Only a few hours after the boat launched, I began to feel feverish. This wasn’t some kind of sea-sickness; I wasn’t prone to that. It felt more like a mild flu, including some digestive problems. Had I finally caught a variant of COVID-19?
I walked around the deck a little to see if fresh air would help. No luck.
The journey to Denmark from the Faroe Islands includes one whole day at sea. For the next 30 hours or so, I slept, tossing around on the tiny bed in my tiny room, conscious only of the surging ocean beneath the boat in the darkness. Occasionally I drank water from the sack I’d filled before embarking. That had been a great idea because the water available on the ship was either foul tasting or tourist-grade expensive.
Eventually the fever broke and I felt much better, but all the sleep had wrecked my body’s sense of day and night. It didn’t help that the transition to European time had cut two hours from the clock. I grazed on some cafeteria snacks while listening to an audiobook, then spent the final night on the boat drifting around in a haze of semi-sleep that wouldn’t make a great start to my Denmark ride.
I got nine good hours, with occasional waking. As I was walking around in my dream I heard myself snoring, so either I wasn’t entirely asleep, or my brain was playing a bizarre trick on me.
I coughed a bit. Was I recovering from something, or coming down with something else? Not a great time for it, here at the end of the world. I only had a few hours left in this AirBnB.
I lingered for a while in the dining room, enjoying the diffuse morning sunlight, and the cozy contrast of the inside heat with the blustery wind combing the hills outside.
A charming place! But I didn’t have a boat to launch here, and the weather wasn’t great for hiking. With only a couple more days on the islands it made sense to turn around and go right back up the hill.
The bike was nearly dry from yesterday, which was a shame because it was just going to get wet again today…
I rode to the edge of town where the road began ascending the valley, and once I was beyond the buildings the wind went from annoying to ferocious. It was coursing down the hill right into my face, pushing me and the bike directly away from where I needed to go.
Out of curiosity I called up the wind tracking app I’d installed a few days ago.
In the above image, the Faroe Islands are those little dots straight south from that formation that looks suspiciously like the eye of a hurricane, midway between Iceland and Norway.
In bike touring, you plan to go to the safest place, on the safest route, at the safest time and speed, and then you’re okay because you only break a couple of those rules when your plans change. Today there was bound to be trouble, because I was breaking all the rules at once. Even if I wanted to reschedule, I couldn’t because there was nowhere to stay in this town for the night, and if I tried to camp, my equipment would instantly be destroyed. And there was only one road out. And it wasn’t safe.
It was about 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) and 300 meters (1000 feet) up to the pass between this town and the next. I tried pedaling at first, but the wind gusted unpredictably, throwing me off balance. Only about 50 meters away from the last building I stumbled out of the seat and began to push the bike, walking on the left side so I could keep one hand on the front brake, which was the stronger of the two. The wind got worse as I began the ascent, and the gusts became so strong that unless I took defensive maneuvers they could knock me backward and onto the ground.
When a surge began to hit me, I gripped the brake and leaned my torso over the back of the seat, pushing the tires down onto the road with my weight and joining myself and the bike into one object. As I did this, I turned my head to the right, facing downhill, because the wind was blowing rain at my head so fiercely it felt like a dozen needles piercing my skin. It was so painful that the first few times I impulsively checked my face to make sure I wasn’t bleeding. With my head turned, the raindrops blasted the back of my helmet instead, making a sound every time like a bundle of dry spaghetti snapping slowly in half.
Fun fact I only learned later: The winds on the northern and southern edges of the Faroe Islands are generally worse than the interior.
Some years are milder than others, and this year was mild in the sense that the summer was longer, delaying the onset of the tougher weather in the fall. But that tougher weather did arrive, and I was in the midst of it.
In the distance I could see the wind churning the grass violently all across the hillside. All the animal pens were vacant: The animals were all indoors. I should be following their example.
The road out of Gjógv had numerous turnouts – little appendages of pavement on either side of the road – and I lingered at each one so that cars could pass me. The driving rain worked into all the seams of my clothing, but the outer layer did still separate my clothes from the wind, allowing me to stay reasonably warm.
