Stephanie's Birthday

Our first day on the ring route was also Stephanie's birthday!  Our car was set to come at noon, so we decided to walk back up to Hallgrimskirkja to ride the elevator to the tower.  It certainly provided a wonderful view of the city.

Like every church that I have ever been in, it had drawings by children.  The town of Reykjavik is like this: even in the tourist destinations, there is evidence of real Icelandic life.

I was stoked to hear that the organ was playing some music as we approached, but there was no player, so it must have been a some kind of player-piano situation.  Or else the church is haunted, in which case I treated this event far too casually.  Plus, I just think that a poltergeist would play something a bit closer to being music.

The camping gear and the car arrived on time and we bid farewell to the nation's capital.  Ready to hit the Hringbraut or "ring route."

We had lovely weather throughout our stay in Rekjavik, but almost as soon as we started driving to our first destination (camping in Husafell) the weather turned sour.  This day was supposed to be a drive through some of the most magical and scenic landscape in Iceland.  We mostly saw this:

When we stopped for a picnic lunch, it was only mostly torrential, so we got out of the car and got to see a herd of delightful horses.  You can sort of see them here:

While picking up some groceries at the Borgarnes branch of the state-run grocery store named "Bonus," my life was changed (a bit) by an Icelandic teenager with luxuriant blond hair, when she accurately pronounced "Snaefellness" (something like: SNIE- fettles-ness), and it became clear to me that camping in this weather is insane, and perhaps all of our ten days on the Hringbraut will be ruined by this ghastly weather.  Perhaps (I thought) we will have to shell out thousands of dollars to stay in hotels every night.  Perhaps we will even return to the US as disgraceful paupers.

At any rate, I could not ask my wife to sleep outside in the otherworldly winds and torrential icy rain...at least not on her birthday.   So instead of heading northeast to the campground at Husafell, we went west out of Borgarnes to drive around the Snaefellness peninsula in search of an affordable guesthouse with a vacancy. 

The peninsula is supposedly magic, and HG Wells set the decent into the center of the earth here at the glacier: Snaefellsjokull.  Icelandic hippies value the spiritual properties of all the balance and whatever.   It is also some of the most beautiful country in Iceland, full of stunning basalt cliffs, hot-spots, dramatic cliffs, waterfalls, and suchlike.  It is easy the most beautiful place I have ever driven through without seeing.  It mostly looked like this to us:

We finally found a room on the far side of the peninsula that was called (in Icelandic of course) "The Old Post Office."  And it was in fact an old post office.

(This is the next morning when the weather was a stitch nicer)

The rooms were comfortable and the owner with the unpronounceable name was very kind to us.  And we slept well.

All in all, Stephanie's birthday was our worst day in Iceland.