Iceland 2021 Page 7
A River Of Ice
Sleep was good. I managed not to worry about the tire most of the night. I found another thing to worry about in the morning though: The hotel had no food, and my supplies were low again.
Everything’s outside the room, so it counts as checking out!
Reassembling the patched tire. Let’s see how far this gets us…
I had a Prince Polo bar, so I chomped that while I moved my gear back out the window and reassembled the wheel. I brought it to half the usual pressure, hoping to slow the abrasion of the tube.
Then it was back on the road, with some atrocious dried fish snacks and a small can of Pepsi for calories. Sure, the food ain’t great just now, but the views… Amazing!
For most of the day the wind was against me. The coast flattened out into a series of plains separated by arms of rock pushing the road close to the sea. Eventually I hauled myself around a curve and was rewarded with Fjallsárlón glacier:
A long straight approach to the foot of the next glacier.
For an hour or so I pedaled closer to the ice sheet, then alongside it. There was a tourist place around here offering boat rides up to the face of the glacier, with a restaurant attached to it. My stomach was churning by the time I rolled up: The Fjallsárlón Frost Restaurant. Packed buses and rented cars were streaming through the parking lot, but everyone was going for the boat tour, not the food. That was fine by me…
It was overpriced of course but I was desperate. The server hid in the back, only peeking his head out every five minutes or so to check if anyone was in line. Next to the register was a big overstuffed tip jar. That guy back in Keflavík would be appalled!
There was a salad bar (wow!) but all the lettuce had been plundered, except for a few bits floating in a half-gallon of water. (Boo.) Instead I heaped a plate with fish and meatballs. The fish was impressively bland – no seasoning, and steamed for too long with no oil or garnish – and the meatballs tasted like ketchup and nothing else. Nevertheless it was protein and calories, and I cleared my plate twice.
ROAD CAKE. The best kind.
On the way out I bought a slice of chocolate cake wrapped in plastic. It was almost eight dollars, but it would prove to be every bit as delicious as the previous meal had been bland. The dessert highlight of this entire stay in Iceland, in fact. (Okay that might have been the hunger talking.)
On my way out from the restaurant I looked back and took one of my favorite photos from this trip:
The ice just keeps going up…
With the cloud cover, it looks like there are three separate horizons happening here. It really conveys the sheer volume of ice stacked up behind the glacier.
Lots and lots of slow pedaling in to the wind. I put the phone on random play and it started They Might Be Giants, so I hooked up the speakers and belted out lyrics for a couple miles.
In time I arrived at a bridge, spanning the river that connects the Jökulsárlón to the sea. Lots of little icebergs were sailing around in it, broken off the tongue of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier that forms the northern edge of the lake. Every now and then a chunk would get too close to the river and go rolling down it, passing under the bridge and eventually getting washed out to sea. Some of them would get marooned on the beach, or stuck on the riverbank instead. It was absurdly photogenic. People were all around, waving cameras, festooning the bridge, walking in the sand, pulling their cars in and out of the gravel parking lots.
So of course I pushed the bike to the shoulder and joined them for a while!
A busy day on Jökulsárlón glacier.
I took some shots with the camera and then got back in the saddle. Once I drew far enough away from the crowds again, I shouted some more They Might Be Giants lyrics at the road. After a while I got too out of breath, and started to lose my voice. Plus the air was rather cold. So I removed the speakers and packed them away again, and began listening to an audiobook series called “Warlock Holmes.”
It’s a collection of short stories that rolls with the premise “what if Sherlock Holmes had magical powers and was a bit of a looney?” and it did a great job keeping my mind off the damaged tire. Hours passed, with more gorgeous landscape scrolling by, and I went through a bunch of them. By the time I drew close to the area where I’d booked my next hotel, I was on “Warlock Holmes in The Adventure Of The Unpleasant Stain.” Funny and gory in equal parts.
I pushed the bike up the road leading to the Reynivellir guest house, and then got confused because the map marker was pinned to a vacant patch of hillside. Back down the road were some industrial-looking buildings and up the road was a two-story thing that might have been a private residence, or perhaps my hotel.