Just after the first turnout, the wind lashed at the bike, and the recently-superglued side mirror snapped right off and tumbled onto the road. “Awww, come on!!” I yelled, then awkwardly turned the bike in a loop so I could get a few meters back down the hill and pick the mirror up. Honestly I had been lucky, because if the wind was gusting it could have just carried the mirror upward and out to sea. I wedged it into my retention straps. Maybe I could come up with a better repair plan later in Tórshavn.
Covering the 2.5 kilometers to the top of the mountain pass took hours. I have no idea how many. I couldn’t see the sun, and all I could hear was the wind. I kept hoping it would get less intense but it only got worse. Close to the top, it was averaging about 30 meters a second — just over 65 miles per hour. Many times I didn’t square myself and the bike into the wind quite quickly enough and was nearly blown off my feet. The gusting had no pattern. There was no safe window where I could relax my body.
Just before I reached the top, an especially hard blast shoved the bike out of my hands, and away to the right. It toppled over, and the combined slope and the wind began to actually push it several meters back down the road on its side. No small feat, since the gear and bike combined weigh well over 45 kilograms (100 pounds.)
I jogged carefully after it and hunkered down on the leeward side, then very slowly pushed it upright. The journey down the road had scraped the corner off the netting on my seat, and put a tear in it longer than the palm of my hand.
I knew from a glance that it would probably continue to tear until the seat was unusable, but I didn’t know whether that gave me another day or another month. The road also tore a hole in the rain cover over my backpack, which was annoying but much more fixable: I could just slap a square of duct tape over that when I got to a city.
The most disappointing effect of the tumble only became clear to me after I’d pushed the bike another 15 meters or so, reaching the top. I glanced up to see what my GPS said the elevation was, and the GPS was gone. Apparently it had been popped off the handlebars when the bike fell.
“Awwwww, dangit,” I said into the wind. I couldn’t even turn around to look where it might have fallen because I would be too off-balance, but ahead of me was a wire fence right across the top of the pass, with a gap for the road. I struggled forward another 15 meters and shoved the bike over the cattle-guard, then turned left and lined it up against the fence so the wind was pressing it into the wire. Then I walked back down the road, leaning back, going in small steps. A surprise surge in the wind could send me face-first onto the downslope of the cement and push me, and if I was lucky it would only tear big holes in my clothing. Anything less than lucky and I would break an arm.
The search was fruitless. In my memory of how the bike fell, I saw the handlebars pointing off to the right, and that way led down the slope of the valley into the churning grass. The GPS was a light plastic thing; it had most certainly been blown right over the edge and was probably 200 meters away tangled in some roots. It was black. I would never find it even if the weather was suddenly perfect.
“Well, crap,” I thought. “It’s just going to sit there in the grass until the battery runs out, recording nothing. Then it will probably remain undiscovered until the weather destroys it completely. Talk about e-waste.” I felt helpless. I wasn’t even sure what to learn from the experience: In 15 years of biking with a GPS as my constant companion, I had never once lost one from an impact. This was a pretty special circumstance.
I mince-walked back up to the bike and turned it into the wind. When I was over the top of the pass by about 30 meters the wind seemed to die down somewhat. “Oh thank goodness,” I thought, and tried to get back on the bike. The road zig-zagged sharply just ahead, and all seemed well until I went around the first bend, and the wind came back just as fiercely as it was on the other side of the pass. I dismounted and returned to pushing.
But first I took a careful self-portrait to show my lunatic expression:
This is the expression you get on your face when you’ve been bracing against 90mph gusts of wind for five hours.
This is the expression you get on your face when you’ve been bracing against 90mph gusts of wind for five hours.
Yes folks, that is the face of a wind-blown lunatic, being stupid, out in stupid weather. Behold! Do not follow the example of this person!
I thought going downhill would make things easier, even if the wind was the same. That turned out to be true and I did manage to coast for a good 500 meters on one straightaway, but then the road turned up again, and the wind added a layer of ferocity even more extreme than what I’d felt at the pass. I was now being hit by gusts as hard as 40 meters a second — 90 miles per hour. I had to lean over with my chest pressed to the side of the seat and push very hard just to take each single step forward.
