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:
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.
I dig this thorough packing job.
Need a late-night drive-through burger? Here's your spot.
Dockside attractions.
I haven't seen a trough urinal in years. And here's one in jolly first-world Iceland.
Sudden camper van explosion!
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 were 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.
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.
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.
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.
Clouds cutting the top off the ridges.
Little ridge, big ridge.
I absolutely 100% guarantee this telephone pole arrived on a ship.
Very few cars today; just the way I like it.
It's a monument to ... Something. I didn't read the kiosk.
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?
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.
A long pipe, fetching water from the lake over the ridge.
Some giant indoor facility here. Probably for sporting events.
Sheep in a heap!
Glacier in the mist.
My destination town in the distance.
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…
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!
A cool causeway! Luckily cars were sparse, because the road was quite narrow.
An inspiring view to pedal towards.
Roiling cloud piling up around a hill.
I'm pretty sure this sign is announcing police cameras.
A cement house seems like a great idea right up until a massive crack appears in one wall and you start wondering if you'll wake up one morning under a pile of rubble...
A neat sculpture on the coast.
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.
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.
Mom
Yes! You made it!
Me
Yup! Sore legs though!
Mom
What is your hotel like?
Me
It’s an AirBnB. The room is small but comfortable enough. Just set up the laptop!
Mom
A few days of enforced rest will be good for the old leggers. Decent food nearby?
Me
Just ate fish and chips, and a burger with an egg on it!
Mom
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.
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!
Another natural arch way up there! This totally feels Lord Of The Rings-ish.
Comminucations gear waaaay up on a hill.
Glacier under cloud.
I know starkness is sometimes the Icelandic modern style, but come on, couldn't you do just a little bit of landscaping? This is a hotel but it looks like a storage facility.
Spoooooky valleys!
Looking south across the layers to the Atlantic.
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.
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…
An absurdly expensive restaurant but the view is alright.
Heading away from the glacier now. Looks very different from any angle!
Centuries of ice piled on top of itself.
So much ice!
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.
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:
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.
Approaching the Jökulsárlón glacier bridge.
Cars have to wait their turn, but people just stroll across.
The bridge makes a great photo spot.
So of course I pushed the bike to the shoulder and joined them for a while!
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’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.
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…
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.
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.
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!
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.
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…
The day started nervously. I inflated the front tire to 90 PSI again, but as soon as I rolled onto flat pavement I noticed it was bumping rhythmically, much more than before. The warp was getting worse, faster than the leak in the tube.
I hit the all-in-one convenience store for the last time, and bought two Prince Polos, a banana, two chocolate muffins, and a large carton of milk. I strapped the carton to the back of the bike, where it’s visible to passing motorists. I like to think it amuses them.
A crisp, clear morning. Just the tiniest bit of tailwind.
The temperature was fine but the wind was against me. About 10mph, pushing into the bike. With over 50 miles to cover I knew I would be in the saddle for the whole day — and worrying about the front tire every minute of it.
Happy horses enjoying the short summer.
But, it’s hard to stay worried when you’re seeing stuff like this.
Hard to beat this roadside view!
A few miles east I found the pie shop I’d seen on the map. Having a stubborn nature paradoxically means that you sometimes insist on slowing down and relaxing even when you’re worried about getting somewhere. As I parked the bike next to a table sporting a delightful view of the waterfall, I thought of the story my Mom liked to tell about my grandfather’s stubbornness:
He was on a months-long expedition, going up the Alaska-Canada highway, riding shotgun in a truck with my father. My father had every day scheduled and booked in advance, and wanted to get to the next place with as much time to look around as possible, so he was not inclined to stop. My grandfather checked his watch and, seeing it was early afternoon, and considering the trip to be the vacation it definitely was, said “It’s cocktail time. Pull over and let’s take a break.”
Looking around at the trees, my father said, “Why would we stop here? There’s nothing interesting.”
“Because it’s cocktail time,” grandad repeated.
“Let’s just keep going and we can relax when we get to town.”
