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.
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.
Sjanni is a great fellow and I wish I’d had more time to spend with him!
I was looking forward to today’s ride because it included a tunnel – the Fáskrúðsfjarðargöng – 20,000 feet of road straight through a mountain and open to cyclists.
I stopped in town for some breakfast and email with nephews. One of them was feeling despair over the state of the world.
It’s difficult to pay attention to work when the world is slowly ending. I can’t stop seeking information about the collapse. I wonder if I’m crippling myself by going to college to get a degree that might not be worth all that much and it might not matter if the country has burned down yet or been flooded or both. Also corporations are buying all the houses here so I’m fairly certain I’ll be renting my whole life. I’m sure my 20-something endocrine system isn’t helping here either.
I thought for a while, then emailed back:
Civilization and the planet will survive while you to spend some time concentrating on your own development and diversification. It’s a process and you don’t need to tackle it all at once or figure out where it should go. Take it one step at a time, one day at a time.
What I didn’t say at the time, was that I could remember being his age many years ago, and overhearing my sister – his mother – expressing the same frustration and despair. And I remember our Dad replying with pretty much the same advice.
That gave me two interesting thoughts: First, that young people are always prone to think the world is ending, because they haven’t been around long enough to see otherwise. So conversations like this will happen forever, no matter how good or bad things get.
And second… How much worse was this, centuries ago, when the world seemed to be at the mercy of inscrutable gods, and people usually didn’t quite live long enough to learn that the world would carry on past their own hormone-addled youth?
That’s the morbid angle on this “wisdom”: It truly sets in when you witness people your age – or even younger than you – dying, and then observe years, then decades, of the world continuing without them. And perhaps not into a future they would have expected, but in some way that’s real enough, and teeming with other living people who still have to deal with it.
This global pandemic business. Great for the soul, yeah? Ugh. Interesting times — who needs them!!
Today’s route appears to go straight up over a mountain! No wait, that’s a tunnel.
And there it was… The portal down into darkness. I didn’t realize until I got this close that the tunnel slopes downwards from here, for the entire run. A good idea for drainage purposes, and also for dramatic effect. It feels a whole lot like descending deep into the earth.
10 whole minutes of coasting silently downhill into the mountain. Very trippy.
And then, off I went. The slope seemed to grab the bike, and the cool air being drawn through the tunnel by the turbines on the ceiling streamed over me, making it feel like I was going faster. I had a brainwave and put on some music from the Skyrim soundtrack: The chanting and drumming of Sovngarde. I had plenty of time to play through the entire track, because 20,000 feet of tunnel is nearly 3.8 miles (6km). At a breezy 15 miles an hour on a bike that’s fully 15 minutes of creeping downward through solid rock, imagining that I’m on my way to some eldritch ruined city abiding in total darkness, teeming with ghosts and adventure.
I love being a nerd!
If you look close you can see the tunnel I came out of.
If you look close you can see the tunnel I came out of.
Once I was out of the tunnel, I paused for a look back. The exit was clearly lower on the mountain than the entrance, making the mass above it even more impressive.
The town of Reyðarfjörður was on my right, sporting some nice waterfalls and snacking spots, but I was too interested in forging ahead over the hills to Egilsstaðir, where the next room was booked. The wind could turn against me any time, and I didn’t fancy another late night on the road.
I was tempted to walk over and put my feet in, but I figured the water would be far too cold, and my socks would take far too long to dry.
If I’m reading the sign correctly, the motorist was only 16 when she died here.
The rest of the journey was a slow pedal against mild headwind, through a narrow and relatively featureless valley. I say featureless, but it was still very pretty. I listened to a podcast about world economics and kept on cranking.
I arrived at an intersection, and suddenly realized that for the first time in many weeks, I’d crossed my own path from 2019. Once again I was in Egilsstaðir.
Time to find more snacks!
Here’s a place that looks like it can serve up a lot of calories.
Snack-laden, I found my hotel and wrestled all my gear up several floors to the room, including the bike. It was good to be indoors and warm again, and the food gave me enough energy to put in some work hours before falling over.
Before leaving town I decided to have a nice breakfast at the restaurant. Only a handful of people were there, and the atmosphere was quiet and comfy. In the corner I noticed an interesting collection of furniture:
It’s pretty cool seeing all these little kid toy sections in restaurants.