Despite my best efforts to improve my tactics for bracing myself and moving at the right time, I lost control of the bike and it pitched over at least four more times. Two women driving a small car passed me and asked if I was okay, and if perhaps they could carry some of my bags ahead to my destination, since their car was far too small for my bike. I turned them down, partially out of stubborn politeness, but mostly for a reason I didn’t really want to explain to them: I needed the bags as ballast, or the bike would surely be blown right off the road, with me tumbling along or chasing desperately behind it. I gave them my bravest “I’m fine, just going very slow” reassurance and they went on their way, though I could tell they didn’t really buy it.
I assume they mentioned me to friends later on, with words like, “Crazy guy on a bike.” I cop to that.
It’s funny… I get a bike, and the exercise keeps me healthy, which saves my life, so it’s a good influence. But it compels me to go out into these dangerous situations and risk my life, so the bike is a bad influence. But then I put so much gear on the bike, that the sheer weight of it keeps me from getting killed. So, good influence?
Finally I pushed up to the intersection I’d passed before — the one where the road sent an offshoot way down to the east, making some angular turns and plummeting 300 meters to the tiny town of Funningur by the sea. I was hoping that the wind would get progressively calmer as I moved downhill, but I could tell I’d have to keep pushing the bike at least until I got to the first major bend, where I would no longer be facing straight into the wind.
There was a guardrail at the intersection, and I pushed the bike over to it so it would be close when the wind gusted. I stood there fiddling with my sheep-themed root beer bottle for about a minute, trying to decide if I should search for an AirBnB or a hotel in the town below, and suddenly the wind hit me harder than it had all day. The bike was pushed sideways and back, with both tires skidding on the road – the brake made zero difference – and I was hurled back with it. My butt hit the guardrail immediately, then the bike hit my stomach, then the wind pressed the bike hard into me as though a giant hand was trying to make me the gooey center of a sandwich in a panini-press.
If not for that guardrail – and how close I’d kept it – I would have absolutely been blasted right down the cliff. Assuming the bike missed me, I might have managed to roll to a stop maybe 100 meters down, perhaps without a broken limb. But the bike would definitely be broken in some way that I couldn’t ride it, and my gear would be scattered far and wide. Assuming I could even move, my only option at that point would be to crawl around on the hillside trying to fetch my gear and hope that I could at least find my phone, and barring that, drag myself up to the road and flag down a car.
Luckily: A guardrail.
After about five seconds the wind eased up enough for me to shove the bike outward and hunch over it, and when I looked up from that I noticed a truck had just passed me and was slowing down. The driver had most certainly seen me get slammed against the rail.
It stopped only 10 meters away. I bent forward and shoved the bike slowly up the road, sticking close to the guardrail, and managed to get up alongside the truck. The window came down and a man leaned his head out, and yelled something. The wind was howling, and I yelled back “I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the wind!!”
He paused for a moment, then put his truck in gear and moved it forward, angled to the left, closing the gap between him and the guardrail. This made a little wedge where the wind wasn’t as bad, with me inside it. “This guy knows what he’s doing,” I thought. I gratefully pushed the bike ahead a bit more, drawing up close to the window again.
He leaned out and said, in a fantastic example of deadpan Norwegian humor, “It is a bit windy today.”
I laughed and agreed, and then paused for a moment. I quickly thought to myself: “Okay, so you’ve been out here for at least four hours, and managed to go about three kilometers. There are no hotels, and the AirBnB you stayed at two days ago seems to be the only one available between you and Tórshavn, and it’s another 33 kilometers away. At your current rate it would take you well over an entire day to get there. Your seat mesh is torn, your rain cover is torn, your GPS is gone, your mirror is broken, your battery may be too wet to charge your phone, the only substantial food you have is two slices of pizza, and you’re soaking wet. The wind almost succeeded in murdering you just moments ago and will doubtless try again another ten times before you’re even off this mountain, and it will likely get worse, not better. Oh, and in about four hours it will get dark. This man has an actual truck, with a bed. He is driving the only kind of vehicle that can transport you, and you have not seen any other like it all day.”
