Travelogue Thread

Thank you Iceland for being so pretty.

Where the &%$ did the water go? ... into a hole?

So here is my last day in summary:

I made an error. My idea was to take advantage of the 24 hours of daylight on the last day and just take in as much as I could for as long as I could, and sleep on the plane on the way home. I stayed at a farmhouse near Akureyri for a good night's sleep and the next day flew from Akureyri to Grimsey to see the Puffins and cross over the line marking the Arctic Circle. Then my plan was to drive to the Westfjords and see the waterfall (above) and then drive to the westerly most point in Europe. The first obstacle was the roads. To get to the Westfjords you have to take roads that are dirt and gravel with 15% grades and switchbacks. The roads are so bad that I saw several cars on the side of the road with tire punctures. I was not in a car made for this type of road but I have a motto that if you build a car I will try to take it somewhere it doesn't belong. So I went in.

Once I got to the waterfall I spent a long time there for the obvious reason of its awesomeness. But there were so few people and there was no service or town for over 180 miles and I started getting nervous about the drive back out. If I were to get a flat tire I would almost certainly miss my flight because it would take so long to get a new tire. I didn't have a spare. Plus, my error... I thought it would be daylight for 24 hours. This is the case in June but not so much in August. Around 1 a.m. it got dark. Plus it was cloudy and raining. There are no guardrails, lights, or anything to guide you on these roads in the Westfjords. There are no service stations or towns or, as it turned out, travelers on the roads. I was about the only one. In about 180 miles I passed two cars and one trucker.

I decided I didn't have time to go the westerly most point in Europe and instead headed back to the ring road about 180 miles away. It was white knuckle most of the way with growing anxiety. When I got back to Hwy 1 I was so relieved but it was shortlived because I was now low on fuel. The few towns that I came to were locked down for the night. I started calculating how far I could go before running out of gas. According to the car computer I had enough to get within four kilometers of Reykjavik. I just don't trust car computers.

In any event, I finally found a gas station near Reykjavik that was open and fueled up. I made it to the airport and got some breakfast. I was then stopped twice by airport security, once at check-in where they swabbed the inside of my bags, and then at boarding where I was called out of line and asked questions about why I was in Iceland. I told them I came to drive the ring road. I was asked to name some of the waterfalls. I said I couldn't pronounce any of them.

Then my flights were all nightmares. We circled upstate New York for 45 minutes because Newark was backed up. Then my flight to Memphis was canceled. I was rerouted through Atlanta. That flight was delayed and then sent on a 45 minute longer route down the coast to avoid weather. When we landed in Atlanta we sat in the plane on the tarmac for over an hour waiting for a rain storm to pass and a gate to come open. Then the flight from ATL to Memphis was delayed. We were boarded and then had to wait an hour for the flight crew to arrive becuase they were delayed getting in to ATL. Then we had to wait for a dozen planes to take off and a half dozen to land before we could take off for Memphis. And then when we landed in Memphins about 1 a.m. we had to sit for a half hour on the tarmac because there wasn't a ground's crew to guide us into the gate. Worst travel day I've had since the Russian train in 1993.

I was a solo traveler. When I use "we" it is in the collective sense of all those sharing that particular leg, in this case it is the people on those flights, all weary travelers trying to get somewhere else with varying success.

"I was called out of line and asked questions about why I was in Iceland. I told them I came to drive and to suck dick."

-no need to church it up