It’s pretty cool seeing all these little kid toy sections in restaurants.
The owners had set up a little play area for kids to mess around while their parents ate. Lovely! I can’t imagine any American restaurant doing this, at least any corporate-owned one, because of liability issues, and the drive to make customers move along as soon as possible.
(Much later when I was thinking about this, I discovered that Djúpivogur is the first – and so far the only – Icelandic town to join the Cittaslow movement.)
Shout-out to Glen, giving his trailer a trial-run on this Iceland tour!
Glen is a long-range cycle tourist, and has been all over the world. For his Iceland visit he’s using a trailer, and is not entirely sure he likes it.
The luggage rides low to the ground and the trailer tilts with the rest of the bike, so maneuverability is pretty good, but there’s still extra drag to deal with. On the one hand you can inflate the wheel to a very high pressure to make it roll better – but on the other hand, the wheel is relatively small. Plus there’s the weight of the frame.
“So what do you like the most about Iceland so far?” I asked him.
“I think I’ve been the most impressed by the deep clear water here.”
“Is there a place you’re recently been that you think is under-appreciated by cycle tourists?”
“Turkey is amazing, and relatively unknown. It was kind of a paradox, to be honest. I wanted to stay there longer but I also knew I would never want to stay permanently. The people there are in denial about the social and political problems they have, to the point where it’s surprising Turkey even holds together as a country.”
We chatted a bit more and wished each other luck, and as he vanished around the corner I spent some time preparing my rain gear. I’d been lucky the past few weeks, but now it was back to the standard waves of rain, and the all-day dance of add-a-layer, shed-a-layer.
The back of the bike: Table, coat rack, extra hand, clothesline, and occasionally even a work desk.
The back of the bike: Table, coat rack, extra hand, clothesline, and occasionally even a work desk.
I had to pause for a moment and enjoy a thankful thought for something I use every day: The flat surface on the top of my backpack. On a tour, it’s my kitchen table, my workshop, my clothesline, my staging area, and my extra pair of hands.
This could be a clear day or a cloudy day, depending on your perspective.
This side of the rock was constantly getting wet from streams of water and then quickly drying out from the wind, over and over.
As I rode along, the rain intensified, and so did the wind. By the time I stopped for a self-portrait in the afternoon, I was fairly soaked by the wind blowing water sideways into my jacket and hood.
Just how much mist is an excessive amount? Iceland has no such limit!
I kept pausing for photos, or to eat snacks, or to just stand around breathing the air, and lost all track of time.
You could climb to the top, but I don't know where you'd stand when you got there!
Creepy!
Another world, above and below the clouds.
Gorgeous sandwich layers along every fjord.
I cairn do this all day.
Mysterious!
And all this geography, right by the side of the road...
Ride on in, the mist is fine!
Farming the sea.
Watch out for them trucks!
That rock's in the way! Blast it!
Before I realized it, between the cloud cover and the hour, it was getting pretty dark.
I assumed I wouldn’t be doing any night-riding on this trip, partly because I have to pay more attention to a work schedule and keep regular hours, and partly because it’s less interesting to ride at night in a country as gorgeous as Iceland.
If I was riding through boring terrain with nothing new to see, then night time would have some clear advantages: It’s quieter, there’s less traffic and more privacy, and there is a real increased sense of intimacy with the bicycle. On a recumbent it’s like sitting at home in a chair in a comfortable study, though of course you need to keep spinning your legs.
Is something wrong with my lens? Nope. It’s the northern lights.
On a whim, I pulled to the side of the road and dismounted. My headlight went dim, and then slowly began to fade out entirely.
I looked up and saw two satellites slowly coasting across the sky. As my vision adjusted, I tilted my head and realized I could see the arc of the galaxy spread right across the top of the sky like a stripe. Turning my head to take in the view all around me, I looked back up the road, and above it on a shelf of cloud the constellation of the Big Dipper was right in the center of my vision, looming larger than I had ever seen it before.
I looked around for Orion‘s belt – which I thought would be easy to see because it’s a very familiar constellation – but there appeared to be so many other stars in the sky that I couldn’t pick it out. If I set my camera up for a long exposure for 30 seconds or more like I did a few days ago in the Viking camp, I was certain it would reveal a deep royal purple undertone filling half the sky as the northern lights undulated across the camera.
