Return to Iceland - The End

After yet another failed attempt to sleep in, constantly thwarted by the daily noise of hotels and hostels, I didn’t waste much time in getting out of my accommodations. I sated my hunger with a surprisingly good lamb and egg sandwich and coffee from a gas station and some skyr from my dwindling bag of groceries. I drove around Ísafjörður for a short period of time, but it quickly became apparent that little but the dead center of town seemed familiar. I don’t think it was that so much had changed, though there was a lot more tourist traffic thanks to a cruise ship that tours the Westfjords. I think not being under a blanket of snow and mostly devoid of cars and people just made it seem like a different town. I did find the bakery, which was better than I remembered, and the hotel I stayed in…but that was about all the seemed familiar. One of my personal favorite photos from my last Iceland trip came while I was in Ísafjörður and I wanted to see if I could find the same spot to compare winter and summer. I just couldn’t seem to get my bearings. Disappointed, and unjustifiably annoyed at the retiree tourists pouring off the cruise ship that didn’t actually do anything wrong other than exist, I headed out of town. Though not before restocking on a few supplies from the local grocery store.

I continued my trek around the Westfjords, and not too far out of Ísafjörður there is a long tunnel that bores through the mountain. I get unreasonably excited about driving through tunnels, but this one was a bit surprising because just a short distance into the tunnel, after it splits off into two directions, it becomes a one-lane tunnel. I’d never been in a tunnel where you constantly had to keep an eye out for oncoming traffic and then figure out which of you is going to pull into one of the many lay-bys inside the tunnel to let the other go. These lay-bys are signified here, and on a few other roads I’ve been on in Iceland, by a blue sign with a white M. I have no idea what the M stands for even after trying to look it up. Apparently one-lane tunnels aren’t unheard of in Iceland, but none of my travels brought me to one until then.

It was another day with only a vague idea of something to aim for other than just seeing the rugged beauty of the Westfjords. Much like the previous day there was plenty to see and be awed by, but not very many places to stop and really take it in. At one point I came around the tip of a fjord and saw what looked like a massive waterfall across the water. Driving around the inlet you get a good view and it becomes obvious there is more than one fall but right when you get near it the road turns inland. I backtracked and found a road that takes you to the base of the series of falls called Dynjandi. In all there are seven falls, all of which have their own name, but Dynjand is commonly what the largest is referred to as. It’s much taller than it seemed from a distance, and it seemed pretty big, and it fans out dramatically as it cascades down a series of steps—getting wider and wider with each drop. The hike up to the main fall is steep but not as bad as most of the others I’ve been to. Despite this, I found it more exhausting than usual to go up. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, the colder temperatures of the Westfjords, the nearly constant wind that could reach 20mph (steady, not gusts)—whatever it was I ended up stopping a lot on the way up and even a time or two on the way down. It was a bit embarrassing as young people practically ran up and a few old people passed me by.

After checking out the falls I continued on, slowly making my way toward a small valley town called Selárdalur where a now deceased artist created a bunch of large concrete sculptures and just started decorating the area. It was off the main road the goes around the Westfjords and I wasn’t sure how much time it would add so I kept it tentative. When it finally came down to deciding whether to go on to Selárdalur or continue on the main road around the Westfjords I chose the main road. I pulled up to the point where the road splits and there were signs pointing out how narrow, rough, and slow the road was. Paved roads in Iceland have a speed limit of 90KMH, gravel roads 80, and this road was a sluggish 60. It was marked as an F-road that I should stay off, but I had doubts of just how well my little piece of shit would manage and turned away. Even though it was a little more than 200 miles away, at this point I was pretty much just making my way through the rest of the Westfjords and back to Reykjavik.

Now it wasn’t at this point that the thought first occurred to me, it was actually shortly after sighting the Dynjand falls, but this was the first time in the trip I had thought about no longer being on the trip. It was depressing because it was so sudden. My mind had been free of any thoughts of my normal life, the life where I’m not traveling and I’m not in Iceland, and I hadn’t realized until that moment how nice it had been to just forget. But then I forgot to keep forgetting. I eventually got over the melancholy, but the thought that the trip would be ending stuck around.

Not much else happened after giving up on Selárdalur. I saw more alien mountains, but how many times can you go on about that before you start sounding repetitive? There was a bizarrely golden-sanded beach in a land of otherwise black sand or rocky beaches. I saw a small public pool among the rocks just a few yards from the sea that was fed by the warm waters of a nearby creek. There was a sign in the gravel lot bragging about the fact that pretty much everyone in the area learned how to swim in that pool—an odd thing to feel the need to proclaim. I saw more sheep, more ducks and geese (they’re all over the place), more Icelandic ponies (they all have mane that either looks like they should be in a commercial for horse shampoo or are about to start an emo rock band), and a pair of massive ravens that may or may not have been Odin’s companions Huginn and Muninn.

With evening coming on and the weather quite gloomy it was time to start thinking about the night’s accommodations. I had no intention of driving all the way to Reykjavik so I settled on a small but very nice hostel in a tiny little village called Reykholar. There were no stores or restaurants other than a gas station that I could see, so I made dinner from my bag of groceries and settled in for the night.

The next morning I was once again deprived the luxury of sleeping in thanks to the sounds of guests clanking away in the kitchen. I tried to buy a couple hours with some earplugs, but the magic of sleep was already fading and it was all for not. I downed a grocery bag breakfast and once again hit the road. With only about 3 hours of driving to Reykjavik I was in the capital city by lunch time. The night before I had struggled with the decision of whether or not to stay in Reykjavik. It was the city I had fallen in love with on my first visit. Except for the short detours to Ísafjörður and Akureyri I had spent the entirety of that trip inside the city limits. But I was a little afraid to return. When I first drove past Reykjavik on the start of my trip around the Ring Road I could already tell even from a distance that it had changed. The skyline was littered with cranes and the traffic of tour busses had definitely shot up dramatically. Was it still the place I had built up in my mind? Yes and no. Unlike Ísafjörður there were parts instantly recognizable. Once on the main artery through the heart of town, Laugavegur, I remembered where a lot of things were, and a lot of them were still there. Much like Akureyri it had grown and is still growing. A large section of Laugavegur was sectioned off as pedestrian only and tourists strolled up and down popping in and out of shops and restaurants. A few blocks in any directions and there were chunks of streets that were closed for construction or were being redone for commercial use. Parking was in short supply as lots were full, as was most of the street parking. There were dozens of new buildings going up, many of which looked like hotels. The spike in tourism since my first visit was definitely making its changes.

But it wasn’t all bad. Quite possibly my favorite bookstore in the world, Mál og Menning, was right where I’d left it. Its second-story café that overlooked Laugavegur looked the same and still served good coffee and pie and it still made a great place to chill out. Instead of getting out of the cold, this time I was getting away from the tourists. The fabulous hotdogs from Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur were still fabulous, even if the stand had been forced to move from where it was when I visited. Walking around the center of town was still fun and brought back all the good memories. But with that said, after about three hours I was done. I was happy with my decision the night before not to stay in Reykjavik, because now to me Iceland is the whole country and not just one small city. To quote Helga, the chatty proprietor of the bed and breakfast near Mývatn, “It’s good to get out of Reykjavik.”

