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So at this point Brian's ankle has taken about all the abuse he can stand, and he's worried that it hasn't gotten any better in the seven days since he hurt it, so he wants to try and get a flight straight home instead of stopping over in Iceland. At the airport he talks to a woman at the counter, and this is the conversation as he described it:
Brian: "I hurt my ankle and want to change my flights to go straight home today."
Woman behind counter: "Do you have a note from your doctor?"
Brian: "No, but I have an ankle the size of a football."
Woman behind counter: "Let me see it"
Brian: rolls up pant leg, down sock.
Woman behind counter: (grabbing phone) "Oh my gosh!" (talking rapidly into phone) "You need a brace on that! We'll get you right home!"
So, for the price of going with the woman to the medical office at the Frankfurt airport to have an ace bandage type thing put on his ankle (there was some claim about more swelling because of the reduced pressure in the airplane during flight) Brian got his direct flight home.
Paige and David waited to make sure Brian got onto his flight (which left almost immediately after we arrived in Keflavik) then headed down to claim their luggage, which was pretty much waiting for them on the conveyor belt. We could see Biggi waiting for us on the other side of a glass partition and waved, grabbed our luggage and headed out into a blustery afternoon in Iceland. Our first taste of how Iceland is: Biggi was parked within 30 feet of the door we walked out through!
Biggi took us to his house in downtown Reykjavik, then we had to make a decision: to sight see this evening or go straight to his parent's cabin (where we're spending the night) and crash? For once we made the right decision: sight see! After a stop for the raw ingredients for dinner we head out into Iceland.
OK, these first two pictures are taken on our way out of Reykjavik: they're both of rainbows and basically that's it...
Rainbow!
I stopped taking pictures out the window of the car tomorrow because these didn't turn out too well...
I think that's a lake out there... the lighting was really spectacular with the sun coming through the clouds, but I need a zoom lens to zoom in on it a bit better.
At many of the major cross road intersections there are these signs that you can stop and check out to see where you are and what roads are open to where you're going. Now I should mention that many of the roads we were on for much of the trip were dirt roads, and Biggi had no problem driving at insane speeds (I think we were going at least 120 KPH occasionally.) It was quite the experience (of pure terror ;-)
More Iceland scenery.
And a dirt road.
Another attempt to get road signs into the picture so I'd know where it was taken. The scenery is really spectacular with the sun slanting down over the clouds.
OK- this picture is of the purple flowers that are covering the hills behind this farmhouse, which you can't see very well. We saw these purple flowers *everywhere*, they were really pretty, then Biggi told us that they're a weed... I wish we had weeds like that in New Mexico! According to Biggi they also help to improve the soil... they grow well in the volcanic soil, and when they die they help create good topsoil.
Only in Iceland... first, there's the "Bridge to Nowhere" on the right. But we want to go across the one-lane bridge on the left. Unfortunately this big truck is hauling a piece of paving equipment across the bridge, and it just BARELY fits. In fact, there are wooden curbs on the bridge (about the size of railroad ties) that two helpers are removing because the truck is too wide to fit inside them. So the the truck moves forward four feet at a time as the helpers remove the curbs, then walk around to make sure he really can move forward! I think they took about 20 minutes from the time we arrived, who knows how long they'd been at it before we arrived?
This picture is looking downstream from the bridge... the colors barely come out: they seemed much more vibrant than they show up here.
Eventually the truck got across the bridge and the group of us who were waiting moved on. Our first stop was here at Deildartunguhver hot springs. This is really cool! There's boiling hot water just bubbling out of the ground! OK, so I'm a tourist, but I'd never seen a hot spring before, and it was amazing.
This is the sign at the hot springs, you can see steam rising up in the background where the previous picture was taken. The English sign reads:
Deildartunguhver
Iceland's / Europe's largest hot spring
Flow 180 L/sec 97°C
Since 1981 utilized by Akranes and Borgarfjordur district heating company
The main pipeline to Borgarnas is 34 KM and to Akranes 64 KM
So you're asking yourself what this is a picture of... it's that strange oval cloud in the sky... it looked like camouflage for a space-ship. Somewhere in here we stopped at Snorralaug and saw Iceland's first hot tub: a circular stone enclosed area fed by a hot spring. This was at the site of Snorri Sturluson's home, who documented many of the early Icelandic Sagas. There was some construction on the home.
More beautiful Iceland scenery. The name of this waterfall roughly translates to "Lava Falls". Can you tell what's happening? There's a top layer of lava in this area that is porous (it looks really "crumbly") on top of a more solid layer of rock. So what's happening is that water in the area is flowing down through the top layer of lava and running on top of the solid layer of rock, until it empties into this other stream here! The water is literally running out of the middle of the hill opposite us!
A hundred yards upstream from the above falls is this powerful cauldron fall, whose name translates to "Child Falls" for some children who fell in and were lost many years ago. I should scan some of our APS pictures: Paige is standing above a seething cauldron where the water is forced through a narrow hole in the rock. The sound and pounding of the water is impressive. Notice the lack of handrails in this area... we're sure that in the US they would have prevented us from approaching as close as we wanted.
It was a good thing we did some sight-seeing this evening, because we didn't see the sun much for the next two days. We headed over to Biggi's parent's cabin, which is an incredibly nice small cabin on a salmon fishing river. It was a real privilege to stay in such a beautiful location for two nights! We cooked up the dinner we'd bought earlier in the evening, and stayed up until 12:30, daylight (but not direct sunlight) the whole time. We had no problem getting to sleep despite the light, it never seemed to bother us.
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