The aurora, vaulting up behind the clouds. I did not expect to see them this time of year.
The aurora, vaulting up behind the clouds. I did not expect to see them this time of year.
I stood around in darkness for almost half an hour, lost in thought, and then abruptly realized that I hadn’t been passed by a car the entire time. The only car I could see was a microscopic point of light on the outer edge of the mountains across the bay ahead of me, just where the mountain slope met the ocean. I saw another light below it, coasting off in a straight line to the east, following the horizon. That would probably be a fishing boat, starting the night’s work.
Perhaps the majesty of this environment isn’t entirely lost when the sun sets.
I got back on the bike and rode for a while, reaching a decent speed, and then tilted my head to look at the Milky Way again. Instead of a scattering of stars forming a rough shape, it was now a distinct band with its own weird texture. Tilting my head made my balance a bit wonky so I tried to keep it brief, but nevertheless in that few seconds a minor gust of wind shoved my helmet right off my head. As it rolled on the highway behind me I hit the brakes and burst out laughing. Nothing says “safety” like a helmet that tumbles to the ground randomly because you forgot to clip it on…
As I laughed quite loud at my own folly I looked up again, and a meteorite went streaking across the horizon. I stood and appreciated that, and a few seconds later I heard a loud bleat from a sheep directly behind me, surprisingly close at hand. This patch of road was full of surprises! I wanted to stand there for hours, watching the sky get ever more grand, but there was a number I had to contend with: The one on the thermometer. In conditions like these, if I stop cycling for more than about ten minutes I grow very uncomfortably cold, even with all my layers on. And tonight my layers were compromised by water. Best for me to move along.
Fjardabyggd:. More than just that thing you shout when you stub your toe: It’s also a town!
Fjardabyggd:. More than just that thing you shout when you stub your toe: It’s also a town!
Google and Apple maps could not agree on where the hotel was. Apple maps had the nerve to present two results for the same address, each about half a mile apart on the same stretch of road. I found the place on the third try, an hour after I passed it the first time.
It was a four unit lodge built underneath a house, with a common kitchen and showers. There were plenty of shoes propped on the rack by the door so I tried to stay quiet as I lugged my gear and my exhausted ass inside.
My room had two beds, so I luxuriated by pouring all my stuff on the smaller one to organize it. My last act for the night was to prop my squishy gloves on the windowsill over the radiator.
Didn’t get a chance to pay for your spot? Be a good citizen and leave some cash.
Today would be a quiet day, spent snacking along into a mild headwind. Headwinds are never nice, but at least this one did interesting things to the sea:
I switched between music and books all day, giving myself room to think. My mind kept coming back to the scene of the accident from yesterday, and the behavior of the people involved, especially the victim.
Aha! I think I found the Icelandic version of Pride Rock!
Aha! I think I found the Icelandic version of Pride Rock!
The young woman had not yelled or cried, just sat there in awful silence. As a fellow introvert I knew there was a storm inside her head of course. It was just thoroughly walled in by learned social behavior and disposition. I wondered if that expression would come later – days or weeks from now – ambushing her in a safe isolated place, or perhaps somewhere embarrassingly public. If I was dealing with people back home in California I would anticipate that. But could I expect it here, with Icelanders? Perhaps the stoicism I see around me on the surface goes all the way to the core, and this young person already lives inside it to the point where a more intense expression of her feelings will just never arrive.
It would be silly of course to extrapolate one personality onto an entire country. But it’s still possible, and interesting, to talk about averages, and why those could exist. As I rode along, snapping the occasional picture of the rugged coast and forbidding mountains, I wondered if there was a geographical influence at work.
How much does this terrain influence the people living on it?
This bay is protected by a long thin arm of land that smooths the waves on the ocean.
This bay is protected by a long thin arm of land that smooths the waves on the ocean.
I thought about the young woman, and her age group. What must it be like, spending your teenage years in Icelandic terrain? I amused myself by trying to puzzle it out.
For one, the population here is either super-concentrated, or sparse. There aren’t a lot of suburbs. If your family does farming or ranching, there is plenty of kid-appropriate work to be done. This makes me think that Icelandic kids are not likely to hang around together in large groups unattended, away from the normalizing influence of adults.
Geese on the water near the Hvalnes Nature Reserve Beach.
This is the same stuff that’s in the pillow packed into a compression sack on my bike!
