Beer And Waffles: Deadbeat blogging

I haven't blogged in forever.

In my defense things got very busy there for a while -- we went to Wales, I'm in a panic about my thesis, we had our house taken over by a throng of 3,5, 13, 32 and 35 year olds... blah blah blah. I am now repentant and ready to rise from the ashes and blog anew.

So. Iceland.

Common Icelandic traffic problem

At the fishing museum ... What is it about me that can't resist the stupid photo op? It gives me an insane amount of pleasure to put my head in a mouth of shark's teeth, throw on a pair of viking horns, pretend to be a lion, cross my eyes, flex non-existent biceps...
I suspect it's because I'm the fourth of five children and have spent my life in a quest to get as much attention as humanly possible at all times.
Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!

What the vikings ride when they are not pillaging villages or worshipping Thor.

This is a dish of rancid shark meat. Icelanders used to catch the sharks in tiny little boats on rough Arctic seas, then, because the meat was so inedible, they would bury it for months, allowing it to ferment and rot. Then they would dig it out and chow down. We tried some. The guidebooks describe it as a cross between horseradish and roadkill, and that's about right.
Those Vikings are tough mo fos.

They no longer bury the meat but hang it in sheds -- take that Jaws.

This is some sort of important, point I think... I'm going to make something up and say it's the most easterly point in Iceland... I don't remember anymore. The perils of waiting a month and a half to blog after visiting somewhere, I guess.

Whale Skull

This is the sign for a common ye olde Icelandic pastime -- lifting heavy stuff.
In this case it was rocks:

My big strong man.

Cait's big strong man.

Notice how the rest of us are wearing tuques and multiple layers? Harry is in shorts and has taken his shoes OFF. Far be it from me to judge someone, but Harry is super cukoo.

Trying to hide from the wind. We look like marmots. Is that an animal?

So, the coolest part of our trip was our stay on the Snaefellsness Peninsula. At the tip of this peninsula is an extinct volcano, and just to liven things up, there is a glacier in the volcano. Madness. The landscape is all harsh North Atlantic sea views and vast rubbly lava fields. Is very amazing and kind of otherworldly.

The woman at the hotel told us that we could find the glacier by driving up a track. It was rainy, and she told us we could walk on the glacier, but we shouldn't stray from the caterpillar tracks on the glacier itself, or we might fall into a crevasse. She was very casual about it.

Well, the further we drove up, the more insanely windy and wet and foggy it became. We thought we had come to the end of the road, but that was mostly because we couldn't see the it anymore. We got out and took a couple of photos:

We are standing like that because we are actually braced against the wind, which was that strong. Even Harry is wearing pants, so you know it's cold. I kept reminding myself that we were there in July, which is the warmest month of the year. Andrew talked of returning to Iceland in a few years and camping, but given what the weather is like, there is no way I'm trusting myself to a sleeping bag and some scaps of canvas.

Anyway, we never did actually see the glacier, because we couldn't drive the car anymore, and we couldn't see more than a few feet in front of us. We figured it wasn't a good idea to go wandering around the volcano top in zero visibility.

I have to say, I mocked Andrew for bringing rain pants, but when my legs were ice cold to the touch and bright pink, I was no longer so mean. Even if they were kind of MC Hammer pants. This might be my all time favourite photo -- Andy's hat is blown right up and our glasses are completely filled with fog and rain. Not really intrepid explorers
-- more like bumbling nerd moles.

This was the hike we did the next day.
The weather was about a hundred times better than the day before