While I stood around slack-jawed, a man wandered over and asked what I was looking for. I told him about the hotel, and he pointed at the two-story thing, but then said “You need to go down to the office and check in to get the key. That’s further along.” He pointed east, down towards the highway.
I called up a map and he helpfully poked at the approximate spot. It was two miles away, on the opposite side of the highway by the shore. I shrugged, thanked him, and rolled carefully downhill. I hated backtracking and I especially hated pushing my bike up the same hill twice, but there was nowhere else to go.
I dig this.
I’ll never understand why Ford discontinued this van body style. It was so versatile…
The road leading down to the office was quite steep, so I parked the bike at the top and walked down it instead. The area had a restaurant and some tourist-oriented warehouses and safari vehicles scattered around, plus a museum shaped like a long bookcase that I would have marched right into if I wasn’t so hungry.
It’s a giant bookshelf; get it?
While I lingered outside the restaurant, I was a bit startled to hear a loud voice talking in Icelandic, even though I didn’t see anyone around. The voice was slightly too loud as though it was amplified.
Eventually I traced it to the side of a big rock a few meters away, and saw a speaker grille built into it, painted to blend in. The rock was partially hollow, and somewhere inside was an amplifier, a media player of some kind, and probably a buried power cable going to the museum. How amusing! If only I could understand a word of it…
The rock talks.
Half a mile down the slope I entered the office and checked in, and the attendant gave me a tiny hand-drawn map, indicating which building I should go to.
He said “We have key boxes at the guest house now, and you put in a code to get your key, so usually people don’t have to come down here. But since you booked through Expedia it looks like you didn’t get all the information.” You don’t say!
He wrote a code down on a post-it and stuck it to the map, and handed both to me.
Lots of instructions for finding the cabin.
Where to go, and how to get in.
They’d obviously had trouble with this before, because next he held up a large laminated photograph of the building, and from that I could finally confirm it was the one I’d seen.
I walked back up the hill and guided my bike down to the restaurant. The wait for a table inside was 20 minutes, so I bought an “Iceland” sticker and slapped it on the bike.
A new sticker!
Then the waitress said it would take even longer, and apologized, and then she and a couple of other staff pulled a small table out from the back of the restaurant and plopped it in among the others, then decorated it with cloth and silverware, making me an instant table for one. Nicelandic!
They custom-laid me a table for one, rather than making me wait. Nicelandic!
I had asparagus soup and buttered bread, then breaded fried lamb steak, with chutney and potatoes. After that I was too full to get dessert. I paid the bill (something like $80 bucks – damn!) and got on the bike and rode slooowly back the way I came, and up the hill again.
I kickstanded by the front door, then tried to open it, only to find it was blocked on the other side by a small table, which I shoved out of the way. In the foyer I beheld a row of lockboxes, one per room. I found mine and extracted my room key. So far, so good.
I grabbed my backpack off the bike, then tried to shut the front door and realized it didn’t shut. That’s what the table had been for. So I wedged it back in place, paying the confusion forward to the next guest.
Around the corner was a kitchen, with about a dozen middle-aged men and women sitting around, all talking and laughing loudly in Italian. I waved, then went upstairs and unlocked my room. Down and up again a few more times, to ferry my bags in from the bike. Then I arranged my bike against the outside wall, trying to give it some shelter from possible rain.
Not 20 minutes in, and stuff is everywhere already.
Back to the room, and I exploded my luggage. I grabbed the towels and marched over to the shower at the end of the hall. Good thing I had two towels, because the floor was unpleasantly wet. I laid the first one across it. A moment later I discovered that, damn, all the hot water was gone!
I was impatient and tired, so I took a tepid shower, and dried off standing on the towel. Then I scooped up my dirty clothes and headed for my room, only to find that whooops … it has automatically locked.
