Purple Rain, or Why a Prince Movie with a Scary Puppet is More Appealing than this Weather

Hi from Hofn! We've got lots to cover, so let's dive right in.

It is euphoric to ride a bicycle and actually get somewhere in a time that reflects that you had two wheels to power you along. The ride to Vik was like that. It's been our only ride like that... More about Vik in a second, but first, I have a revelation.

Between you and me, I have been feeling pretty self conscious about how difficult the majority of this trip has been. Chris has regaled me with countless stories of all his adventures before there was us, and his tales about riding 125 miles a day in Wyoming during his coast-to-coast trip have been cackling at me from the back of my head. Believe it or not, partnering yourself with a superhuman explorer can occasionally make you feel like you're about as adventurous and hearty as that curly-headed blonde girl from the Sex and New York Martini Bars show.

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Now add this element - I saw a family pull up in Skaftafell on bicycles. The dad was hauling a toddler in a trailer and the mom had a child pedaling behind her on an attached recumbent. Shortly thereafter, a man with only one arm joined the "I'm Better at Cycling than Lauren" club that was apparently holding a meeting right outside my tent.

Basically, I have been worrying that I am about as tough and outdoorsy as these sheep butts. That little biker family of mockery-makers did not help the situation. What if I'm hindering the progress, like that member of the Arctic expedition team that gets frostbite first and keeps falling off the line into crevasses? What if I'm Crevasse Guy?

Five miles from Vik, we took a little horse photography break. Chris happened to mention that this was the worst cycling trip he'd ever had for weather, and that he was quite impressed that I always kept pace, even in 40 mph headwinds...because, among other things, Chris is also telekinetic...and I can't even tell when he's stopping the bike.

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That was before we saw the show offs in Skaftafell, though, so now I'm worried he's had time to change his mind about me and my prowess since Vik...which I still haven't started telling you about...so I'll set the tone with me moodily drawing lines in the black sand beach there.

Fun Fact about Vik:

Deep under the Mydalsjokull glacier, the highly active volcano Katla is brewing molten lava soup. History shows that Miss Katla serves up her scalding supper about twice per century, and as her last dinner party was in 1918, her next round of festivities is decades overdue.

Vik is Katla's guest of honor. As Katla will start the party whenever she pleases, residents in and around Vik have regular evacuation drills, and farmers are trained to release their livestock to higher ground and leave Volcano Notices on their doors.

The Cold War never ended here.

Some side effects of a volcanic eruption include:

A giant explosion, poisonous ash, noxious clouds, lightning, flash floods from melting glacial ice, and, usually, giant tidal waves from the direction of Vestmannaeyger.

All of which begs the question - Why the hell would you bother living in Vik at all?

Yes, the canyon we cycled through to get there was the most beautiful, serene stretch of the trip so far, and black sand beaches are the softest and loveliest in the world.

But that soft, serene loveliness is a front for the most horrifying geologic possibilities I have ever considered.

Not worth the trouble.

And all the poor livestock! They never asked to live on a volcano...

Vik was sleepy, so Chris was ready very quickly to leave the black sand behind. I, meanwhile, was ready to sleep again without waking up all night thinking I was about to be eviscerated by tarry magma (it was always just the noisy cliff dwelling fulmars conspiring to scare me with their endless cawing).

Off again, cycling with a mild tailwind to Kirkjubaejarklaustur (actual spelling), ambitiously thinking we'd make it in one go. Instead, the wind changed directions, as it is wont to do in stupid Iceland, and we ended up cycling well into the night against a wall until we stopped off to sleep...nowhere...and decided to have another go at the last ten miles in the morning.

Semper fi and whatnot, dominate the pain, conquer mind and body stuff.

We escaped this creepy cairn village (you put a rock on a stack for luck if it's your first time passing; some farmer's farm was dissolved by volcano juice here at one point) and made it to the idyllic Kirkjubaejarklaustur under bluish skies and some interaction with the briefly unencumbered sun.

Nothing more than a hamlet, Klaustur appeared popular with Icelanders. It's pastoral and pretty, and a delicate waterfall slides elegantly down a gray cliff into a 'forest' that was hand planted by residents in the '70s.

It has a fascinating, churchy history, with Irish monks settling the place before the Viking arrival, followed by a convent for hardy nuns. Kirkjubaejarklaustur translates as follows;

Kirku - Church
Baejar - Farm
Klaustur - Convent


Which is accurate. There is a church, there are some farms, and there used to be a convent. Back in the day, ChurchFarmConvent was pretty fanatical in terms of religion. Apparently, two nuns were executed and buried somewhere around there for having slept with the devil.

I'm curious about the logistics of that. Does he call from hell at 3 am after a night out with his bro demons?