My last night in Iceland will be spent back at the same place I crashed after arriving. If I was able to sleep 16 hours here last time, I’m hopeful that I’ll finally succeed in sleeping in. Hopefully that’ll help me transition back to “normal time” and won’t be so tired on the flight back. I don’t go back to work immediately, luckily. I’ll have two days of downtime in Atlanta, and then I’ll be meeting friends to go to the annual nerd convention, DragonCon, over Labor Day weekend. That won’t exactly be relaxing since it’s likely to be hot as balls and lots of walking and standing, but it’ll be fun. And we’ll just have to see what the next adventure will be.

Return to Iceland - Fjording Around

Sleeping in a capsule sucked. Surprisingly it wasn’t claustrophobia that was the issue—they’re rather roomy for what is basically a 4’ x 4’ x 7’ shipping container made of flimsy ABS plastic. The real problem is they get hot inside. Although they supposedly have air conditioning, what they really have is a fan that circulates air and somehow manages to dry it out so that you are slowly dehydrated. Add to that a thin mattress on a frame where you can feel the supports underneath, poor soundproofing, plus the units are really noisy themselves. They’re also stacked two high, so if you’re in the bottom like I was you have the person above you making noise and making the ceiling dip as they flop around. I ended up having to sleep with the door open to avoid feeling like I was baking and being turned into jerky, and even then I got maybe four hours of very uncomfortable sleep. Considering how I started feeling later in the day I’m not convinced I got that much. Regardless, I woke up in time for breakfast and head out by about 9.

The only thing on the itinerary for today was to drive along the shore and check out a rock formation on a beach called Hvítserkur. It’s a 50 foot tall structure of basalt that looks a lot like a dragon, although the legend is that it’s a petrified troll. Hvítserkur is a good ways down a gravel road, but once you park it’s a rather short walk to an observation deck on the cliff above the beach. However, if you actually want to go down on the black sand beach below you have to navigate a very steep, somewhat treacherous path. Most people don’t even bother, and quite a few that do stop shortly after starting. I managed to get down unscathed and got a good look at the monster and waited for the handful of tourists that were down there to take stupid pictures in which perspective made it look like they were holding or pushing or doing something else to the stones. A lot like the cliché pictures of people “holding up” the leaning tower in Pisa only there’s no real context to Hvítserkur that makes it look like you should “do” something to it. The hike back up was much quicker, though a lot more exhausting, and then I was off to the Westfjords.

The Westfjords is a large squiggly looking peninsular dangling off of the far northwestern portion on Iceland. When I was originally trying to loosely plan out my drive around the country I wasn’t sure I’d have time to visit the Westfjords. They’re off the ring road, and because of how dramatically fjordy the area is, there’s a lot of road to cover. Because of a couple days, namely my first, in which I covered more territory than expected I now had the time to take in the rugged sites. Because it wasn’t part of my original plan, there wasn’t anything in particular I wanted to see, though I did want to go through Ísafjörður on the way. Other than Akureyri, Ísafjörður was the only other town I got to see the first time I came to Iceland. Back then I two a pair of flights on Iceland’s domestic airline, Air Iceland, to spend a day in each. Much like with Akureyri, I was curious how Ísafjörður might have changed.

The landscape of the Westfjords is harsh, brutal, and beautiful. It’s a lot of the types of geology seen throughout the rest of Iceland, but compressed into a small area full of deep fjords with steep cliffs. The road clings to the edge of the fjords for most of the trip, which means it takes a long time of zigging and zagging in and out of the fjords to go from one town to another. Because of this, the roads are a little narrower than the ring road, climb up and down a good bit, have lengthy series of switchbacks. It’s a gorgeous and pleasant ride, but it means there aren’t a lot of places to stop and really take in the scenery. I pulled over whenever I could, but I ended up spending a lot of time driving and was surprised that I ended the day pulling into Ísafjörður when I expected to end up spending the night at least an hour away.

Because cell coverage is spotty in the Westfjords, I ended up pulling into a gas station to try and sort out my lodgings for the night. Once I found a decent guesthouse and got checked in, I realized how hungry I was. Other than a sandwich after hiking back up from Hvítserkur, I had done little more than snack occasionally the whole day of driving. The last time I was here in Ísafjörður I only remembered there being one restaurant and a bakery that was open in the off season, and neither were all that memorable. Looking online I stumbled on a seafood place called Tjöruhúsið. They only serve fish that was caught that day, and they serve it buffet style where groups of sit at long tables with bench seats. You could have a bench of nothing but your friends or a bench of complete strangers. I’m not a fan of buffets or talking to strangers, but the place kept showing up on lists of the best places in all of Iceland. It was just down the road, so I figured why not.

I didn’t realize how things worked when I showed up, but it turns out that you need a reservation because the place is very popular. They have multiple dinner services, and you show up for the 7 or 9 or whatever service that you’ve reserved. I got lucky and they had one seat for the service that happened to be starting in about 15 minutes. Serendipity at its finest. The seating arrangements or handled in a controlled chaos fashion. They try to fit people in wherever they can, and accommodate groups and keep people together, but with the way things are setup it ends up involving a lot of shuffling as people show up. Since they let me slide in without a reservation I volunteered to get moved around and ended up at a table of people all dining alone. At our table was a woman form Germany, one from Corsica in France, one from Detroit, and me. It was an odd mix, but I actually ended up enjoying myself despite my social awkwardness.

The food. My god…the food. When the service starts the cooks begin putting down massive skillets of steaming food on a large table at the front of the dining room. There was cod, haddock, plaice, wolfish, and some others I didn’t quite understand or recognize. They were in mustard dill sauces, white wine with onion sauces, simply pan seared with tomatoes, they were in sauces I couldn’t identify. It didn’t matter what was in the pan, it was delicious. When one pan ran out another pan was being set down. It wasn’t always replaced with the same thing. Something I sampled the first time around and loved was gone by the time I went back. And I went back. And I went back again. The woman from Detroit had eaten there the night before and immediately made a reservation for the next night. The one from Germany had been to Iceland 20 times and stopped to eat at Tjöruhúsið every one of them. If I’m lucky enough to make it back to Iceland, I will be eating there again myself. It ended up being about $55, which is pretty reasonable for a good dinner in Iceland, and I would’ve been happy to pay double. It was a phenomenal way to end the day.

Ísafjörður is a small town, and although I can tell it’s grown a bit since my last visit there’s not a lot that I want to see here. Tomorrow I’ll probably spend a little time strolling around, but it’ll mainly be driving again until I find something worth stopping for. Until then I’m going to try and make up for my shitty capsule sleeping.