“Huh,” I said. I took inventory: “I’m in a hallway, locked out of my room, with a bundle of clothes, but no shoes or socks, and no phone or wallet. I suppose the first thing to do is put these dirty clothes back on.”
I did that in the bathroom. I dropped the towels outside my locked door, then trotted downstairs to the kitchen area. Feeling like a comic relief character in a sitcom, with a studio audience ready to throw in some mild laughter at my situation, I walked up to the closest person – an Italian man in his late 50’s – and asked, “Are you all part of the same group?” As soon as I spoke English at him, the rest of the room fell silent, interested in what this rando American stranger had to say.
The man nodded and said “Yes! All one group!”
“I’ve accidentally locked myself out of my room. Do you happen to know who I should talk to?”
“Me!”
He walked over to the foyer and pointed at the row of lockboxes. “There is a spare room key in the box! You just need to enter the combination. What room are you in?”
“I’m in 59.”
He found the box for 59, then started messing with the first dial. It seemed like he was expecting it to be only one digit off from opening, but I had absent-mindedly spun the dials when I closed the box earlier.
“Actually,” I said, “I already got my key from there.”
“Oh, you mean you got the second key too?”
“No, there was only one.”
“Yeah but it’s the spare key,” he said. “Didn’t they give you a key when you checked in?”
“No, they just gave me a combination to open that box.”
“.. Ooooh,” he said.
He shrugged. “Well, there’s a number you can call. It’s here on the instructions.” He pointed to a sign by the boxes.
“That’s good,” I said, “And I’d call it, but my phone is in my room.”
“No problem; use mine,” he said. He wandered back into the midst of the crowd in the kitchen, then came back with his phone, which he unlocked and handed to me. Nicelandic!
I called the number. A woman picked up and said something in Icelandic, to which I responded, “Hello, I’m here at the Reynivellir guest house and I’ve locked my key in my room. It’s the one I got out of the lockbox, with the code I got at check-in.”
She said, “Oooooh, well okay, here’s what you do. Go to the service panel at the bottom of the stairs.”
I walked over to the stairs and spotted a rectangular outline in the wall, with a tiny handle sticking out of it. “I see it.”
“Okay, now open that up and you’ll see a master key hanging on a peg.”
“You mean this key with a pink tag on it?”
“That’s the one yeah.”
“Got it. I’ll unlock my room and put this back on the peg.”
“Good; thank you!” she said.
I ended the call, and the man walked over to reclaim his phone.
“Did you work it out?” he asked.
I pointed at the peg, inside the little closet. “Master key,” I told him.
“HAH!” he shouted. “You are one lucky guy!”
“I know it! I’m also very lucky that I talked to you!” I said.
He grinned, waved his phone, and then walked back into the crowd.
So hey, if you want to get into a specific room, you need a code from the office two miles up the road. But if you want to get into everyone’s room, just grab the key behind the little door.
Just another of those “Okay, now what?” kind of travel logistics days. You get them sometimes. But, as usual, keeping a cool head and being friendly has made all the difference…
Limping to civilization
August 15, 2021 Filed Under Curious
By the time I had the bike loaded again, the Italians were just starting to wake up and populate the kitchen. I headed for the restaurant from yesterday and chomped an open-faced sandwich.
Tasty somewhat traditional breakfast at the museum.
I had 40 miles (65km or so) of cycling before I reached Höfn, the destination of my replacement tire. I’d be rolling along at about half the usual pressure and making frequent stops, so 40 miles would take the whole day.
With Skyrim filling my headphones and a gentle wind moving me along, my worries about the tire faded into the background. At the eight mile mark I saw a fenced pasture on my right, and held up the phone in time to catch this:
Horses seem to like the recumbent!
That made my entire day. Now, even if the tire got shredded and I had to push the bike for miles I’d still say this was a great day.
Reindeer were imported into Iceland as an experiment over 200 years ago.
Apparently one of the touristy things to see in East Iceland is reindeer. They roam around a bit and you may even see one on the road.
Go bikers go!
You’ll also see cyclists! I passed more than usual today. Everyone grinned and waved. We know how cool we are…
More cyclists! Go go go!
