Iceland Planning Notes

July 13, 2019 by Filed under Advice

Comic from XKCD about Iceland's geography.
Courtesy of xkcd.com

If you like rugged snowy mountains, fresh cold air, tempestuous rivers, geothermal springs, and the challenge of regular camping, then go to Iceland. Iceland is a great place to start a bike tour through Europe, and also a great place to tour in itself.

  • The crime rate is spectacularly low.
  • Pollution is nonexistent.
  • There are good modern services at regular intervals, and plenty of nature in between.
  • Most of the people are conversant in English.
  • People are friendly to cycle tourists without being intrusively curious.
  • The country is isolated and relatively small, making a tour through it feel self-contained.
  • The main international airport is very supportive for flying in bicycles.

All this, and my favorite weird thing: During the summer, it is light out even at midnight. If you are able to sleep during the day, you can avoid the majority of car traffic by riding on an upside-down schedule.

Entering

You’re most likely to be flying in via Icelandair. Icelandair has a good policy for bicyles.

  • A bicycle counts as sporting equipment, so a single bicycle in a single box costs as much as a standard checked bag.
  • The weight limit for a standard checked bag is 50lbs, or 22kg.
  • Maximum weight of an oversize sporting equipment box: 70lbs, or 32kg. If a box is heavier than this, you need to contact Icelandair Cargo to arrange transport for it.
  • The maximum size of an oversize sporting equipment box: 87in x 22in x 40in, or 221cm x 56cm x 102cm.
  • Only 25 bicycles are allowed per flight, so it’s recommend that you contact Icelandair in advance to pre-book the box, and ensure space for your bicycle. After booking your ticket you can call the airline directly at 877-435-9423.
  • Bicycles can be paid for during check-in at the airport, but it costs 20% more than pre-booking.

Once you arrive at the airport, a shuttle will take you from the tarmac to the terminal. Inside the terminal, after a great deal of walking, you’ll go down an escalator and through a few doors to a baggage claim area.

Your bike boxes are undoubtedly larger than a standard suitcase, so they will come sliding into this room from a short ramp set in the wall between the luggage carousels. Grab a hand cart and collect them.

Your next move depends on your style. If you’re dead tired and just want to check in to your hotel, you can usually catch a free shuttle near the information desk in the lobby. If you’re feeling awake enough to work, you can wheel your bicycle boxes over to the “bike pit”, a special building a short distance from the terminal that is set aside just for assembling your bike.

If you can get your bike assembled here, you can fold up your bike boxes and put them back on the handcart and haul them directly over to the DHL storefront in the airport, and get the boxes shipped back out of the country, or shipped ahead to your last touring destination.

If you decided to go straight to a hotel and assemble your bike later, note that your hotel shuttle usually runs both ways and you can arrange to take the shuttle back to the airport with your folded-up boxes, mail them out, and then take the shuttle a third time to return to your room. It’s a bit of an abuse of the shuttle system, but very handy.

A few random notes:

  • Getting In And Out Of Iceland With A Bicycle
  • Set up accommodations for the day you arrive, then use AirBnB to book something longer.  Just open the app, enter Iceland in the search, edit the rent range to 100 or less, and press the location marker when the list appears to get a map.
  • Remember to check WarmShowers as well, just in case.
  • Get a camping card

Crossing

Before heading to Reykjavik, how about checking out VIKING WORLD?  They have a campsite too.

Iceland’s winter is the most severe of anywhere in Northern Europe, including Norway and Sweden.  Live through Iceland, and you’ll be able to manage the others.

  • Temperatures drop drastically between July and October.
  • In November the nights will drop well below freezing.
  • In December the sun will not come up at all.
  • In January it will be well below freezing, all the time.

On the other hand, you’ll probably be able to arrange to sit in plenty of hot springs along the way.

Use Iceland’s “Iceland’s 112 survival app”, and the official road conditions site.

Snaefellsness peninsula is well paved and worth going around. It’s the long skinny arm poking out from the west side of iceland, northwest of Reykjavik, with a National Park at the end.

Route overview

A very useful overview, though 14 years old, is MasterlyActivity’s Iceland page.

SimplyCycling overview and impressions, what to know about Iceland.

The most ambitious version of my route crosses through the center of the country and takes 31 days at 30 miles a day (with no days off.)

With the six-day middle crossing included, and the ferry cross up from Vatnasafn, plus time to prep gear and sightsee, touring Iceland will take at minimum 6 weeks (42 days), and most likely approach 8 weeks (56 days).

Central crossing

The central crossing will take six days during which you’ll need to carry at least four days of food, and there is a whole lot of elevation climb.

Camping outside designated areas is basically illegal in all of Iceland now without written permission from landowners, which is not likely to be granted as you’re passing through. So plan to go from one official camp to another in the interior.

Refer to the cycling map for nearby accommodation markers, and for crossing the interior get permission from hut managers.

Exiting

You can exit the country on the east side, by taking the ferry from Seydisfjordur, Iceland to Hirtshals, Denmark. It runs on Tuesday or Wednesday every week.

  • 250 Euros for one person with bike + 530 Euros for a single-person cabin or 95 Euros for a bed in a shared room
    • Example itinerary:
    • Depart Seyðisfjörður at 8:00pm day 1
      • Booked a 1-person cabin with a window
    • Pass by Faroe Islands day 2
      • Breakfast 8:00am – 10:0am
      • Dinner 6:00pm – 8:00pm
    • At sea day 3
      • Breakfast 8:00am – 10:0am
      • Dinner 6:00pm – 8:00pm
    • Arrive at Hirtshals at 10:00am day 4
    • 3 nights total on the ship, total 397 EUR, or ~$470
  • There are a number of hotels in the town, as well as a camping site:
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The last 10 percent

July 13, 2019 by Filed under Introspection

To a detail-oriented person, eliminating the last 10% of the contents of a house is harder than the preceding 90%.