Return to Iceland - Lavapalooza or: the true value of a good pair of shoes

Just a bit of warning—this is a long one since I skipped a day.

The day started with a quick trip to the nearby grocery store, a discount chain called Bónus. I wanted to try to limit my overpriced meals to one a day, so I stocked up on sandwich stuff, snacks, and skyr. I munched on a bag full of pastries that I swear the cashier said translated into Marriage Boats, but the closest name I could find is Hjónabandssæla which is Marital Bliss and they don’t sound even close. Anyway, they were good and gobbled it and some skyr as I drove to Detifoss, which was roughly 2 hours. From what I was told, the east side of Detifoss is the more attractive side. I really wasn’t sure how to get to either one specifically, but as luck had it I ended up on the east side. Detifoss is touted as the most powerful waterfall in all of Europe, and the term “The Niagara of Europe” was tossed around a fair amount. To get down to view the falls it’s a steep descent on somewhat slippery rocks. I’ve mostly been dressing for either the rain or the cold, and as my luck would have it I was geared more for rain. Unfortunately it was a very cold, very windy rain and I was quickly shivering and ended up cutting my stay at the waterfall rather short. Although not the plan, I pulled the shitty tourist and snapped some pics and left. It’s a very nice, powerful waterfall but it certainly ain’t no Niagara. It’s definitely worth the trip down and back, but short of the sheer volume of water going over the edge I’ve already seen much prettier (and would see an even better one the next day).

On the subject of weather. Any place I’ve ever spent more than a day or two—domestic and internationally—I inevitably hear someone say something along the lines of “If you don’t like the weather just wait 30 minutes and it’ll change.” It’s become a rather trite thing to hear when traveling. In Iceland, if you don’t like the weather just wait 30 minutes and it’ll change—really. The bitter cold rain and wind that drove me away from Detifoss ended about the time I got back to my car. Whether I stayed or left I would’ve been cold and wet for the exact same amount of time. Driving really shows off how much the weather can change. In the course of a single day of driving it can start and stop raining more than a dozen times. It will clear up, cloud up, rain, clear up again, and repeat this cycle endlessly. It really is best to dress for rain regardless of how sunny it is, and just expect the temperature to go up and down 10 or more degrees multiple times a day. And it’s almost always windy to some degree.

After Detifoss I headed to the Lake Mývatn area about an hour away. In the course of exploring the area I ended up backtracking multiple times, taking the road between points of interest and where my room for the night would be several times. It was mostly a case of poor planning, not realizing how close some things actually were, and returning to an area because of the fear of having missed a really good opportunity (I was right, by the way). Coming from Detifoss the Ring Road descends dramatically into the Mývatn with a small geothermal field called Hverir full of boiling mud pools and sulfuric steam-spewing fumeroles as soon as the road levels out. It’s a relatively small area, but it’s cool to see (and smell) the small pools of bubbling mud and a pair of what look like a giant anthills made of softball sized rocks spewing steam.

Immediately after leaving Hverir there is a road with a sign that just says Krafla. I looked it up quickly and it was supposed to be a lava field with a caldera so I took the long road up the hill. The first thing you see as you drive is the large Krafla geothermal plant. It’s a very modern, tidy looking operation that kept making me think it would be the kind of power plant you’d build on mars. There are large steel pipes that lead to a half dozen little geodesic-domed sheds, a few large buildings, and a pair of massive three story-ish trapezoid-shaped turbines. You drive through the complex and under a series of pipes that rise up and over the road to create a sort of tunnel. The road then goes up sharply and ends at large crater. You can climb up and around the rim of the crater and look at the deep blue lake in the middle. It was pretty, but it was disappointing and not at all what I had read about Krafla. Coming back down and out there is another parking area with several cars, but I couldn’t really see anything but a walking trail so I passed and continued back toward Hverir.

It was a little early, but I wanted to go ahead and check out my room and get setup because the place seemed pretty small and I didn’t want them locking me out before I ever checked in. It’s about a 30 minute drive from Mývatn, but I wasn’t in a hurry so I didn’t mind that I would end up driving back. It’s a nice drive but I couldn’t find my hotel. I followed the directions, but the road it lead too was just residential. There was gas station with a restaurant nearby so I went there and ended up eating lunch there despite my bag full of groceries sitting in the car. I had a pretty good, hearty “Icelandic meatsoup” that was full of lamb and root vegetables. I asked the girl at the counter about my hotel and she told me it was actually in one of those houses—it was an older widow who ran a B&B out of her home. I followed the directions again and pulled up uncertainly to the house. The owner, Helga, greeted me at the stairs up to her house and immediately made me feel a little better about my choice of lodging. Helga was really talkative, I think a bit lonely, and showed me around and let me get setup. She mentioned a thermal bath back at Myvatn that I should check out so I added it to my mental list.

The whole time I was driving to where my room was and back to Mývatn, the disappointment of the Krafla lava fields kept nagging at me. I read up some more on the area and everything pointed to the fact that I never saw the main attraction. It turned out that unsuspecting parking lot and trail was the whole point. So I drove back up the hill, through the power plant, and pulled into that boring looking parking area. I headed down the little walking trail and happened to overhear a girl telling another tourist that it was just a quick 15 minute hike until you reached the end and had to come back. Maybe for young, spunky, athletic girl it was 15 minutes but it sure as shit wasn’t for me and it didn’t end where she seemed to think—it was actually a loop. Only nobody else seemed to be taking the loop. You first go up a small hill and end up walking along a boardwalk that leads to a small, steaming aquamarine pool at the base of a small hill of brown rock. The trail continues and enters a lava field created from the last eruption of Krafla in 1984. The ground is black, jagged, and uneven. A sparsely marked trails goes through the most manageable path toward the caldera, but even it is broken up by fissures that appear to have opened since the trail was originally marks. Off to the sides are large, jagged shards that shoot up, larger rifts, small vents with much of it oozing steam. The caldera seems rather small for what you would think would create the vast field of lava, but it turns out that’s the tip of the tube from one of the previous eruptions. The entire caldera is 10km in diameter and the entire lava field that I was in, the deep blue lake, and more are within the caldera. I didn’t know that at the time I was walking around, but it was still very cool and surreal.

After what I thought was the caldera the trail continues on through the lava field and begins to climb up. At one point the trail splits and you can hike further up and end up overlooking the aquamarine pool that I had seen earlier. It seemed that everyone else that went up ended up coming back down and retracing their steps back to the “caldera” and back to the parking area. But the trail continued on past that point so I continued to follow it. For a very short period it continues through lava field, but not too far on and you leave the lava and return to normal, solid ground. This part of the trails runs around the back side of the large brown hill until you cross a rift and then reach a gravel path that eventually runs back into the path I took coming up. Round trip was about 2.5 miles—15 minutes my ass.