I had just done all of Iceland without ever setting foot in a car — for the second time, in fact. But the Faroe Islands was too much for me to handle just now. If I didn’t set a limit I could walk away from, this environment was going to set a limit for me that I couldn’t. It was time to ask a stranger for help.
I grinned and inclined my head back toward the bed of his truck. “I don’t suppose you’d be wiling to give me a lift?”
He immediately nodded and set the parking brake, turned on his hazard lights, and stepped out of the truck. He looked about 35, my height, and in good shape. He was wearing a good rain jacket and pants.
As he opened the tailgate and rummaged around for straps, I brought the bike carefully around to the back. Another car pulled up behind us on the road and an older man got out, in his 50’s with a grizzled face. He smiled at me, traded a few words in Faroese with the first driver, and then pitched in to help lift my bicycle into the truck. We laid it sideways, and as the wind slapped at all of us, the owner of the truck got out a retention strap and looped it through slots in the truck bed, passing it over the bike. Then he cranked a ratchet, pressing the bike down just enough to stop it from moving. I thought for a second that the pressure of the strap might bend the rack or crush some of my possessions, but I dismissed the thought immediately. Those were consequences I would accept.
He shut the tailgate. I thanked the second man, and he waved and returned to his car. Then I climbed into the cab of the truck, said, “Whoooo!!”, and thanked the driver.
“I knew the weather was going to be tough this morning,” I said, “but I had no idea the wind was going to get this bad.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It looks like maybe 30 to 40 meters a second now.”
“Does the wind usually get this bad in September?”
He thought for a while as he negotiated the switchbacks down the mountain. “It’s different each year. We always get storms like this in the fall, sometimes two or three, sometimes ten or fifteen.” His English was halting, but clear. In the back of my head I wondered at the way English with a Norwegian accent sounds more to me like the American accent than the British one. Was that the World War II influence? Or did the American accent converge to a similar sound because it was being learned by people who previously spoke lots of German and Danish and Dutch, during colonial times?
(I asked Rachel, an actual linguist, about this years later, and she said I was onto something with the Danish influence, but I shouldn’t also discount the social influence of powerful and pervasive American media in modern times.)
We talked about a possible destination for me. I said I was headed to an AirBnB in Hósvik. He said he would drive me there. I asked where he was heading before he picked me up. He said Runavik. I said he could just drop me off in Runavik and I could catch a bus since the wind wouldn’t be as bad there, but he insisted on driving me all the way to Hósvik, which was about 30 kilometers out of his way. I thanked him again, trying to convey my earnest gratitude. It was quite possible he was saving my stubborn-ass life.
We chatted about other things. I learned his name was Sonni. He said his family had lived in the Faroes as long as anyone could remember. The earliest mention of his hometown in history books by name was 600 years ago, but people have been there since at least the viking era over 1000 years back.
I could tell he was working hard to come up with questions, and keep up with my American chatterbox style. I slowed down a bit, and let the spattering of the rain and the churning of the wiper blades fill the cab for longer intervals, then offered easy topics. He asked about the weather in San Francisco and I compared the fog that rolls over the Golden Gate to the mist I’d seen on the ocean a few days ago.
And just like that, I was back in Hósvik. The whole ride took about 25 minutes. Sonni helped me lower the bike to the ground, and I shook his hand and asked for a photo to put in my album. I offered him money but he smiled and turned it down, so I thanked him several more times.
As his truck pulled away I looked around, and a weird feeling of disorientation crept over me, as though I wasn’t really here. How could I be? Mere moments ago I’d been on the side of a mountain near a place it had taken me the entire day to get to. Had I teleported? Well, yes. It was that “broken line” feeling of car travel. I hadn’t experienced it since the shuttle from the Iceland airport over two months ago, and now, I could acutely feel the unnatural detachment from my surroundings that modern life usually grants me all the time.
How strange.
After I checked into the AirBnB I plundered my remaining food, which was almost nothing. I ate several handfuls of gummi bears, the two slices of leftover pizza, a fistful of peanuts, and a Prince Polo bar. That was everything I had, except for more peanuts, and my stomach didn’t want those. Actually it was a full-body thing: I wanted more protein and calories but I was too physically exhausted to eat.