“Cocktail time is now,” my grandfather said.
“So?” said my Dad, irritated.
Whereupon my grandfather scooted over to the middle of the cab and awkwardly shoved his leg into the footwell across the center divider, and pressed down on the brake.
“We’re stopping,” he declared.
“Fine, fine! Fine. We’re stopping!” said Dad, with bad grace, and turned the truck towards the shoulder. “Let me just park.”
And so granddad walked around for a bit, then pulled a folding chair out of the back and had a beverage, and probably smoked a cigar.
I definitely take after him.
The nice lady behind the counter mis-heard me and brought me the wrong slice of pie, but it was delicious. I sat outside next to the bike, gazing at the water tumbling over the cliff, eating slowly, and listening to an audiobook.
Multiple layers of farming.
Not a lot of natural arches in this terrain, so it's surprising to find even a small one.
Local pie and local waterfall.
There really are few things finer in adult life than being able to take exactly as much time as you want doing a thing. I spent half an hour eating one slice of pie.
For two hours afterward I traveled on highway that was almost perfectly flat, and I would have made great time except for the wind and the tire, which I had to pump up about 10 PSI every half-hour.
You know it's a warm day in Iceland when you start seeing heat mirage on the road.
More moss-covered weirdness came into view. More terrain I hadn’t seen anywhere else in the world. Maybe again in Norway, if I ever got there…
If you squint, it looks like a beach covered in elephant seals.
Then, at long last, I caught sight of a full-on glacier. This was something I almost completely missed on my northern route two years before.
The terrain evolved slowly, and the glacier passed out of sight. Before I could see it again I was forced to stop when the front tire suddenly went completely flat. Uh oh…
Stopping for a snack, and to try swapping my front tube.
Got mjolk?
I knew how this had to go. A lumpy tire was a damaged tire. If I was lucky, this flat would be unrelated to the damage. It would just be some random bit of debris poking through the tread like usual, and I could apply a patch and get back on the road. If I was unlucky, the flat would be caused by the damage, and I would now be getting an endless parade of flats, each sooner than the last, until I couldn’t even push the bike next to me.
Time for the usual routine. I shoved the bike to a wide patch of shoulder, stripped all the bags off, flipped the bike, removed the wheel, and peeled the tire away from the rim.
At the time I was too focused on dealing with the problem to take pictures, but here are a few from farther ahead in the trip:
A bunch of patches on the inside managed to slow the disintegration, but not stop it.
The patches did help, but the tube still got eroded.
Long story short, the wire belt inside the tire that helps to prevent flats was so damaged it was causing them instead. Little bits of Kevlar were twisted up out of the belt and scraping against the tube. I applied most of my remaining tire patches to the inside of the tire, trying to make a protective layer for the tube, but the damage kept spreading. I would need a replacement very soon.
I reassembled everything, then inflated the tire about 2/3 of the way. I was trying to balance between the damage of the tire flexing against the tube as it rolled, and the ongoing disintegration of the tire due to high pressure. If the thing spit apart completely, the bike wouldn’t even roll, and I would have to flag down a motorist.
For now, there was nothing to do but pedal and enjoy the scenery.
Depending on where you stand, the cloud cover is a lot closer.
Clouds throwing shade.
Geologic history laid bare.
This was a pretty long bridge!
The incongruous flatness of a zone long covered in glacier ice.
A closer look at the pulverized flatness of the glacial plain.
Meltwater churning with rock dust, moving out to sea.
And the scenery was marvelous!
Interesting info about the early explorers of the Vatnajökul ice cap.
Educational as well. I learned a few things about the early explorers of the highlands.
This would be impossible without the road.
There's an extremely fancy waterfall in there, but I'd seen so many pictures of it already I wasn't all that enthusiastic about riding over.
Glacier under dramatic cloud cover.
The first full-on view of a glacier for this tour.
This bridge wasn't in use. I'm not sure why.
Slowly getting dark.
A channel of sunlight.
45 years old, circling Iceland in the late summer.