After Krafla, the steep climb up the crater, and the steep climb down and up from Detifoss I was exhausted. It was then I decided to hit up that thermal bath Helga had mentioned. It wasn’t as big or stylish as the Blue Lagoon and it didn’t have the really nice algae and silica mud that you can put on your skin, but it wasn’t near as crowded nor was it 300 miles way. I floated around, got as close to the hot water vents as I could stand, cooled off, and repeated for about two and a half hours. By the time I returned to my room about 30 minutes away I was too tired and too relaxed to do anything but go to sleep. The next morning I woke up at 8 to have breakfast and ended up sharing the table with a pair of older couples from Italy. The two women were both judges in different towns, one of the men was a retired judge, and the other was an electrical engineer. They were chatty, but one of the women did most of the translating as the two men spoke little to no English. Helga repeated some of her stories she had told me the day before, and somehow the topic ended up in politics. To say the least, and to keep it apolitical, it’s interesting being an American abroad in the age of Trump. Breakfast was simple but did the trick and I left to start the day.

There was one more thing back in the Mývatn area that I wanted to see—a vast lava cave called Lofthellir. Unfortunately it’s not a cave you go into by yourself, all the tours to the cave leave very early in the morning, and it involves some rather claustrophobic spaces before you get to the good stuff. It’s also something that costs $200 or more, depending on which tour group you go with. Instead, I settled for a small geothermal cave called Grjótagjá that was apparently in the show Game of Thrones where Jon Snow has sex with Ygritte. It was a popular spot for locals to bath, but a rise in geothermal activity in 1975 made the water too hot to bath in. It’s a tiny cave with two small entrances that have limited space to move around and stay out of the water. In all honesty it wasn’t worth another trek back to the Mývatn area, especially since I had to return back toward where I had spent the night to continue along the Ring Road.

The next stop was a lesser known waterfall called Aldeyjarfoss. It’s a bit out of the way, taking you about an hour off the ring road to get there. You actually turn off where the much more popular Goðafoss is. If I weren’t already more interested in Aldeyjarfoss, the half dozen tour busses and parking lot full of cars would have dissuaded me. Considering you can get a really good view of the falls from the road, there’s not much need to deal with all the people. Everything I read about Aldeyjarfoss said you could park just before you got to one of Iceland’s seasonal roads (called F Roads) that require a beefy 4x4 to safely navigate and it was just a 10 minute walk from there. After driving the hour down the road I crossed a bridge and found a small parking area with signs about the area that said the roads ahead were for 4x4s only. It was a fucking lie.

The actual parking area is a mile and a half up a steep road where there is a single, small sign that says you can’t go further without a 4x4. To make matters worse, I tried to make the walk shorter by cutting across the terrain. Any time I might have saved taking a shorter route I more than lost navigating ravines, climbing hills of loose soil, and walking around ridges to avoid the deeper ravines. I was absolutely exhausted by the time I got to the real parking area. At that point it really is only a 10 minute walk down a somewhat steep trail. My trek took almost an hour. But even then, the hike was totally worth it. Aldeyjarfoss is absolutely beautiful. It has the same hexagonal basalt columns that Svartifoss had, but it’s a much larger fall in a much more beautiful area. Much like when I went to Detifoss it began to rain shortly after I got to the fall, but having learned from my previous experience I just waited it out and was rewarded. The hike back up the 10 minute trail was a little taxing, but the full 1.5 mile walk back (of which I stuck to the road the entire time) was so easy in comparison that it was actually enjoyable. By the time I got back to my card I was tired, but quite happy and stuffed my face with a sandwich from my bag of groceries.

After Aldeyjarfoss I continued on the Ring Road with only a vague target of an interesting geological feature along the coast of the far north. I reached the city of Akureyri long before I reached my destination and decided to call that the end of the road for the day. I’ve made a lot of progress around Iceland in the last few days and even if I weren’t tired I wanted to slow down a bit. I’ve been to Akureyri before, when I visited in 2011 and it was a snowy city. Akureyri is considered Iceland’s “second city” after Reykjavik and it’s grown a good bit in the 7 years since I’ve been. In my neverending search for cheap places to sleep I ended up renting a “sleep capsule” at a hostel in the center of town. I’ve never stayed in a capsule, but it looked cool and it kinda solves the main issue I have with hostiles—other people. Finding the hostile was a bit of on ordeal because all the roads in the city center were closed for Akureyri’s annual city celebration to mark the anniversary of its founding. I haven’t spent much time in the capsule, but even my slightly claustrophobic self should be ok. For now I’m going to call it a night and head out to find something to eat and then chill out in my little spaceship of a bed.

Return to Iceland - Tracing and Untracing

When I said I was going to get an early start, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I’d been up since 4am and it was 2am when I called it a night. After some mental calculation I decided it wasn’t going to be that early and set my alarm accordingly. Apparently the tour bus full of people being loud as fuck at 7am hadn’t gotten the memo. How people can make that much noise in a room with a limited number of loud, clanking things I’ll never understand. I don’t know if they unpack their suitcases every single night and then spent 30 minutes opening and closing drawers, slamming closet doors, rolling their suitcases around the room a dozen laps…but people never cease to manage to make a lot of noise. After about an hour of denial and loud dad sighs that only I could hear I gave up and crankily made my way to the hotel breakfast. It was a damn good breakfast and I made sure I got my overpaid money’s worth out of it. I ended up not needing lunch so I think I succeeded. With a glutton’s breakfast out of the way I packed up and hit the road to retrace some of the route I had driven yesterday.

To avoid paying even more than I had already overpaid, I ended up staying a little over an hour from Svartifoss, which I had passed on the way to Hofn. I slightly underestimated just how much I ended up having to retrace, but it saved me enough money I wasn’t too concerned with it (some of the nearby hotel prices were insane). Nevertheless, I made it back to Vatnajökull National Park where Svartifoss resides where it was a sunny, warm (60ish) day. From the parking lot it’s roughly a mile of steep, uphill hiking that absolutely kicked my ass. Stairs and hills are my nemesis, and this hike had plenty of both. It’s a nice, beautiful hike that takes you past a smaller waterfall and up above the tree line so that you can see the lava fields, winding glacial rivers, and rocky beaches for miles until they hit the ocean. I paused to take in those views very, very often—mostly as an excuse to catch my breath. What was touted as a 45 minute hike easily took that long, and by the time I reached the falls I was exhausted. Luckily it’s worth it. What makes Svartifoss (which means Black Falls) special is that its water cascades down over a rock face of tall, dark lava and basalt columns that are roughly hexagonal in shape before the water pools at its base and winds down the valley. The hexagonal columns are very similar to those of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. A hike that took at least 45 minutes to go up only took a little more than 15 minutes to go down. The hardest part of the return is slowing down so you don’t trip over the deep drops of some of the wood and earthen steps. If you’re going to go, definitely be prepared to sweat and bring some water with you.