I listened to lots of Warlock Holmes and obsessively checked the tire. As an older person, I stop frequently for the sake of my bladder, so to say I stopped even more than usual is a pretty big deal.
I made good time but had no snacks to eat. The leftovers from the restaurant had vanished immediately. With food on my mind, I wondered, just what does a symbol of “egg in a cup” mean on those roadside displays? Something different than all the other symbols for food? The “breakfast” part of “bed and breakfast” maybe?
Okay, so… Egg in a cup… How is that different from all the other food icons?
I passed by some other puzzling things. A giant pipe going up to a lake. Bringing water down, or moving it up? A huge enclosed facility, perhaps for sporting events. Some very clever sheep.
In the late afternoon I noticed that the tire was leaking air about twice as fast. I had one more patch in my toolkit – found while rummaging around the previous night – but didn’t want to use it because then I’d have none for the replacement tire.
The problem was, if I took the tube out and patched it now, it would get damaged somewhere else after I put it back inside the wrecked tire, because it would be lined up differently. Better to wait, if possible…
Was that sign added by a Russian speaker?
Right, so, this sign has “knife and fork” as well as “pot on a hook”. How do these compare with “egg in a cup”? The hungry mind boggles!
The road went on. I passed over a rough bridge spanning Hornafjörður and turned southeast, into the wind. The road got a bit lumpy, making a late effort to sabotage my tire.
The panorama to the north.
Just as my Warlock Holmes book ended, I rolled into Höfn. At the far end of town I located my rental, booked on short notice the previous day when it looked like I might actually get here.
Yes! You made it!
Yup! Sore legs though!
What is your hotel like?
It’s an AirBnB. The room is small but comfortable enough. Just set up the laptop!
A few days of enforced rest will be good for the old leggers. Decent food nearby?
Just ate fish and chips, and a burger with an egg on it!
That should do it!
I was hoping to spend the additional waiting days in the local campground to save money, but I’d been unable to book there in advance. The idea of just plopping down my tent so late in the day, only to be shouted awake in the morning, did not appeal to me. I’ve learned that campgrounds in densely populated areas are run a bit more strictly than the ones in the hinterlands, even in Iceland.
That was a problem for “tomorrow me”. For tonight, my job was to shower and creep into the bed.
Brought the bike in for the night. Cozy!
My little LED candle really is awesome.
Hunkered Down In Höfn
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.
All set up for a long stay.
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.
All kinds of stuff for the hungry traveler.
And power sockets? Nice!
The staff at all these places got a little tired of me in the second week. But I was spending money, so…
I explored the town from end to end, checking out the paths, the information kiosks, the local art, and so on.
One of my favorite areas was the shoreline, which gave an amazing view of the glaciers nearby. For example, Heinabergsjökull:
Quite a view along this bike path!
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.
Also I saw some odd bones on the pier, and had to ask my nephew about them:
Dockside attractions.
So what’s this bone here?
My money is on skull cap of a cetacean.
And the rib?
Oh, hah! I seriously thought that was a huge wood plank. Definitely baleen whale. Not a rib though. That’s a lower jaw.
Thank you once again, Keeper Of Bone Lore!
There was one errand I could do while waiting: Laundry. This was my first chance to wash everything in a real machine for many days.
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:
Delicious fried eggs and vampire teeth for sale!
Bag O’ Snackables.
The gas station snack bins helped bring my food expenses down, since all the restaurants were super fancy.
The joint’s jumpin’!
Roaming free! Until winter sets in. Then you take them indoors or they die.
While I stayed in place, other tourists came and went all around me. The campground filled up and emptied out in waves.
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.
Icelandic Security
August 17, 2021 Filed Under Amused
Okay, so, say you’re in an AirBnB. And it’s multiple rooms, and you can get in the front door but you can’t unlock your own room.
In an emergency you can exit through the utility room.
I bet the key to the other door opens this one too.