I sat in the dim living room for a while, making a few notes about the day on my miraculously dry laptop. I think the only other time I’d experienced 40 meter-per-second wind was sticking my hand out the window of a car. And that was really not the same.
I had another day to get back to the ferry terminal, but I had to admit, at this point I would have traded that day for an extra one in Denmark, where the weather was bound to be entirely different.
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.
The morning was cold enough that I wore my rain pants just for the insulation, even though it wasn’t raining. This had a useful side-effect: No one could see just how alarmingly stained my sweatpants were. Highway tar does not look good on anything.
The view in the campground was glorious, and as I struck camp I paused for a while to take a video of the tumbling clouds.
Daylight revealed big splats of mud on my walk-around jeans, so I rinsed them in the restaurant bathroom and roped them to the bike. The dry wind would do the job the weak sunlight couldn’t.
Across the bay from the viking settlement — a radar station!
Across the bay from the viking settlement — a radar station!
Before joining the main highway, I rambled back down to the end of the road I’d been walking last night, and saw a cool radar station that had only been a row of blinking lights before.
When I reached the highway, the tunnel was visible again. The first one of this trip. (I’d been through a few on the northern side a few years ago.) This would be fun!
Further in I saw a few spots that were already in need of repair. I wonder if volcanic eruptions cause the ground to quake enough for this? Or is it just the ordinary freeze-thaw destruction of harsh winters?
Okay well there’s a little wear and tear, but still pretty modern lookin’.
To amuse myself and contrast with the serene landscape, I cued up an ancient radio show by The Firesign Theatre, The Big Internet Broadcast Of 1996. I wondered if the Icelanders around me would go for such absurdist humor? I might be making the day’s experience less Icelandic, but, … a geek’s gotta geek.
“We’ve got a lot of everything out here. And a lot of places to … put it in.”
The Firesign Theatre describing America
I think this sign is saying something about city versus country speed limits, but it’s way too complicated.
I think this sign is saying something about city versus country speed limits, but it’s way too complicated.
So, you should have headlights if there’s no road, or a road but no city, unless you’re a bus, in which case go various speeds. But if there’s mixed company, then … go the same speeds? Thank goodness I can ignore this, since there aren’t any bicycles.
Around the corner I found a nice place to sit:
Tired of traveling? Take a rest, in the big red random chair.
Hay wrapped up for later chomping. Gotta have that when the weather gets as bad as it does in Iceland.
Then my afternoon changed. I was biking along an S-curve, and ahead I noticed a car hurtling along, approaching the other end of the curve. I was a bit concerned that it was going to take the corner pretty fast. Then it didn’t take the corner at all.
Instead, the car went down the embankment on the outside of the curve, then up another embankment from a perpendicular road. It flew almost 15 feet into the air, tilting downward from the rotational force of the front wheels being first to leave the ground, then it came down with a heavy thud just on the other side of a fence, see-sawing back up into the air and throwing a large dark object out behind it. It landed again, the airbags deployed, and finally it ground to a stop in the grass.
Witnessing all this, I pedaled faster to get around the S-curve to where the vehicle had landed, certain someone was seriously hurt. Less than a minute later, a young woman opened the driver-side door and got out, standing unsteadily. By the time I drew close with my bike, on the other side of the wire fence, she had walked a circle around the car, apparently inspecting it for damage, and then sat down heavily on the grass by the open door.
I looked ahead towards the first impact, where I’d seen a giant object come flying out. There was a large rectangle of bare earth, and a long blanket of sod the same size beyond it. The impact of the vehicle had ripped it out of the ground all at once. I was quite relieved it wasn’t a mangled body, human or otherwise, and that I didn’t have to try and triage some horrifying injury while waiting for assistance, since I wouldn’t be very good at it.
The first impact dug up a big chunk of turf and flung it to one side.
The rear wheels came down in the same place just after the front ones bounced up.