After leaving Vatnajökull and Svartifoss I then untraced my retraced steps, taking me back past Hofn and further down the Ring Road into eastern Iceland. My next destination is Detifoss, another waterfall, but because of all the time spent going back and forth I knew I wasn’t going to make it there today. Instead I checked out the map and picked somewhere along the way that wasn’t going to involve me driving late into the night. As it was I’ve already spent more time in the car in the last 2 days than I’d hoped and I don’t want to slip into old habits of blitzing across the country. Iceland is too small to do that. Instead I kept a brisk pace, but didn’t hesitate to stop if something caught my interest. So far there’s been no shortage of that—the only thing stopping me from pulling over more often is the lack of safe places to park. The roads in Iceland are relatively narrow and with little to no shoulder to speak off. The sides of the road are either loose plains of volcanic gravel that are tough for a small car to manage or they’re steep slopes, glacial rivers, or soft and wet bog-like areas that aren’t suitable for the shitty little Hyundai I’m driving.

As the Ring Road leave the South and heads into Eastern Iceland (I don’t know if these are official designations, but all the maps and searches I’ve done seem to divide the country into the cardinals) the coast becomes more rugged and the road hugs high cliffs that sheer off into the ocean. Coincidentally the weather also changed as I made my way around the island. What was a warms day with few clouds turned into a brief hail storm and dissipated into spotty rain, low clouds, and a drastic cool off. The alien mountains are ever-present despite the change in the coast. If anything, they become harsher looking and full of more drastic sheers and angled striations. My mind began to see them more as ancient structures or ships from a long forgotten race that were left to sink into the volcanic landscape and less as naturally occurring. At one point my GPS decided I needed to take a short-cut, which admittedly cut about 45 minutes off the trip, but it was on roads that were intimidating to say the least.

For the most part the Ring Road around Iceland is paved. It’s not always smooth and it’s almost always just a wee bit too narrow for comfort when busses and tractor trailers pass you, but it’s decently maintained. Occasionally it gets into hard-packed gravel or a weird gravely asphalt, but that’s mostly in areas where they’re building new bridges. I should mention that most bridges are one lane and involve pulling to one side while the oncoming traffic crosses. For the most part it works. The jackasses driving the tour busses tend to strong arm their way into crossing, because how is a tiny hatchback supposed to argue? The tourists who haven’t seemed to catch on to the system despite being hundreds of miles away from Reykjavik are the real danger, as they’ll start crossing a bridge that a column off on-coming traffic is already halfway across. They also do a lot of other stupid stuff, like stop in the middle of the road if there’s no good place to pull over. Some throw on their caution lights, but I’ll be damned if I know how that’s supposed to negate the fact they are stopped in the middle of a road where people are doing 70mph.

Anyway, back to the shortcut. The GPS directed me to leave the safety of the Ring Road and turn onto an even narrower road of dirt and gravel that wound sharply up and around things as it climbed up the side of one of the alien mountains all while raining sporadically. The initial ascent was a bit of a white knuckled ride, especially in a severely underpowered piece of shit that often struggled to climb some of the steep inclines. The occasional RV that had no business being on the road didn’t help, nor did the pickup trucks that would pass you on those suicidal roads doing 50 or 60mph in a steep turn with no way of knowing what was coming the other way. However, once I got up to a point where the road wasn’t kamikaze’ing up the mountain I was actually able to appreciate just how beautiful, and yet more differently alien it was driving through and on top of those things that may or may not be ancient spaceships. The thought that kept crossing my mind was “This is what Mordor would look like if it were pretty.”  It’s just as sharp and angular as things look from down below, but it’s less pronounced once you’re on top and it’s all softened by really short shrubs and lichen that grow all over the place. It’s also littered with babbling little brooks that run in narrow channels carved out of the rock that have weird angular arches of rock and jutting rock growths, also softened around the edges by a cloak of pale green. I kept expecting to see hobbits traipsing along one of the ridges on their way back from defeating Sauron. And then suddenly you’re gently descending and the road becomes paved again and you’ve left Middle Earth behind and re-entered Iceland. And then I was in the little town of Egilsstaðir and my lodging for the night (which I booked on my phone a few hours before while buying snacks in a gas station) was only a short 10 minutes ride away.

The room for tonight isn’t much to write about, but it’s about 1/3 of the price of the one the night before. It’s clean, there’s a bed, and the doors lock…don’t need much more. The owner recommended a restaurant back in Egilsstaðir called Café Nielsen. It’s about as expensive as any other prepared meal in Iceland (which is very) but it was actually mostly worth the price. I had lobster soup (with lobster caught off the shores of Hofn where I was yesterday), reindeer steak (which I’ve never had and it was delicious), a weird but good baked potato, and skyr cake for dessert. For those of you who weren’t along for the ride last time I was in Iceland, skyr is akin to Greek yogurt but made differently and tastes way better. Skyr cake is more or less a cheesecake made with skyr. It was phenomenal. Even though my wallet shrieked a bit when I paid, I was more than happy to part with the money.

Tomorrow it’s off to Detifoss and to explore the Lake Myvatn area. There are supposed to be quite a few geothermal thingies there—I don’t know if that means baths, geysers, power plants, or all the above. It’s about 2 hours away and depending on how much time I spend there, I might just stay the night in nearby Reykjahlíð. As usual I’ll just play it by ear.

Return to Iceland - The Beginning

Back in June I was going through pictures from my previous travels and I came across the stuff I shot when I was in Iceland back in 2011. I was immediately overcome with a sadness and a longing—I desperately wanted to go back. I’d looked into going back to Iceland a few times, but I always thought about how many other places there were that I wanted to see and I had a hard time justifying not seeing something new. But this sense of longing was strong enough that a few days later I had bought a plane ticket. The rest eventually fell into place. I specifically wanted to go in the summer this time, since I went at the end of winter last time and my plans of driving the Ring Road that circumnavigates the country were dashed by weather that was getting the best of even the locals. Fast forward a few months and here I am, back in the land I fell in love with and a rental car—and this time it isn’t covered in snow.

And then I slept for 16 hours.

I didn’t land and immediately sleep for 16 hours. As usual I am incapable of sleeping when I travel so when I arrive in Iceland early yesterday I had to wait around for my room to be ready. Although the hotel got my room ready much earlier than they had to, I still had to drive and walk around for a few hours. It did give me a chance to see the south peninsula near the airport. It’s a pretty rural area with clusters of small towns that usually have little more than a school, a grocery store, and the infrastructure to support a bustling fishing industry. The highlight of the drowsy tour was a small park with a pair of lighthouses. And then I slept for 16 hours.

Which means I woke up at 4am.

After killing a couple hours, eating some food I picked up the day before at one of the small grocery store, the sun was finally coming up so I got an early start. My plan for the day was to take in a handful of the sights along what is called the Golden Circle. The Golden circle is a roughly 300km loop just outside of Reykjavik that has several very popular attractions, including Þingvellir National Park, the waterfall Gullfoss, a pair of geysers (one of which is Geysir, the origin of the term geyser), a volcanic crater, and a few other stops. I got to Þingvellir around 7:30 and within a few minutes the tour busses started rolling in, so I headed into the park to try and beat the rush.

