. Aren’t you done with this Nordic stuff yet? Don’t you want to be some place where it’s warm, at least some of the time?” I could use the sunshine, yes. But because of the ferry, I had six days to see the islands. I couldn’t do any less, and I didn’t have time for more.
I already had an AirBnB booked for the next two days in a town called Hósvík. When I made that booking (back on the boat) I thought I would need a day to recover from the ride, but after staring at maps all evening I realized scales were different here relative to the country I just left. Hósvík is just 32km (20 miles) outside of Tórshavn, and probably less than 150m (500 feet) of climb. I had to guess because my mapping applications refused to give cycling directions, and the walking directions don’t go through tunnels that are passable to cyclists. I’ve also learned that the locals stare at you like a lunatic if you ask about biking anywhere. They’ll give you an estimate of time, but a good estimate of distance or altitude is beyond them.
I had enough time to wander around the boat and admire the misty sea, eat a few snacks by the window, and then retreat to my tiny room for a nap. In the late evening I woke up and spent some time reading a fanciful local description of the islands I would soon be visiting, and chatting with friends. It was late afternoon back in California.
Amber and I started talking about romantic adventures, and my current situation. The months of riding had worked their physiological magic and I was feeling optimistic about the future, but the realization back in Iceland that I was too obsessed with past baggage was still knocking around my inner landscape, and sometimes crashing into unexpected feelings of betrayal from the sudden end of my relationship last year. I’d known those feelings were in me, but I never thought they were strong enough to linger this way.
I described all this to Amber, and asked her if I was doing the right thing by traveling so much.
Amber
I think it takes a great deal of courage to go out on your own. Most of us are programmed to always seek companionship, for better or worse, and I think one of the things adults can do – if they want to – is undo some of that programming.
Me
Agreed! I’m glad for that programming though. I mean, if we didn’t want to be with others generally we’d make pretty bad communities. And with people who like being alone, they still need someone to love, even if it’s just a cat.
Amber
Well in your case, you have this current of wanderlust that runs through you, and I think you need someone who can be your home base, but will encourage you in your travels. Maybe go with you when she can, and support you from afar when she can’t.
I don’t think it needs to be mutually exclusive — all home, or all wandering. I think you can have both, and that person is out there for you.
Me
Yeah. I don’t know what came first — the de-programming or the wanderlust. I think I was just unlucky enough to meet several people in a row that I didn’t work with long-term, in some way that was subtle and took time to uncover. That kind of wore me out.
So I felt compelled to “take a break” from romance, and that’s when the de-programming started. It was honestly kind of a surprise. I didn’t think there was anything to gain from being single any longer than I absolutely had to be.
Amber
I remember thinking that way. It took me a while to cross that line.
If there’s one thing you have to learn from long trips – either before, or during them – it’s that being alone isn’t scary.
But in romance, it’s very hard to make that discovery, or to really believe in it, because it’s too easy to equate “being wrecked over the last breakup” with “what it’s like being single”.
It takes time to feel the difference. And then there’s the whole “waiting for Mr/Mrs Right” thing… The belief that being happily single is really only desirable because it’s a stepping stone to starting the next relationship. If you run your single life that way – like a journey with an “exit” sign over the destination – there’s a lot you miss.
I spent quite a while telling Amber the details of last year’s breakup, and muttering about it, which surprised me. It had been nine months ago, and I’d been dating other people for six of those nine months. Wasn’t I supposed to be letting go of baggage? It was probably an ego thing. It usually is… Maybe some insight would come to me as I rode around the islands.
Amber signed off to start a work meeting. I said hello to a few nephews and sent a photo of the misty sea to my parents. Then, slowly, the mist began to clear and the television on the cafeteria wall showed a blob approaching from the south. The Faroe islands were near.
I really hoped that this truck would have a man in underwear on the other side. Nope!
I also purchased some snacks from the local market, and found some strong glue that I could use to repair my busted over-ear headphones. They hold my fancy microphone when I’m teleconferencing, and I didn’t want to spend any more time bugging my co-workers by leaning on the mute key and shouting into the laptop.
Last order of business: Repair these poor headphones.
In the afternoon it was time to cruise over to the staging area and line up. Having done this exactly once before, I was suddenly an expert. A few people strolled over to chat like they always do, and I answered their questions with a grin.
A last, lingering view of these fine Icelandic hills.
Eventually the road opened, and the boat started slurping up cars. I was among the first to go, so I could get my gear tied down in the far back of the hold.
As I busied myself with ropes and bags, a long line of cars filled up the decks, followed in the end by some enormous trucks and buses that packed in close and were then chained to the floor by the loading crew.
The reduced tourism from the lingering pandemic had made bookings much easier on the ferry, so this time I had a room for myself instead of a communal bunk. I hauled my bags into it and flopped down for a nap.
Ultima 9 used to take a 300-watt tower PC to run. Now I can play it on a laptop in an emulator and it looks just as good. That’s wild.
For the second time in two years, I am at the final day of a bike ride across Iceland. This happened much sooner than I expected: With so many other places in the world to see, I figured I wouldn’t see this country again for a decade or more.