Once all the items with obvious destinations are moved, and all the items with an obvious value have been sold, the house remains cluttered with things that are complicated.

For example a scrapbook of old photos:  Should you store it somewhere, or should you scan it and then throw it away?  You need to get rid of your scanner too, so you have to decide now if you ever want it scanned.  Instead of throwing it away should you mail it to someone?  Perhaps you could take out a couple of the photos you really like, and then throw away the rest.  If you scan them, should you email copies to someone?  Upload them somewhere?  Or just leave them on a hard drive stuffed in a storage unit?  Until you make this decision, the house cannot be empty.

At some point you reach that weird stage of the process where you’re second-guessing your regular habits.  You open up the dishwasher full of clean dishes and ask yourself:  Should I really be stacking these back in the cabinet?  You notice that you’re down to one bar of soap and you ask:  Should I bother getting another?

And there is a stage even beyond this, where you realize you have done something for the last time and now a chore is looming before you that you never encountered before.  This is the last shower I’ll be taking here; it’s time to take down the shower curtain and trash it.  This is the last piece of toast I’ll make with this toaster; time to shake out the crumbs, wipe it off, and set it on the curb.  This is the last time I’ll be locking the back door.  Find the spare key that’s hidden under the flower pot, and stick it back on the ring.

Take all the hooks off the walls.  Unplug the fridge.  Roll up the old welcome mat and stuff it in the garbage.

There is never a time when these last few chores don’t feel sad, even if the place was the scene of suffering or discontent and we are happy to be done with it.  The good feelings come from our anticipation of a better time somewhere else.  For these final moments in the old place, we think about how it might have been different.  We never enjoy erasing ourselves, or confronting the fact that there are no more choices to make.  We did our best – or maybe not – but either way we are done.

It’s that last 10% that feels like forever.

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Motivation

July 10, 2019 by Filed under Inspiration Tagged with ,

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

Leonard Bernstein (possibly quoting someone else)

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An Intimate Connection

July 6, 2019 by Filed under Introspection

When I’m on a bicycle tour, I have a more intimate physical relationship with my bicycle than with any living person.

I know Valoria inside and out.  I am in physical contact with her for hours almost every day.  I look her over in detail for damage.  I get her grease all over my hands when I make repairs.  She gets my sweat on her when I ride.

Wherever I stop, she is right next to me.  I pedal for ten miles and stop, and there she is again. She’s been with me on mountaintops, deep inside canyons, halfway through deserts.  She’s been next to my table at street-side cafés in foreign lands. She’s been with me through lightning storms and torrential rain and stupefying heat.  She has lit my way in total darkness.  I’ve leaned on her for support, used her as a dining table, a work bench, a footstool, a windbreak, a drying rack, a shopping basket.

She carries the food, water, and gear I use to survive. She is incredibly high technology. She is simple enough that I can take her completely apart.  She is freedom.  She is health.  She will kill me if I don’t look after her.

My closest parallel is the rancher and their horse.  But even the rancher doesn’t know their horse like I know Valoria.

She was stolen from me once.  After weeks of anguish and frantic searching, I rebuilt her body from scratch, from a hundred parts, sandblasted and powder coated, recreating every cable and cog, from the headlight mount I formed with plastic epoxy down to the stickers on the rear fender.  It took months.  Then I arranged candles in a circle around myself and the bike, placed a hand on the frame, and willed the spirit of Valoria to return from wherever she had gone, into this new body. I am not a religious person, but this was a necessary ritual.

Then I cast the entire event out of my mind as though she had never been stolen.  Only rarely do I remember it, and as I see it, I’ve been riding the same bike for ten years and her spirit just moved.

Some people feel like a part of them is missing if they don’t have their smartphone.  That’s sort of how it is.  Even when Valoria isn’t with me, if she wasn’t somewhere, locked up securely or safe indoors, I would feel vulnerable and incomplete, like a beaver in a dried up stream.

Together we conquer the horizon!

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Preconception of Iceland

July 6, 2019 by Filed under Amused Tagged with ,

Before I did any research on Iceland, and well before I actually visited the country, I wrote down what I thought I knew about the place. So, think of this description as a snapshot of what some random West-coast American might think about Iceland from hearsay and pop culture. (Of course, actually going there will change this picture dramatically.)

Iceland is a big ice-covered chunk of rock way up north, populated by a collection of pale-skinned people all crammed into one large city, close to some killer geothermal pools that are probably very relaxing to sit in. The population is so small they have to be careful who they date, but they’ve mostly solved this problem with detailed bookkeeping.

Having nothing to exploit on their rock in terms of natural resources and not much of a tourism draw, but consistently bearing the best skin color, hair color, and height for social navigation, they have naturally turned to banking and finance as the means to stay at first-world levels of comfort. From a sideways perspective this isn’t too far from the plundering behavior of their ancestors, just white collar instead of blue collar.

Nobody does any crime because Iceland is too cold, but people struggle with depression a lot.  This ironically makes Icelanders a very interesting and engaging people to talk to.  This is also probably why they spawned Björk.  Occasionally their snow-covered rock explodes a little, dumping hot ash into the air and blocking the sun, and there is some fatalistic worry over this but soon everyone goes back to ignoring it.

Icelanders probably throw really cool parties.  And hey, don’t hate them because they’re beautiful and smart.  Do business with them instead.  You’ll live longer.

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