Þingvellir is notable for two things; it’s the point at which the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet, and it’s the historical site of one of the world’s first democracies—the Althing. When you arrive you descend into the park through a rift, a footbridge taking you between jutting walls of rock and over a portion rift that opened up years ago. A gravel path winds through the park taking you past a small waterfall, down onto a plane with a small lake, and around to a small church, cottages, and the historical site of the Althing. The Althing was, and still is, the parliament setup to govern what was the various tribes that settled Iceland. It was created in 930 on the plains below the rift of the tectonic plates. At that time it was probably held in a longhouse, but today the site is a national park—the parliament having moved to Reykjavik. The tour bus crowds had caught up with me around the time I got to the site of the Althing and, having seen most of the park, I decided to get out before I started hating people. I try not to hate people on vacation.

My next stop was supposed to be the geysers Geysir and Strokkur, but half way there I saw a sign that I thought was for a waterfall. About 45 minutes later it turned out I had followed a sign to the town of Selfoss (foss means waterfall) in which there are no falls. Despite the hour wasted, and an hour to get back to Geysir I still intended to hit the stops along the Golden Circle. What I ended up doing was driving in the wrong direction as the map on my phone seemed to think I was driving in a different direction for about 45 minutes before it suddenly realized I was going the wrong way. At that point I didn’t feel like the lost time and the time to backtrack was really worth it. Instead I decided to leisurely continue along the Ring Road toward Svartifoss, my next point of interest.

Although I didn’t stop at any major attractions, I did stop a few dozen times. The Ring Road takes you through some of the most amazing geography I’ve ever seen. At times the plains and sudden jagged mountains reminds me of my time driving around Norway and Sweeden. At other times the mountains are strange fantastical monuments of striated and stepped lava rock covered in moss and lichen, seeming to rise up through massive piles of black dust. Some seem to rise up from the earth like massive gray molars and others seem sculpted and rendered for some fantasy game.

The plains go from gently undulating barren lava fields that look like a harsh alien landscape to bizarre vistas covered in piles of squashed globes of rock covered in dull looking moss that look like a completely different planet. Throughout the sci-fi and fantasy landscapes are mountains covered by glacial ice. At one point the glacier flows a small lake and breaks into icebergs that float away, presumably to the nearby sea. Because it’s summer, though the temperatures are only in the mid-50s F, the glacial melt runs off creating hundreds of waterfalls as it flows over the edges of those fantasy mountains and creates seasonal rivers that snake their way across the landscape.

Because I stopped so often I didn’t get to see Svatifoss today, but I’ve stopped for the night at a hotel in the nearby town of Hofn where I’ve paid too much for a room and for dinner. Tomorrow I’ll leave out early to see the waterfall. But now it’s late and I’m sleepy.

Operation Aurora - The Weird Night

The ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm was not quite what I was expecting on so many levels. I made pretty good time Jyväskylä to Helsinki and had a couple hours to kill, but not enough to really do much in Helsinki so I just hung out at the terminal's coffee shop until it was time to load the car into the ferry.

Once on board I realized it was much less of a typical ferry and more of a small cruise ship. The main promenade deck had several shops touting tax free fashion, electronics, and souvenirs. The main shopping attraction was a large duty free "superstore" full of liquor, tobacco stuffs, and perfume. Aside from the shopping there were also a small variety of restaurants (a fine dining place, a sushi spot, some cafeteria fare, a buffet, and a few others), a small casino, a pub, a night club, and a discotheque(a very European thing to have). The cabins on the upper decks were like more compact versions of cruise ship cabins with views that either overlooked the promenade or had ocean views. The cabins in the steerage where I was sleeping ranged from tiny to fucking tiny---mine was fucking tiny. Possibly the smallest room I've slept in. Being down at the bottom of the ship it also got the full motion of the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden, and the full sound of metal creaking and waves slapping the hull. I could already tell I wasn't going to get much sleep. It was small, too warm, and had no wifi so I ventured out to the promenade.

The night started pretty simple. I had dinner at the fine dining restaurant where I had a pretty good dinner of seafood, beetroots, and a very small but tasty desert. I was going to try and get some photos uploaded (the upper decks had wifi) and have a beer or two in the little pub. I got very little work done when I realized that my steerage ticket only got me access to slow, to the point of being useless, throttled wifi with a relatively small data limit. At one point I made some sort of impatient gesture when pictures kept failing to upload and this guy at a table across from me made a comment. We shouted back and forth for a minute before he slid over to my table and introduced himself a Pedro.

Pedro was born in Colombia but adopted at a very young age into a Swedish family and grew up in Stockholm. He seemed to have an eccentric personality and a bit of a bohemian lifestyle---kinda drifting from one job to another until he got bored or he got fired. He had a few stories about being in the wrong place at the wrong time and spending a night here or there in jail or getting stuck in Hungary without a passport and having a hard time getting back to Sweden. He described himself as a "rock and roller" and had the personality and dress to go with it. He was very high energy and fed off of social interactions.

Pedro disappeared for a little while and I tried futilely to get some work done with my pictures. He finally came back and we resumed talking about life and enjoying a pretty decent British guy playing pop rock songs on his acoustic guitar. Pedro's personality ended up pulling in another solo traveler, Niina, and once the singer---Grant, I believe---finished his last set he ended up gravitating to the table as well. It became an international court of contrast and comparisons---of life, politics, why Americans like guns so much, and everything between. Grant was from Birmingham, Niina was from near Lahti, Finland but had lived in Stockholm for the last 20 years, me the American, and Pedro the born Colombian but raised Swede. Eventually the pub was closing down and we were all going to relocate to the dance club on the other end of the ship. In the process we lost Grant, he was taking his gear back to his room and never resurface, but Pedro and Niina ended up making it there with me.

The dance club had a small dance floor about the size of the average living room and there was a band that played a lot of soul, r&b, and standards. It was headlined by an African who spoke English with what sounded to me like a Johannesburg accent. You could tell by the way he schmoozed and interacted with the audience he had played many cruises, but they were pretty good nonetheless. Pedro, the flamboyant social butterfly, couldn't resist the call of the dance floor and kept disappearing to dance his awkward dance with a variety of older women. That left Niina and I to talk on and off for several hours. I learned that she was a drug rehab nurse, her husband was ex-Russian military and a former Tae Kwan Do champion and his photo intimidated the hell out of me (and I never felt it was a ruse to make sure I didn't hit on Niina). She grew up in what seemed like a very traditional Finnish family but moved to Stockholm because the work opportunities were better, much to the annoyance of her mother. He father had passed away sometime in the last 10 years and her mothers health was up and down (this was the reason she had been in Finland).

