Iceland, Day 2

Something nice about visiting a small country is that you can pack a lot of it into one day.

We took our time over breakfast while I browsed a pocket guidebook for the area and caught up on tweets, and then headed out to meander more of the Reykjanes Peninsula. On a whim I told Adam to take a right rather than left, and started us on a route towards but not into Reykjavik, through which we looped back along a coast road in an area of sparse farmsteads. The roads here are interesting - clear and in good repair, but no shoulders, guardrails, or lights, except a few on the urban stretches of the main highway. The road edge markers are just plastic posts with a bit of reflector tape on them, and the roads are sort of banked up on top of the land, which is mostly lava fields. If you drove off the edge, there's nothing to stop you and you'd totally destroy the car rolling it over into a field of jagged black rock. I don't know if that just doesn't happen here because everyone drives smart, or if it's occasional but they just clean up the mess rather than add huge infrastructure and maintenance costs.

On what I'm now thinking of as the "top" loop of our somewhat wonky figure-8 shaped route today, we found lots of open fields, coast, very utilitarian-looking buildings, a bright yellow lighthouse, and a few ruins of entirely indeterminate age. Adam and I concluded they must actually be newer structures than they appear, as we found both metal wire and what looked like pieces of modern cermic dish ware in the rock and mortar walls of one. The lava rock itself looks very aged and weathered, and I'm guessing in a coastal windswept field on an earthquake-prone island country, things might erode quickly.

At the end of our first loop was the town of Vogar, mostly a small fishing village. We utterly failed to find a potential lunch stop there, so continued back towards Reykjanes town /Keflavik, but on th edge of that I spotted an industrial-looking building with the word "Kaffe..." in its name and lots of cars in the lot, and a smaller sign with the English "cafe" written on it. We ducked up the next exit off the highway and backtracked to it, to find we had landed at the head office and roasting plant for a local coffeeshop chain. Adam laughed and had to tweet that I declared my latte to be my new friend today - it was VERY good, as was my sandwich and the chocolate cake we shared from the littlel lunch counter. I assume Adam's wrap was also good but I left that for him to determine.

After lunch we headed for the west coast of the Reykjanes peninsula, about halfway down, south of the airport where we had left off our wandering the day before. It was about this point that I actually registered a few things I'd read in the guidebook and some markers on our map and realized were also heading for the outermost planet of a scale model of the solar system that is installed all along the southern half of the west coast, ending with the Sun at a large geothermal power plant which has a science exhibition. While we didn't go out of our way to find every one, in fact, since the first was somewhere in another small town that didn't look particularly touristy, we definitely skipped it, but we started with finding Neptune at a roadside stop that was also the entry point to a hike to the shore and a bird sanctuary.

It was at about this time the local weather got fun. We had a pretty stiff wind all morning, making me very grateful for my new windproof jacket AND that I'd brought my Moebius scarf, mainly as I could wrap it double as a hood and keep my hair out of my face. We had a rainstorm that turned into driving slush, though moments before it had been only a bit cloudy and breezy, and moments after we needed sunglasses again. This happened a couple more times! The good news about the weather here is first, we could see it coming, and second - it doesn't hang around long, whatever it is. I've referred to "weather tantrums" back home when we get those too-hard-to-last rainstorms but man, here they're on a 5 minute cycle. It was awesome. And even if you get wet, you don't stay that way long, as the wind comes back. Can't do much about the hypothermia, though, so lots of layers are needed.
The land here is very stark and looks like an otherworldly wilderness. But I noticed something, even shortly after leaving the airport yesterday - there are lots of subtle little signs of humanity, that are probably obvious to the locals, but for us coming from a land of video billboards and lit-up 8 lane highway signage, they're hard to spot. Cairns set up as signposts in the lava fields. The odd structure, low to the land and only intermittently visible from the road, or just some sticks or wood where there are otherwise no plants but moss. I had been looking for a picture to juxtapose these, and the planet marker proved a fun way to do it.

We continued on our way after Neptune and turned into another stop, almost hidden from the road, and walked across "The Bridge Between The Continents". Iceland is the only place the mid-Atlantic ridge is above sea level, and they've marked this remarkable tectonic location with a bridge and small walking area. The bridge crosses a sudden, deep rift in the craggy lava field, and is itself filled with fine black sand, which also makes up the dunes around the bridge.

We missed the Saturn marker somewhere, passed Jupiter on the highwayside, and then turned into the road to the power plant, finding Venus and Mercury in the driveway. Unfortunately, the exhibition "Power Plant Earth" that the trail of planets leads to was closed for the season but we stopped for a snapshot of the Sun, embedded in the lava outside the door. From here, we followed a comparatively treacherous gravel road further towards the coast, following signs labelled "Hot Springs" to find Gunnevar's springs, a natural sulpher hot spring site reputed to be haunted. I was interested to find there had been a homestead there where a farmer ran a flower farm not even a century ago, but the mud has become hotter in that time, and one has to stay on very carefully chosen paths or risk a step into scalding mud. Indeed, it was apparent the paths have had to be re-worked at least ones, as part of a previous boardwalk structure was IN the boiling mud cauldron.

After this last spectacular sight of the day, we drove the last bit of winding highway to Grindavik, the town nearest the resort we're staying at, looking to buy some local groceries for a cold dinner, and for some cough medication due to the fact that I kept BOTH of us unpleasantly awake last night with a choking cough that kept returning every time I fell asleep. Luckily almost everyone speaks English very well, or I'd have had a heck of a time trying to explain. The pharmacist sold me something that smells awful and tastes worse, the active ingredient of which is "difenhydramen" which we usually see as an antihistamine (Benadryl) but which apparently here is used for coughing. After that, we had a little fun exploring an Icelandic grocery and trying to work out what various products were. We came away with a fresh baguette, some flatbreads, fruit, lamb pepperettes and a mild orange cheese. Easy light dinner.

The day ended with another visit to the Blue Lagoon, where we took full advantage and drifted around the warm salt pool network until the closing bell rang. Even this evening, we had clear skies, clouds, and a little rain shower just in the time we were in the lagoon, and we've had a brief rainstorm while I was typing this, though we're now looking at clear skies and a crescent moon over the rock fields.

Tomorrow, we move on to a new location for our adventures, Hverargerdi at the edge of the south coast of the country.