For fire safety there’s a key behind some glass that opens a back door, and that passes through a storage room that also contains spare keys. You can see them through the keyhole! But, should you break the glass? That seems wasteful.
You keep looking around. At the top of some stairs you find another locked door that leads to the upper story of the house, where the owner lives. When you look in the keyhole, you notice it’s dark. It appears that someone has left a key in this door, on the other side.
You also notice that the faceplate over the keyhole only has one screw in it. Has someone taken it apart before you? You don’t have a lot of possessions to work with, but you poke around the laundry room and find a dull knife. It’s just enough to turn the remaining screw.
Have people done this before?
It was even easier than it looks.
It’s also enough to turn the entire locking assembly once you get the faceplate off. You do so, and hear a loud “clunk” as the lock disengages. You open the door…
Just on the other side of the door. How handy!
The keys to the kingdom!
… and discover that the owner has left a complete set of keys to the entire house, including all the rooms, hanging in the lock on the other side of the door.
You unlock your own room, fetch your key, then place the keyring back where you found it, and screw the faceplate back in.
Ready for the next guest…
Höfn Thoughts
August 19, 2021 Filed Under Introspection
Stuck in a town for two weeks with nothing to do but work and answer emails…
Iceland was just declared one of the best places to survive a global societal collapse, according to the highly reputable scientific outlet The Sun. What are your thoughts?
Well, based on that list, the key factor in survivability is the ratio of sheep to people. The more sheep per capita, the better. But I think it’s praa-aa-a-aaa-aaabably more complicated than that…
That report has some really questionable ground rules. For one, it deliberately excludes any factors that might arise from a collapse of external supplies of fuels and materials to these places.
I’m sure you’re aware that Iceland is extremely reliant on industrial-scale shipping to bring in everything from fuel to light bulbs to nails. New Zealand to a similar, but lesser, degree.
But sure, go to Iceland to weather the apocalypse… And remain here, as the airlines and ports shut down, and no one in the rest of the wold bothers to restart them because tourism and banking are dead. Life will not be very comfortable, and probably not very long. Reykjavik will have to depopulate, after a brief period when the trucks burn through their fuel reserves, and then almost all of those people will move out across the landscape, starving as they go, chasing sheep around the highlands.
Geothermal heat is great, when you’ve got time to spend indoors. Not any more. Back to intensive farming, for everyone, as everyone gives a solid try at producing a years’ worth of food in weak sunlight and thoroughly eroded soil. The sheep and goats won’t breed fast enough, and the cattle are too hard on the land so they’ll be consumed almost instantly. The remnants of humanity will go back to cutting grass with horses, and watch as first-world comfort folds in on itself.
It’ll all be truly over when a water pump fails in a storm one too many times and the engineers discover they’ve run entirely out of bolts, and there is nothing anywhere on the island capable of generating temperature hot enough to reforge steel unless you try some truly daring metalwork in the midst of a volcanic eruption.
Before that happens you might try sailing away, except the Vikings already cut down all the trees large enough to build longboats.
Perhaps the moss is edible?
Frankly, in terms of short and long-term survival, my money’s on Texas. They have their own long-term supplies of fertilizer and fuel, the panhandle is extremely productive in terms of crops and cattle, their infrastructure is not nearly as abused by the weather as elsewhere, and (this is the important bit)…
… they are armed to the teeth.
Since you’re hanging around in one place, have you made any new observations about the locals?
To be honest, no. In public areas the tourists tend to outnumber the locals by a big margin most of the time.
I’m sitting here at a service station that has a cafeteria and electrical sockets, getting some work done. Out the window I can see a car-washing area: Three parking spaces with spray hoses coiled up next to them. There’s a woman there with her 2020-ish Ford F-150 — the kind with the short-ass bed.
I’ve been watching her for a while. She rinsed her car, then applied some kind of spray-on cleaner, then applied a layer of soap with a scrub brush all around it, even climbing into the bed to get the roof, and crawling under to get beneath. Then she did another thorough rinse with the hose, then walked all around the car with two different spray bottles, spraying all the panels and windows.