Me and Niina got along great, and even though my Swedish was nonexistent and her English was heavily accented and she sometimes searched for words she was always willing to answer any kind of questions I had about Swedish or Finnish life. During the few hours that we were at the night club, Pedro would drift in and out of conversation as his social energy waxed and waned, but over time it seemed like he was getting jealous that me and Niina had connected better than me and him. He was getting a little dramatic at times, making odd comments like "You know Adam, you are very beautiful for an American." I would smile and say thanks, but never indulge in his attempts to get me out to dance. As the night went along, he was dancing with more men (all about my build and age) and less of the older women. Niina and I had long since come to the conclusion that Pedro wasn't just flamboyant, he was gay or bisexual. It didn't really matter so we didn't pay much attention to it beyond the awkward comments.

It was getting pretty late, around 2am by this point, and the dance floor was starting to get desolate. The energetic, crowd-pleasing band had given way to a weird 80s costumed band that played mostly 70s songs, including a selection of Swedish songs. With the crowd thinned out, Pedro was at our table more and his energy was getting less and less. Niina had mentioned she thought he was on more than just a social high, but I had brushed it off as just Pedro's...Pedro-ness. He disappeared to the bathroom for a few minutes and Niina said she bet he comes back a brand new man. And boom...the upbeat Pedro was indeed back. Niina just gave me a knowing, I told you so smile and all I could do was nod. At one point I needed to use the bathroom and had no idea where it was, so I asked Niina if she knew. She said she was going out to smoke so she'd show me. Pedro must have sensed we were leaving because he suddenly popped up and raised his eyebrows suggestively, asking where we were off to. When I told him he made a kind of smirk like he didn't really believe me, but shrugged. A few minutes later I was back, and then Niina was. Pedro again looked at me like he was slightly disappointed. It was also about this time that the night club was shutting down and we were told the discotheque stayed open until 6am, so we made for the next change of scenery.

On our way out of the night club, we came across a bald, broad-shouldered guy with a long goatee that was very drunk and had managed to fall out of his chair. The South African singer from the band was helping him up and Pedro suddenly became interested in the drunk man and we lost him on the way to the all-night dance party. But it wasn't really all night, and after about 30 minutes of obnoxiously loud euro-dance beats that club too was closing. The only thing left open at 4am was the small restaurant that served cafeteria style food. Both Niina and I were hungry so we ended up getting some shitty convection oven pizza and sat down as the night was finally starting to wind down. Only it wasn't quite ready to end, it seemed.

While we were in line for food Pedro popped back up, disappeared, and then popped back up again once we were sitting and eating our shitty pizza (Niina actually liked it, but considering the options for take-out in Sweden I can't really say I'm surprised). At this point Pedro was a little...abrasive. He was now obviously annoyed that he wasn't the center of attention and kept getting louder and more dramatic. Suddenly the conversation shifts solely between Pedro and Niina and they are talking exclusive in Swedish (something that rarely happened the whole night, solely out of courtesy to me). Niina was calm but stern, while Pedro was getting agitated and mock-offended. They kept gesturing to me, making me more uncomfortable than Pedro's harmless attempts to hit on me, and then Niina was grabbing her purse and leaving. I was trying to find out what was happened and all she said was that she was getting security. I looked to Pedro and in a very dramatic, Latin soap opera fashion he explained "I have nothing to hide." I kept asking what they had been arguing about, but all it came back to was that he had nothing to hide.

A few minutes later Niina was back, and then a few more minutes later two ship's security were there. They first talked to Niina, in Swedish, and then talked to Pedro, all while we were sitting at the table. Then they asked Pedro to come with them while they talked some more. Niina went right back to eating her pizza, not the least bit fazed by events. When I asked her what all that was about, she shrugged and said he was on drugs. I had a feeling it was more than that, and it had more to do with me than either of them were letting on. I have a feeling she was trying to protect me in the same way a sibling protects their younger, obviously more naive sibling. But it still wasn't over.

After 10 or so minutes Pedro was back and standing next to the table. He was again claiming he had nothing to hide, adding that he was clean, and that he had much respect for me and for women. I told Pedro it was probably time to call it a night. He dramatically acted offended and stomped off, only to stomp back up at the other side of the table. This went round and round for a few minutes before I told him to just go. The night was over and he should quit while he's ahead. I thought he was about to walk off when instead he sat down at the table behind us where two older women who were completely uninvolved in any of the night's events were sitting and Pedro began to profess to them that he was a good person, he was clean, and he had nothing to hide. At this point I'd had enough and I got up and told Pedro to leave the women alone---they had no idea who he was or what he was talking about so just leave them be. He stood up and puffed out his chest, not in a threatening way but in a mix of defensive and peacockish showboating. He was getting louder and louder, telling everyone he was an open book, he was clean, he had nothing to hide.

I was done being diplomatic and finally grabbed him by the arm and told him if he wouldn't leave then I would take him back to his room. His eyes grew big momentarily and then he gave me a look I can only describe as sort of seductive.

In a melodramatic voice he asked "Are you sure, Adam? Do not tease me."

He was choosing to take things the wrong way.

"No, no, no, Pedro. Not like that," I said, more defensively than I had intended.

He gave me a hurt look and then his eyes brightened and he said, "But it could be."

"Listen Pedro. Me and you are not having sex. We aren't fucking. We aren't getting it on. Our dicks are never going to be any closer to each other than they are now. You can be gracious and let me escort you to your room, or we can get security to do it."

"You do not talking to me in such a crude manner," he said, again being theatrical.

"Fine, security it is," and I walked over to the front desk where Niina had gone earlier. I told the lady there was a guy that had probably had a little too much to drink and needed an escort to his room.

"You mean that guy behind you?" she asked, and I turned to see Pedro pouting, lips pooched out like a child.

"Yeah, that guy."

The lady asked if it was the same guy that had been a problem earlier and I said yes, so she get on the phone and called security. Pedro vanished. I didn't actually see or hear him leave...he just disappeared.

After I sat back down with Niina we both agreed we were pretty much done for the night. It was after 4am and breakfast was early and we would be in Stockholm shortly after 9. I told Niina I would be more comfortable if she let me walk her to her room and she was fine with that, but needed to smoke first. We made our way down the promenade to one of the doors to the outer decks. Niina was already outside and Pedro popped up from the stairs nearby. He pointed an accusing finger out the door to Niina, who just rolled her eyes, and said "It is because of that girl, isn't it."

"Dude, she's married to a terrifying looking Russian dude. None of us are getting laid tonight."

"But you could."

"Fuck off, Pedro," I said as I went outside with Niina.

Pedro dramatically walked off up the stairs, but a minute later came back down, and then went down another floor. He kept popping up and down the decks, and I kept catching him glancing at us from a distance, through the rails of the stairs, and then disappearing when he saw that I could see him. He popped up at the door and opened it, but I had my foot in the way so he could only open it so far.

"You will never have another friend like me" he said, and slammed the door, only to open it again. "You will never have another friend like me!"

Then he was gone.