Iceland may be rural, but it’s not quite big enough to be anonymous. All your socializing destinations are in town, where you stand a chance of blundering across some family friend who knows you. If you drove for an hour you might be among total strangers, but if your embarrassing young-person shenanigans have any real consequences – litter, vandalism, noise complaints – word might get back to your parents anyway.
Your parents are probably quiet people. Farm work isn’t a dialogue-driven process. There isn’t a big dancing or singing tradition relative to elsewhere, though you do get a lot of wickedly funny verbal humor that you’ll appreciate more as an adult.
I wondered about this, actually. In rural places where the winter is harsh, there’s a long chunk of time where people are trapped indoors with each other. Being quiet and polite is a good way to avoid expensive conflict, but don’t people also need an outlet? Like, a tavern down in the middle of the village, where music is playing, and people are drinking and shouting over the din, and getting some chaos out of their system? Maybe a bit of dancing?
But if that exists here, what about young people? Would they get their own youth-oriented places to carouse, or would they be mixed in with adults, as usual?
Got a piece of cardboard? Maybe you can slide down!
Got a piece of cardboard? Maybe you can slide down!
It’s a funny idea that a place made of quiet wilderness could also be socially confining. But the terrain seems to push that way. You can’t go skipping down to the beach for a roll in the surf and some sunbathing. You can’t go wandering into the woods, where the cover of trees gives you easy isolation, because there aren’t really any woods. If you want to be alone you need to hike into the hills, and for that you need gear, and people need to know where you’re going.
Another factor is the separation of the country from its neighbors. It’s pretty hard to leave. You can’t hop in a car and drive for a while and end up in Mexico, or go through an undersea tunnel and emerge in France, where people speak a different language and there is serious anonymity and weirdness. In Iceland you’re more likely to be exposed to other countries via incoming tourism, and that isn’t usually a positive filter. I mean, if my community back home was just comprised of the entitled action-hound subset that went on international vacations all the time, I’d probably be a serial arsonist. Let them all stay abroad, thank you very much.
That tourism – all those loud rude people coming in and setting a bad example – probably makes Icelanders want to double-down on their stoicism. Most of them, at least. And that’s another way geography contributes.
This pressure probably goes in the opposite direction too: If this terrain doesn’t fit your personality, then you can emigrate. The way is open, by the big airport and ferry terminal.
Now, I shouldn’t get carried away. Young people are going to find outlets wherever they are. I hear popular indoor activities for kids here are video games, D&D campaigns, drinking, playing in bands, chatting online, drinking, having movie nights, going to shows, drinking, endless flirting with potential romantic partners, and going on joyrides to any place where there’s a bit of privacy, even if it’s just a 24-hour mini-mart. That overlaps a whole lot with what my friends did back in Santa Cruz.
And sure, you can’t do casual outdoor stuff, but you can still be outside. There are field sports when the weather’s good. Get your legs working and the cold doesn’t matter so much. And anything that you can do on ice, is available in Iceland.
I had fun pondering all this, then switched to some Skyrim for a while to reset my brain.
Lots of travelers want you to know they’ve been here before you.
A while after that, the sun broke through the clouds, and I rearranged my layers. It felt like an autumn day back home, and I felt a bit nostalgic. To feel connected to things in my home country I started listening to a news podcast. That sent my mind in quite a different direction.
It was an NPR news report, talking about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. With a shock I realized it would be the 20th anniversary of them in about a week. Had it really been so many years? I could still remember exactly where I was, when I saw the first image that day…
In the report, people were being interviewed who were still active in a support group for the families of Flight 93, the plane that was hijacked with the intent of hitting the Capitol Building but crashed in a field instead. I listened as one of the interviewees, a woman with a low somber voice, reminisced about visiting the site of the crash only a little while after the incident. At the time, she gave a speech about her lost loved one to other bereaved people, sharing their grief, and their determination to build a memorial that would honor all those lost.
NPR rolled a short clip, of that earlier speech. It was the voice of a child.
That traumatic, era-defining splinter in modern history, shared by my whole generation, was now so far in the past that the children involved had grown up into middle age. That timid 11-year-old in the recording is now married and has school-aged children.
