We spent about a week in Iceland, which felt like just the proper amount of time. We saw all the major attractions we wanted to see without it feeling like a trek to Mount Doom, and were otherwise enveloped by nature’s beauty everywhere we went. As I mentioned in my last entry, I’m posting the photos in alphabetical order by location partly to highlight the interesting place names. So now we’re to the “f’s,” with Flúðir⁩ leading the way.

⁨Flúðir⁩

If ⁨Flúðir⁩ doesn’t sound like a place from the Lord of the Rings, I don’t know what does. Tolkien certainly could have used it, because this is the only photo we took in ⁨Flúðir⁩, so I think only a couple of arctic foxes would’ve noticed. In any case, the photo is a good representation of our drive: long straightaways with vast plains and rarely a mountain or four not in sight. Except we never found Mount Doom. But some of those lava fields sure look similar to what Frodo and Sam had to navigate as they approached Mordor’s volcano.

On the last day we also honored Gandalf’s admonition to “fly you fools!”

⁨Grímsnes-og Grafningshreppur⁩

⁨Grímsnes-og Grafningshreppur⁩ sure sounds like a place the orcs must’ve lived, eh? The main settlement in the area is Sólheimar, which has a whopping 80 human inhabitants and I don’t think there are any orcs or goblins left. The main attraction of this region is the Kerið Volcanic Crater. I looked up how to pronounce the “ð” in Icelandic, and got this: Place the tip of your tongue between your upper and lower teeth. Push air out of your mouth between your tongue and your teeth. You should feel some friction.

Screw that, that’s way too much work. I’m just gonna call it Cheerio.

Kerið (aka Cheerio) is thought to be a cone volcano which erupted, emptying its magma reserve. Once the magma was depleted, the weight of the cone collapsed into the empty magma chamber. The current pool of water at the bottom of the crater is at the same level as the water table and is not caused by rainfall. However, it does look like a cereal bowl for a giant capable of holding an enormous helping of Cheerios.

Kerið’s caldera is estimated to have formed approximately 6,500 years ago. Just to give you an idea as to how long ago that was, the world’s first cities appeared in southern Mesopotamia around that time (or if you’re a Bible literalist, about the time Eve was showing off her pet snake to Adam). I think it’s safe to say there was no photography of the explosion, especially since the Mesopotamians hadn’t invented camera film yet.

You may be asking yourself, what in Sam Hill is Carolyn really doing? She was actually fighting the wind (nature’s kind, not the, uh, other one) because it was windy as hell up there. With her arms extended, she looks like she was about ready to take off like the Flying Nun. Although if she’d have been blown off the cliff she would’ve been the Falling None.

⁨Haukadalur Geothermal Field⁩

One item on our bucket list was to see a geyser. We didn’t know it was on our bucket list until we were looking at sights to see in Iceland and found them there. Our bucket list tends to grow when we’re traveling, but it mostly ends up filled with things crossed off. We’re gonna need a bigger bucket.

They have a nice operation nearby with an upscale restaurant and a large gift shop/cafe within a few hundred meters of the field of rising steam and boiling water. At first we thought we had it made by finding a place with guaranteed restrooms because the entire building looked like it was for old geezers. We just thought “Geysir” was how they spelled geezer. But, despite the hordes of people younger than us there, there were plenty of restrooms available, and they honored the geezer name by featuring a robust selection of Preparation H and black socks.

By the way, here is a little trivia to lend credence to our geezer confusion. In British English, geyser has two meanings: a “geyser” can be either a hot spring or a water heater. And for both meanings of the word, most British speakers rhyme it with “geezer.” So there. Tally ho!

The area looked like the fallout from a nuclear bomb, except without all the dead people and stuff.

Just in case you’re not familiar with celsius, 100 degrees is when water starts to boil. I decided not to challenge any signs and test any temperatures, because I like my fingers rare.

They have a cute “litli geysir” before you get to the main event, presumably for the kids to play in.

The word “geyser” actually came from the Icelandic geyser known as Geysir, but ol’ Geysir stopped spouting, so another one called Strokkur has become the main event. Strokkur” translates to “churn;” so get your mind out of the gutter. With all that said, here below was what you’ve all been waiting for all along! (No, not the end of the blog, the geyser eruption!)

We actually captured the whole eruption on video, but the budget for BaldSasquatch –despite the non-existent advertising bucks the site will never generate– doesn’t allow for videos. So go see your own damn geyser if we’re not enough for you, ha ha! Anyway, the geyser erupts every 4-10 minutes (it ain’t Old Faithful), so we watched a couple of eruptions. Our video had one that went a bit higher, so apparently they can vary in intensity.

Of course we always have to root through the souvenirs and chachkies but we rarely buy anything except funny hats. And by “buy” we mean try them on to try to catch some local fleas and then put them back on the rack to share some of our own Portuguese fleas.

⁨Hvolsvöllur⁩a

Hvolsvöllur⁩a features waterfalls, incredible vistas, glaciers, strange rock formations, a Piggly Wiggly, and a restaurant with a choir. There’s lots to see here, so strap in!