Seriously, a view like this is just wasted on sheep!
Imagine this massive pile of ice slowly sliding down the side of that mountain, year after year, for tens of thousand of years, crunching boulders down to sand, which washes away...
The road remained flat, which was a blessing. I didn’t need to put extra pressure on the tire by using the brakes. I checked it every half an hour or so, but the tube was holding, and the lumpiness of the ride seemed to be constant. I kept myself braced for a sudden explosion.
But, sometimes I just forgot about the tire completely, because Iceland is freaking gorgeous!
Sheep just can't appreciate how great of a view they have...
Maybe Icelandic mutton tastes better because the sheep enjoy a nicer view? I can’t decide.
Wreckage from part of the highway that got destroyed in a flood years ago.
Wreckage is cool!
One of the turnouts I stopped at was arranged around a weird chunk of wreckage, which was a bit of a mystery at first.
The billboards explained that Icelanders had tried multiple times to make an enduring road across this terrain and been thwarted by unexpected floods. They built larger and tougher bridges, which were all eventually destroyed, and then they moved to another approach: Build a cheap one that’s easier to get in and repair!
Having only one road around most of your country is problematic.
The old bridge at Gígjukvísl was smashed away by floodwater carrying icebergs that weighed up to 2000 tons.
Background and description of the 1996 volcanic eruption and flood.
When constructing a road like this there are choices to make that sometimes conflict with each other.
It struck me as very Icelandic, that the builders of this road would decide to entertain travelers with a series of lessons in construction and engineering. In other parts of the world this accomplishment would be lost in the general noise, or treated as the concern of civic planners only.
You might say it’s optimistic of them to believe that tourists would be interested in this stuff, but on the other hand, here I am being a tourist and totally enjoying it. I guess they know their audience!
Even guided tours on this glacier are strongly discouraged. This is a warning to locals as well as visitors.
There were signs with more vital information, of course. All of it designed to discourage people from getting too adventurous on terrain that would be hard to rescue them from.
Not only are there rockslides already damaging the road, but more could happen any time!
Oh, fart! It's impassable!
At this point I couldn’t go off the beaten path even if I wanted to. I knew my tire was damaged because of all that hard gravel road, and I dreaded what would happen if I went off this smooth highway even for a minute.
Hello, meltwater! Gosh there's a lot of you.
Late in the day I passed over one of the flood areas that had so vexed the engineers from years past. Look at all that rock dust!
A restaurant serving food to an avalanche of people, mess-hall buffet style. One of the best deals I've seen in all of Iceland, actually.
Shortly after that I passed through a small town that had the Iceland equivalent of those midwestern gas station mega-stores. There was a crowded restaurant in the back, serving people cafeteria-style with trays. I paid one price and then came back three times for more fish, and wrapped the third round up in some foil to take on the road. It was a really good deal!
The view outside the restaurant.
Just across the road from the restaurant, the glacier was close at hand. My stomach was full but I still wanted dessert, so the first thing that came to mind when I saw this was a giant powdered-sugar donut the size of a country. Mmmm…
This would turn out to be the closest I got to a glacier this trip.
It's a nice spot, but way too expensive for what you get.
Eventually I reached the hotel. It was expensive but strategically placed, being the only shelter for 30 miles in either direction. With permission I could have camped on the private land on either side of the road, but I had no idea who to contact and didn’t want to upset any locals.
There was nobody at the desk, just a bunch of keys scattered on top with labels attached. I picked out the one with my name and found the room on the second floor, up some narrow stairs. It would be really awkward carrying the bike through here.
Luckily the hotel was built into a hill, so my second floor window opened to a parking lot in the back. I wheeled the bike around and passed everything in though the window, then turned the bike over and removed the front wheel, and passed that inside too.
The room before I obscured it under all the reast of my gear.
Drying clothes, importing photos, and patching a tire all at once.