A terrible feeling rushed through me, as though two decades of my life had been skipped, and just yesterday I was in that small San Jose apartment staring at a television, watching the world get rearranged. Now suddenly I’m this grumpy old person, with all this gray hair, partway around the world on a bike. What happened? How the hell did I get here? Did I even live during those 20 years? What does any of it mean?
Tears blurred my vision and I had to roll the bike to a stop, and wander blindly to the side of the road so I could sit down in the grass for a while.
Needless to say this was not where I expected my nostalgia to lead. I pulled the phone off the bike and sent a few messages to family, checking in and centering myself. I drank some water. Felt the sun on my back; ran my hands over the grass.
As I calmed down I tried to understand the intensity of my reaction. I think it was because I had already passed into a post-post-9-11 era, and been living there a long time. The recording had dragged me back across two eras, to the beginning of the previous one.
For years the attack was a lens that shaped my politics, my sense of history, my relationships with Americans and non-Americans, et cetera, but that lens was eventually ground down into a temperate flatness: Politics couldn’t just be about terrorism any more. History wasn’t just about preventing my country from committing atrocities in the name of self-defense in the Middle East. Being American wasn’t just about debating the national stance on Muslims or Arabs or the dangers of petroleum dependency. I passed into another era. We all collectively needed to, because history just kept happening.
I’m here now, and there is so much more to think about than fire and smoke and the drumbeat of war, and for that I am intensely grateful.
Okay, back on the bike. Maybe some nice audiobook? Let’s see what’s ahead on the road…
Awww, don’t run over the dude! He’s just walkin’ here!
Awww, don’t run over the dude! He’s just walkin’ here!
I stopped for a while at a neat waterfall. A few picnic tables were nearby, but I had no food to eat on them. Bike tour metabolism is hard to plan for!
That’s way too tilted to be a house foundation. Some kind of waterside animal pen?
Then I began a long stretch of road that followed a narrow fjord (Hamarsfjörður on the map), with layered mountains visible on the opposite shore. The thick strata of the mountains were all tilted at a shallow but consistent angle, bending down towards the interior of the country. What immense forces were at work here?
Curious, I went poking around on my phone for some kind of geologic chart.
Since this was one of the long fjords on the eastern edge of the island, I was seeing a tilt down towards the point at which new land was being generated between the tectonic plates. Maybe the sheer weight of all the new layers in the middle, without the benefit of erosion to make them lighter, is causing the center of the island to sink a little bit, into the stew of molten rock that everything floats on?
An interesting theory! I made a note to go ask a geologist about it in the future. Also it was a pretty good reference to the colors of the Icelandic flag: “Blue around white around red” clearly means “sea around snow around volcanism.”
A ways after that I found an interesting memorial, in the form of a massive pile of rocks. A saint is buried here, and travelers consider it lucky to add a rock to his burial mound as they’re passing by. This has been going on for many, many years.
Apparently there’s an old religious dude buried right around here.
I am amused by the way this burial site has been turned into a picnic spot.
It’s funny how even extremely sensible people will do this, just to enjoy for a brief moment the whimsical idea that the spirits of dead saints can take a role in material affairs. I considered doing it myself, but the rain was picking up and the rocks were a bit slick. It would be hilarious if I went gathering rocks to boost my luck and busted an ankle.
Whole lotta symbols in the next town. Not sure what a bunch of them mean…
Whole lotta symbols in the next town. Not sure what a bunch of them mean…
Eventually I reached the town of Djúpivogur. The sign on the highway showed an encouraging number of little icons. There would be food and shelter!
With so much of my gear wet, and multiple days of camping behind me, I decided to try for a room. All the rooms were booked, but the hotel had a scattering of tiny wooden cabins behind the main building for a decent price. I grabbed one of those.
If you don’t dry your frillies on the radiatior, some other camper will come by and do the same.
If you don’t dry your frillies on the radiatior, some other camper will come by and do the same.
I went poking around the common area in pursuit of a shower and a washing machine, but they were all in use. A few people were splayed on a ratty-looking couch watching television. A miniature kitchen had a few abandoned tupperwares on the counter. Laundry was spread along the top of all the radiators. The place had that cavalier hostel atmosphere. Ah, my fellow tourists. Or rather: Aaaaa! My fellow tourists!
I was pretty hungry. Even a vending machine full of candy bars would have snared me. I tucked myself into the bed of the adorable little cabin and dreamed of snacks at the cafe in the morning.