When I reached this point during the first trip, I felt a mixture of satisfaction and regret. The regret was mostly that the journey couldn’t continue indefinitely, since I was so used to being on the bike. Once I boarded the ferry and left the country I had just two weeks to make a whirlwind tour of Europe, which I spent mostly in London and the German city of Lübeck. My mind was a tangle of work obligations and family concerns, and I was struggling with the logistics of getting back to Oakland on a schedule.
I had the same tangle of obligations and concerns in my head this time, but there’s also something very different about my mental state: Even though I am two years older and moving on from my mid-40s, I am bizarrely less concerned about “wasting“ time on the road and missing romantic opportunities at home.
It’s been difficult to avoid the feeling like the last two years have been somehow wasted, in the combination of COVID-19 and the formation and instant destruction of what I thought was a solid romantic relationship. When I arrived in Iceland this time, there was a real risk that I might feel as though I was starting over again. But this time, there was far less doubt and trauma to work through. My journey was more ambitious, more focused, and contained more logistical surprises as well, and I would not have handled those with such grace if I was feeling my way through an emotional disaster. There was no “on Icelandic plains“ moment during this trip.
The closest I got was a far more positive moment, when I found myself riding at night and looked up and was awestruck to see The Milky Way spread across the horizon, underlit by a very dim but unmistakable line of fire from the northern lights, which I was convinced I would never see on this journey. I am grateful that I came back this way during a time in my life when there was less to distract me from its unique beauty. I can now confidently say that I am more familiar with this country than practically all of the other tourists who pass through it, and I feel that has added something to my life.
I squiggled up, and up, and the wind increased with the altitude. Rainclouds pelted me and then scooted over the horizon, making space for the next batch of rainclouds in hour-long intervals.
Just before the plateau, the wind got especially bad, as I knew it would. I made a little video of my defiance:
If only the wind was blowing the other way, it would shove me right to the top of this range in less than half an hour. Instead it shoved rain directly into my eyes, making the sunglasses mandatory.
Who’s smug that he made it all the way up here in this insane wind? This guy!
The art installation has lost a bunch of portable TVs.
All those blocks used to have television sets perched on them. Now they’re gone, but there’s still an expository sign planted there. Perhaps the artist printed a different sign, inviting a different interpretation… But I didn’t get close enough to read it.
The wind relented somewhat at the plateau, and the rainclouds moved past so quickly they barely had time to drop rain. The ground was still soaked, of course.
Large patches of moss appeared on either side of me, some large enough that it was more accurate to call them fields of moss.
Right around here, I set down my rain cap and it blew off the back of the bike. I didn’t realize it was gone until I’d pedaled half a mile away and felt my head getting wet. Drat!
Around me the clouds drifted low, and did strange things to the light.
As if to complement this rugged weather, I got a random text message from my nephew Nick, asking about rugged ancestors:
“Didn’t you say that grandpa is part Mongolian at some point?”
I spent some time narrating an answer into my phone, and sent it in pieces.
“Well, there’s no recorded history for his family on his father’s side, before they left the Volga river settlements. No one knows whether they were there for 50 years, or 150 years. With marriage traditions what they were, that’s as much as seven generations. It looks like somewhere along the line, someone with epicanthal folds on the outside of their eyes must have gotten involved. There’s no documented evidence for it other than ‘your grandpa’s father was born of a group of people who collectively all lived in X place for somewhere around 100 years’, though. Which isn’t much to go on.”
“Even less information is available for your grandpa’s mother, who was part of a large family that moved down from Canada shortly before she was born.”
Garrett: “Does the ’51’ mean you’re five-foot-one at this point?”
Ben: “Hah! No I was six-foot-two. ’51’ is the year I graduated.”
“And her father, Hans, was born in Denmark and comes from a large Danish family that crossed the Atlantic more-or-less together when he was a little kid.”
“Companies like 23andme do their best to nail down certain genetic trends to certain regions by correlating documented evidence and family anecdote with sequenced genes, but when it comes to the last 200 years or so in Europe and Asia, things get vague quickly.”
“Besides, as I am fond of saying, ‘your genes are not special; the way you were raised is special.’ You and me and grandpa and grandma are all from families that place a high cultural value on education and graciousness as the route away from not-too-distant poverty. Which is why we all feel more comfortable around people who embrace the same, no matter what they look like or where they got their genes.”
That fun diversion, including looking up the various photos I used as illustration, carried me across the plateau and down the first run of dramatic, whooshing descents towards the town. When I came around the arm of the mountain and saw lights in the distance I paused for a snack and a photo.
Good ol’ Valoria, always ready to stop for a photo — and hold my snack while I’m taking it.
A night-time approach photo to match the one from two years ago.
One more whooshing descent, burning the brakes, and I arrived in Seydisfjordur. Only order of business: Check in and go to bed.
The hostel room was quite cozy. No one in the building was wearing a mask, even in the common lounge area, which I could only shrug at. The rules have always been loose at tourist-heavy spots.