Then she removed all the floor mats, sprayed them down, soaped them, scrubbed them, sprayed them again, and hit them with the bottles. Then she went over the mirrors and lights on the car with another sponge and soap. Then another full rinse. Then she got out a spraying brush on a broom handle, and scrubbed the rims, including all around the road-facing surface of the tires.
Is this some kind of national pastime?
Then she climbed in the back and scrubbed the inside of the tailgate with a rag. She did not rush, and between intervals of writing code I looked up and looked at the clock, and noted that the whole routine took over two hours.
I couldn’t imagine any service station in America tolerating someone who wanted to use their water and parking space for two hours to completely hand-wash their truck. And from my point of view, the truck was already pretty clean when she started. So, was this a tourist being extra-super-cafeful about returning a rental vehicle in good shape? Or was this a local, doing a once-a-year detailing of their workhorse?
I’m no stranger to seemingly wasted time over-doing something. My bicycle is proof of that: I’ve put hours of obsession into every tiny component and piece of luggage on it. On the other hand, I can see it from here, sitting in my service station booth, and the frame is spattered with mud and caked grease, the handlebars are scarred, and some of the stickers are peeling off. And I don’t really care. It’s mostly aluminum, so it’s not like it’s going to rust.
Perhaps I’m seeing an example of Icelanders “taking care of their things” in a more Scandinavian way than their cavalier American counterparts. And perhaps it’s no surprise that, being an American, I’m on the side of the Americans in this case: It’s a damn truck. It’s designed to get knocked around and still last 40 years with standard maintenance; just don’t store it in the snow. The only thing you’re doing by using a hundred gallons of fresh water to wash the dirt off – and it rains all the time in Iceland by the way – is performing cleanliness to a local social standard.
But again: Tourist or local? I didn’t march outside to ask. So, I may not have learned anything here.
I did see this sticker on the bathroom door. I think it counts as local color:
“EMPLOYEES MUST CARVE SLAYER INTO FOREARM BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK.”
What would you do for a living if there were no computers? Like, nothing more complicated than a pocket calculator? What would you do for fun? How would you socialize?
For fun, I would probably keep riding my bike, but regress to a tape collection and a bookshelf, and end up socializing a lot more in cafes.
I like to write, but if I was reduced to punching a typewriter and shopping my work around to publishers to find some kind of audience, I confess I’d probably just give it up for the most part. I don’t have the chops to make it in the print world. The vast majority of my words would become a rambling paper memoir crammed into binders on a shelf in my garage, read by probably one or two people on the planet at best, fulfilling their main purpose of giving me some way to complete my own thoughts by externalizing them. I really do like nailing down a thought. Perhaps being deprived of electronic transmission would force me to confront just how self-serving my writing habits are.
It’s a funny idea: Whether social media, blogging, or whatever variation you like, the possibility that our work is visible to some random anonymous visitor tossed our way by a search engine lends it a sense of legitimacy that we embrace at the subconscious level and don’t want to think about. I mean, if you spend two days composing a very thoughtful essay about something and post it, only to have the algorithm utterly ignore it, haven’t you really just spent two days muttering to yourself, facing a blank wall, and communicated with no one? Isn’t that appallingly dysfunctional? The vague promise of random future eyeballs prevents you from asking the question. It may even prevent you from doing something more socially fulfilling.
So, I don’t know. I do write these things for my own satisfaction. I need good external memory in words and images or I think I’d forget almost everything concrete, at this point — and I don’t want to forget. It’s something to do with my brain. I struggled with this as a kid and I struggle with it more each year. If computers vanished, this would be a lot harder. Same with photography, and music, and various methods of communication.
Perhaps I’d go back to writing people letters, in actual envelopes with stamps and plant cuttings and stuff in them? Not so bad…
The big issue in my case would be, how do I make a living? I’d probably decide to re-train as a schoolteacher, like my parents. It would take years but I’d enjoy the journey. And heck, I probably already have enough weird facts in my head to assemble a few lesson plans.