First we have to show our favorite grocery store in Iceland, which I nicknamed Piggly Wiggly. You might think the name of the place is 10-20, but those are in fact its operating hours (20 is 10:00 PM for you American luddites). The name of the store is actually “Bónus,” and they have 31 stores in the country. I gotta say it’s nice not to have to jump out of the car and search for a little sticker on the door with the operating hours on it during, let’s say, a thunderstorm while surrounded by muggers, a rabid poodle and a very angry duck. Accordingly I think every business should display their hours like Bónus. If Carolyn and I ever set up a store in our retirement, we’d probably paint a big 16-16:20 on it.

After stocking up on junk food (we couldn’t find any appropriate foods earmarked for cooking in a geyser, surprisingly), we set out on the road, snapping photos of the sweeping vistas from our stupid Ford Puma. Seriously, that car almost killed us. As just one example, the cruise control was so poorly designed that if you wanted to slow down a bit by pressing the button, and held it down for longer than maybe half a second, the requested speed would suddenly drop in 10 km increments, meaning that within seconds you could go from 70 to 30 (and I guess zero, but I never tested that), but at a reduction in speed so abrupt that it felt like the brakes were being stomped on. Since they weren’t, meaning the brake lights didn’t signal anything, if anyone would’ve been behind us during any of the first thirty times I wrestled with that shitshow, they surely would’ve plowed right through the Puma’s butt cheeks and wrecked ‘um.

Skógafoss is one of the biggest waterfalls in Iceland, with a drop of about 60 meters (131.234 cubits) and a width of 25 meters (54.6807 cubits). With the right conditions, you can see a rainbow. That’s just a word of warning for any American conservatives who think the falls might support gay rights and so would prefer to avoid them.

When I first looked at this photo, I thought Carolyn might secretly be a leprechaun, what with a rainbow shooting out of her ear and all. But in actuality, she’s the pot ‘o gold at the end of my rainbow!

You can walk up 527 steps in order to see the top of the waterfall. But it seemed to me that the bottom is where all the action is, and I’m pretty sure our knees only had about 100 stairs in them. Besides, while I’ve seen the top of plenty of water, I was more anxious to see the backside of water simply because of the marketing campaign offered up by the following waterfall:

Seljalandsfoss is one of Iceland’s most famous waterfalls, best known for the ability to walk behind it (and get soaked in the process). For the life of me, I can’t understand why that’s such a big deal. Just to make sure, before we went there I craned my neck into a sink while running water from the faucet, but the water looked exactly the same as the front.

We were excited to get up close and personal with a glacier, but apparently a glacier’s icy stare is enough to melt the adventure right out of aging tourists, as well as screw with the spelling of “recommend.”

So we stayed a respectful distance away despite how appealing that glacier water must have tasted, especially with all the chocolate bits.

As you can see by the picture on the left, a huge walrus had camped out in the lake in front of the glacier. No, no, the picture on the left, not me on the right!

Next up is Reynisfjara Beach, made famous for its black sand as well as basalt columns. The columns were formed after lava erupted from a volcano and then flowed onto the beach during high tide, and the sea rapidly cooled them. Some say the formations look like a pipe organ.

Although it looks like a giant pipe organ, as hard as I might I couldn’t create any sound by blowing on the rocks. Even worse, I couldn’t find the keyboard, so we had to make due with overhearing about six different languages speculating as to why some nut was kissing the rocks while I wiped the sand off my lips.

“Black sand beach” sounds rather exotic until you look at it and realize it’s just sand that’s a little darker than most. Although the naturally occuring footprint-looking indentations are a sight to behold.

Those rocks formed the basis of a legend concerning two trolls who attempted to drag a ship to shore. Unfortunately for the trolls, even though they were disguised as humans, they were caught by the sun’s rays and turned to stone, becoming the sea stacks known as the Reynisdrangar. Personally, I would’ve named them Laurel and Hardy.

Or maybe it should be the Three Stooges.

I’m sure the rock formations in the background are called something but I couldn’t read the sign from that distance. I’d also bet there’s some trollish legend attached to them, but pretty much all I can see here is my beautiful wife, who is clearly no troll. I’m a lucky man!

Otherwise, here are a series of pictures of the surrounding area. Again, photos don’t do it justice, but suffice to say if you look under “rugged beauty” in the dictionary, there is just one word: Iceland.

And then if you look up “Iceland,” this is all they show.

We had lunch in the quaint little town of Vik (pronounced “Veek;” also, “Vik” means bay, and “Reykur” means smoky, so Reykjavík –pronounced “Raykaveek”– means smokey bay, probably on account of all the indigenous hippies smoking lava bongs) and found ourselves surrounded by this church choir belting out their version of Hells Bells by AC/DC. Do you see that table just in front of the woman in yellow? Yeah, that’s where we were sitting when they started assembling. After one of them balanced their music sheet on my head, we realized we might be in the way and so wolfed down the rest of our lunch and stepped away to avoid eardrum damage. It was actually kind of sweet, unless you wanted to eat lunch without a choir three inches from your ear. But hey, Vik only has a little over 300 residents, so I’m sure they take whatever entertainment they can get, other than when they’re not dodging lava flows and the huge floods the eruptions often cause.

One thing I noticed about the Icelandic language is that apparently they need three words to spell “stop.” It’s no wonder they have tight speed limits, by the time you’re done reading the sign you’ve run into whatever you were supposed to stop for.

And so, once the road repair people let us through, we headed on down the highway to our next Icelandic adventure, which we hoped would result in our finding a pot o’ gold.

Spoiler alert: we didn’t.

(Scroll down to see previous entries.)