I asked the woman if she was alright, and said I would call emergency services. I had a feeling she wasn’t confident enough in her English to answer back. I took my phone off the handlebars and realized I had no idea what the number for emergency service in Iceland was, or even if my phone would connect to it.
Before I could start puzzling this out, another car came along. It slowed for me, then slowed dramatically when the driver saw down the embankment and noticed a car sitting on the wrong side of a cattle fence.
The car parked, and the man who emerged was a local farmer, fluent in Icelandic. I told him what I’d seen and he immediately began attending to the young woman, who looked no more than 17 years old, and was clearly in shock. He called for the highway patrol, and with a few minutes to wait he turned to me and gave the woman’s side of the story, as she remained shell-shocked in the grass.
“She was up really late, trying to drive home from the other side of the island,” he said. “She fell asleep at the wheel. When she woke up, the car was in the grass. She doesn’t remember anything about the accident, just waking up with her face in the airbag.”
A few minutes later an SUV marked as law enforcement pulled up. Two officers talked to the woman, and a third came up to me and asked for a retelling of the incident, since I was the only one who’d seen it. I walked him over to where the car left the road, and to the embankment where it vaulted into the air. The car had missed hitting a metal sign embedded in a concrete footing by only a few inches, then had flown just far enough to avoid having the rear end come down on top of a fencepost. That would have turned the car sideways and possibly thrown her from it. Or, if she’d been going slower and come down in front of the fence, the steep angle would have plowed the post upward and sent it through the windshield.
I was gobsmacked at how absurdly fortunate she had been — and how incredibly well the airbags had done their job. Holy crap do those things save lives. The extent of her injuries was a bruised ankle and some PTSD.
I stood around texting for a bit. The young woman got moved to the back of the SUV. The farmer sat next to her, providing company for the ride home. It turns out he knew her father, a fellow farmer. I leaned in the window and told her: “You’ve very lucky. Think of all the time after this as bonus time.”
She nodded and gave a weak smile.
There was nothing more I could contribute, so I rode on. By evening I’d found a campground, and set up my shelter.
The place had a cute little common area, making a pleasant island of light. I sat around for a while listening to a few other campers chatting about their hike.
Long story short: It took about two weeks for the new tire to arrive. That meant two weeks in Höfn, rambling around town, doing remote work, and trying every restaurant and snack shop at least once. Not a bad life, though my feet were itchy the whole time.
Parked outside in plain view, with gear on it. That’s security in a small Iceland town.
When the AirBnB stay was done I grabbed a patch of grass at the local campsite and paid a few days in advance. I had plenty of work to do but it was too cold to sit outdoors with the laptop, so I rotated between a couple of cafes, a gas station dining area, and the common area of the campground.
As an aside, while trying to figure out the name of that glacier, I found it was actually pretty hard to find a modern map with enough labels on it. I eventually dug one out of a scientific paper named “Non-surface mass balance of glaciers in Iceland“:
One of the retaining walls along the main street had been turned into an art gallery by local students. By the end of the second week I knew them all. The old dude in the boat was my favorite.
Most artctic terns get to Iceland by flying. Some pay a boatman.
No matter how many times you wash your sweats, you can’t get highway tar out!
Unfortunately, no amount of washing will get highway tar out of sweatpants. My frustration inspired a short poem:
Tenth day of cycling The stench hits you like a truck Time for sink laundry
Hot highway blowout Sitting down to fix the flat Ass covered in tar
Hey bicycle guy Looks like you pooped fireworks Sink laundry again
I had a pair of regular pants that I was wearing around town, but when I got back on the road I would have to wear those revolting sweatpants again. I consoled myself during the endless work hours with snacks:
Höfn is a fine town and I have nothing against it, but the sensation of valuable travel days slipping away made the time I spent there kind of unpleasant. The day I’d arrived, I got in touch with the postal depot in Reykjavík, and in the back-and-forth with them over the two weeks I learned that my package had taken only three days to travel 6000 miles and arrive in Iceland, and the additional twelve days got consumed by the customs inspection and the 280-mile (450km) journey around the country to get to Höfn. It was frustrating, but I knew I had no alternative to waiting.
There was only one 20-inch bike tire in the entire country, and it was in a box headed my way.