When I took the tube out, I found another leak just on the edge of a patch I’d applied before. I patched that, then hammered fruitlessly at the shreds of kevlar that were poking up inside the tire. They wouldn’t bend, and they were too short to cut with anything. I used up my last patch to cover some of them, then lined the tube up inside the tire as best I could for reassembly in the morning. The tire was visibly warped in one spot now. I desperately needed a new one.
I searched for bike shops, then online shippers. In due time I learned that no one, anywhere in the country, sells a 20-inch bicycle tire. There were online stores that could probably ship to Iceland, but on what timescale? Weeks? Months? I would probably have to email back and forth with them for a while just to negotiate faster shipping, and it was Friday, so I would be waiting another three days just to get the first answer. The longer the wait, the more uncertain I would be about where to have the item shipped. What else could I do?
I devoured some snacks and pondered.
So many snacks got chomped!
I looked at the map again, then called my nephew all the way back in California to chat about the situation. With my guidance, he went poking around in the garage and located a spare 20-inch tire, plus a tube, and passed them to my sister. Soon after that she drove across town to a DHL shipping center, half an hour before it closed for the weekend. For a total of 250 dollars – double the cost of my room for the night – a tire and tube began the journey partway around the planet, to arrive in the town of Höfn in about a week, the nearest town ahead of me large enough to have a post office. It was a calculated risk, since I’d need to cover 75 mile miles to get there.
I thanked my nephew and my sister profusely, and sent them 250 bucks over the wires.
“It’s great to have people who love you,” I thought. “The people who owe you a favor, they will do things for you up to a limit and then consider the debt paid. But people who love you, they will do what it takes, because of who you are, and that’s a currency with no fixed exchange rate.”
Pondering my good fortune, I quickly fall asleep tucked into the one bed I haven’t blanketed with gear.
I packed up my campsite, then rolled through town to the fancy hotel room. I needed to spend one more day here to line up my schedule with the room I’d booked on the 13th, 52 miles to the east.
After my conversation with Paul I realized that I was probably doing things too formally, and I could just ride out to the hotel even though they were fully booked, and ask to pitch my tent on the lawn behind their building while waving 40 bucks at them. These hotels are generally not big regulated chains, but privately owned establishments run by locals who can bend their own rules when they feel like it. And 40 bucks is 40 bucks, right? Not a bad profit for letting a guy sleep on a patch of lawn for 10 hours and maybe use your toilet. I mean, I’d take that deal, if the guy didn’t seem too sketchy.
But that wasn’t the groove I was in just now. In fact, today I wanted to just enjoy my fancy discounted room and luxuriate in a bed that didn’t need inflating, and use a private shower without a timer.
The fanciest hotel room of the whole trip, I suspect. Got it on a deep discount.
Alas, there was no customer-usable laundry machine. So I did another round in the sink, washing all the stuff I’d been wearing the last time.
SINK LAUNDRY!
Time to make that radiator earn its keep.
With the bike indoors, I decided to clean and tune it, since it was way more comfortable lying on a clean floor than wet grass. As I wiggled around tightening bolts, I could feel my body flexing in ways that I was unable to make it do just a month or so earlier. Burning well over 5000 calories a day has benefits.
It wasn’t until dinnertime that I realized I’d washed all my socks at once. I reluctantly squished my feet into a pair and headed for the fancy hotel dining room. Everyone there was well-dressed, and my sweater and pants were classy enough but my gross socks were something a teenage boy would wear. I was probably the only person to notice. I ordered the soup of the day, plus a piece of Arctic char, a hamburger, and a mug of hot chocolate. The fries were extra crispy and combined amazingly with the fish. I only managed to eat half the food, so the rest came with me to the room in a cardboard box.
I wondered how much of the meal had been brought to Iceland on a container ship. Certainly the potatoes, the beef, and the chocolate. Also the cardboard box, napkins, table, and chair were imports, since those were wood. Oh, and the cotton tablecloth. And the silverware. And… I realized the list could go on and cover almost everything around me. Including me.
Global commerce is weird. When I’m in this hotel, am I even technically in Iceland at all?