I joked with Niina about being cursed by a Colombian as she finished her cigarette, saying she knew how to get rid of cursed, and then I walked her to her room. I was constantly looking around for Pedro as we made our way to on one of the upper decks and agreed to meet her for breakfast before telling her goodnight. I made my way back to my room, but I was still feeling paranoid so I took a long, complicated route using both stairs and elevators. When I got to my floor, a maze of narrow hallways with short dead-ends that branched off every 10 or 15 feet, I peeked around every corner before committing to my move. I had a vision of a little, flamboyant Colombian man with a rag soaked in chloroform and was not going to end up a Lifetime movie. Even though I never saw him on my way to my room, I kept feeling like I was being watched, but finally I got there (and checked the bathroom and the shower just in case) and locked the door and the night behind me.

The next morning, aka 3 hours later, I woke and met Niina for breakfast. Finland is an hour ahead of Sweden, so when we left all the boat's events were in Finnish time, but somewhere around 4am when we briefly docked at the small island of Mariehamn the boat switched over to Swedish time. As a result I screwed up and set my alarm an hour early than I needed, and then she was 30 minutes late so I waited a while. We both knew this was the end of our brief friendship so it was mostly small talk and laughing about the Pedro bullshit of the night before. I had intended to exchange emails or something to keep in touch, but while she was getting a refill of coffee I realized we were pulling into the Stockholm terminal and I still needed to pack. Just then they announced our arrival and stated that the doors for unloading vehicles would be open in 10 minutes and I was 2nd in line and didn't want to be the reason nobody could leave so I hunted her down and rushed an awkward goodbye and ran off to stuff all my crap in my bag. I got into my car just as the car in front of me was pulling away, the guy behind me shaking his head at his near-inconvenience, and pulled out of the ferry and away from Pedro and Niina.

From the ferry I drove straight to the airport where I dropped off my rental car, killed a few hours, and began the long flight home. I arrived in Ft. Lauderdale around 9pm and spent the night in a cheap motel nearby since my connecting flight wasn't until 9am. Then I took the short flight to Atlanta, and my friend picked me up and I was home. Operation Aurora, although a success, was sadly over. I have some thoughts and pictures and lessons learned to think about and will post those in a few days. But other than that, another vacation is in the books.

Operation Aurora - The Long Night

When I woke up Lødingen there was a fresh blanket of snow on the ground and it was still lightly falling from dull, gray skies. My clear skies of the night before were gone and I had a sneaking feeling it wasn't just in Lødingen. Looking at the weather online showed that it wasn't totally cloudy in Tromso just yet, but radar and forecasts told me it was coming. I was still a few hours away and it would likely be there when I was and would be staying for a few days. I was disappointed, but I had already done what I'd set out to do---I'd seen the aurora and I hadn't needed to drive all the way to Tromso.

Looking at the map and the time I had left I was pretty sure I could make it to Helsinki with a little time to wander around before catching an overnight ferry to Stockholm. I could just go straight back to Stockholm and chill out for a day, but I had hoped to at least catch a glimpse of Finland on my trip. After a little it of hemming and hawing I was set for Helsinki. It would be about 14 hours of driving after having just finished roughly 20 hours, but hopefully worth it. The trip would have me driving along the northern parts of Norway and Sweden into central Finland. It was easily the shortest day I'd had since getting here, making it the longest night in so many ways.

Turning inland from the fjords of the coast meant the roads were less winding and slightly wider most of the way, but it also brought colder weather. I drove across roads of solid ice, but packed hard with snow so they were actually easier to drive on than any of the winters roads before. The idea of driving 80mph on these roads was mind numbing, but if I didn't I'd have been flattened by the giant trucks with massive headlights (Scandinavians are all about being able to see). There were times when I was ahead of the clouds coming in. At one point I could see the moon about to rise over the mountains and wanted to take a picture. I had been standing out in the 10F cold waiting for it to crest the peak only to be thwarted by an incoming cloud. The coldest I knew for certain it got during the drive was just a few degrees above 0---the coldest I've ever personally experienced. It is, to put it mildly, really fucking cold.

The hours dragged on and the clouds finally won out over the skies, dashing any little hope I'd had for chancing a last glimpse of aurora before getting too far south. The cloud cover erased all signs of the beautiful world were just outside the ring of my headlights (which sucked, even without comparing them to the massive headlights mounted on the front or tops of just about everyone else's car). At that point it became just another blitzkrieg of a drive hardly worth noting...if it weren't for the fact that it just wouldn't end.

I drove until around 10pm or so before I started looking for a place to stop. Whether it was luck or just a difference in the region, I couldn't find a damn thing that was open by the time I'd gotten into Finland. What wasn't closed for the winter season didn't seem to stay open past 9pm, and many were much earlier than that. I would see signs for lodging only to find time after time they were closed. A few had signs with numbers you could call after hours, but with no cell service I never got to test just how late they were willing to accommodate. I finally came across a small city, called Oulu, that seemed to have a very active Saturday nightlife, but the only hotels I could find that were nearly full and wanted far too much for the priciest rooms.

I drove on for another half hour or so and gave in and tried to catch and hour or two of rest at a 24 hour gas station but I couldn't relax or get comfortable enough. I gave up on giving up and drove on, trying again and again only to find places closed. I reached a point where I was afraid to go on. Concentrating on driving was getting difficult and I was getting a headache from squinting. At another gas station I managed to fall asleep for a little over an hour. I don't know what woke up, but it woke me with a start and I was confused and disoriented. Long hours, short days, and sleep deprivation had gotten to me and I had a mild panic attack. It took me a few minutes to calm down and remember where I was and realize that nothing was wrong, but sleep was over.

I drove on until dawn when I came across the biggest city I've ran across in Finland so far, Jyväskylä. I found my old friend, the McDonalds, and hopped on their wifi to find some place to stay. The first two hotels that popped up were reasonably priced in the city center. I figured they would be easy to get to and headed into the city center. I found both of them with no problem as they were practically across the street from one another. What I couldn't find was a place to park. I drove round and round the confusing blocks, finding myself on roads that randomly ended in pedestrian streets. I could find the parking garage for one of the hotels but no way in and nowhere to park to get registered. The other hotel I couldn't even find the garage despite the signs pointing to it. I couldn't even see where to enter the hotel even if I knew what I was doing. I'd like to blame it on sleep deprivation, but I fear I'm just not smart enough for Finland. I ended up back at McDonald's and on their wifi until I found a decent place that wasn't in the city center and could see the parking lot in the pictures. Finally, after nearly 24 hours on the road I found a place to sleep. The long night was over.

Despite how tired I was I only slept 5 or 6 hours. I laid there debating what to do next. Roll over and sleep more, get up and finish the drive to Helsinki, or find food and just spend the whole night here in Jyväskylä. I once again consulted the weather and found that it was raining in Helsinki, and the more I thought it about it the less keen I was on hopping back into the car even if it was only 3 or 4 hours. So I've decided to stay the night where I am---after all I do have the room for the night. I'll head into Helsinki tomorrow with a couple hours before I have to be at the terminal for the overnight entry to Stockholm. Not how I wanted to end the vacation, but I thought it was better than forcing something I wasn't really feeling.