Later, in the 1700s, some garbled volcano name erupted and lava was headed straight for poor little ChurchFarmConvent. The pastor, sensing a divine opportunity, gathered the people in his church, where he proceeded to energetically explain that hell hath its ways and that the impending smoky disaster was actually God's way of punishing ChurchFarmConvent for its many sins.

With poignant timing, the lava flow stopped just short of town, and the citizens credited the quick tongue of the pastor with appeasing God just in the nick of geologic time.

And that's all there is to ChurchFarmConvent, which brings me to Skaftafell, our first foray into the Icelandic National Park System ('system' is a generous word; I think there are two parks all together).

Here I am unshowered and being blown sideways by an icy wind that sweeps continuously off of the glacier just behind me. Though I can't spell or pronounce it, I can say that it's the largest glacier in Europe and it is responsible for all manner of destruction, both large scale and small. The water is a small glacial lake with an eerie tide that seems to move in multiple directions. A lone park sign warned about quicksand and getting trapped inside fiery red squares that would then tumble you straight into the 35 degree, quick moving water, where you would promptly die.

Chris tells me the red squares are just pictures reminding you to watch your step, but I have learned to take nothing for granted in this frigid wasteland. (I can say 'wasteland' because the guidebook, written to promote Arctic travel, also uses the word 'wasteland'. Many times.)

No grains of salt to take here.

Like any National Park, Skaftafell was crawling with Eddie Bauer models who clearly used their primo Everest climbing gear once in a decade. We awoke at 6 am to the sounds of our sexy catalog neighbors furiously shaking out their tent pieces. I opened my bloodshot eyes, expecting to be surrounded by my own drenched gear...but it hadn't even rained. Meanwhile, our lovely, fresh counterparts beat those suckers like they were Amish quilts. I don't even know what they were shaking off. The crumbs from the ten course meal that they laughingly enjoyed across two public picnic tables (one of which they had clearly taken from a separate area) at 11 pm while Chris and I sat in the wet grass eating Icelandic ramen?  

Supper of Champions. Notice the fruit. We are nothing if not devoted to maintaining the Food Pyramid, which clearly states that hot dogs should be seared in the bottom of a pot and eaten halved without a bread product.

After living, eating, and working exclusively outside for a month, we've developed our prejudices. Stealing public use areas and violating the sanctity of dawn by obsessing over unnecessary gear rituals hurts my feelings now.

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Resting up at Skaftafell, consuming a variety of cake and tea selections at the pleasantly humid cafe, and taking slippery hikes in the endless rain led us to believe that we would be prepared for the cycle to Jokulsarlon, or Glacier Lagoon.

Instead, we enjoyed the most powerful headwind to date, if that's even possible to fathom. We are pretty buff, I might add, and it gets us nowhere but rocky sheep fields. Forget your workouts, kids. Eat 'Cool American' Doritos and hang out inside a stinky tent. Then you can be just like us. Alone in a rocky sheep field.

Furthermore, I would like to add that, aside from the wind, this ride was also marred by my being attacked and clawed in the face by an Arctic tern. As I have forbidden Christopher from taking photographs of them, or generally admiring them in any way, you can view the little 'effers here.

I can confirm with quantifiable, photograph-able evidence that Wikipedia's description of the Arctic tern is correct:

It is one of the most aggressive terns, fiercely defensive of its nest and young. It will attack humans and large predators, usually striking the top or back of the head. Although it is too small to cause serious injury to an animal of a human's size, it is still capable of drawing blood, and is capable of repelling many raptorial birds and smaller mammalian predators such as foxes and cats.

And me. It is capable of repelling me.

See my Arctic tern head wound? Chris says it's "not that bad."

And he's never been dive bombed on a bike by a Kamikaze sea bird.

I now have to tie up my reflective vest under my chest a la Daisy Duke and wear my sexy cyclist outfit in order to draw attention away from the red, circular, Krishna-esque beak wound in the middle of my forehead.

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Not really. My vest just flaps too much in the wind, which is extremely annoying...and the rest is just the result of being too cold and not having access to laundry facilities.

So, one way or another, upon which I will not elaborate, we got our sorry selves to Jokulsarlon, a blue freshwater lagoon filled with floating chunks of broken glacier. There are no facilities here beyond a cafe open to the endless stream of day trippers. We were thus free to pitch a tent wherever the glacial wind would hit us the least, which was behind a hill just in front of the lake itself.

We pulled our bikes up the gravel road past the parking lot, and there was a terrible stretch where a Mongolian horde of Arctic terns swooped threateningly around while I tried to get past their nesting sight without throwing up in fear. Somehow we survived, making it possible for Chris to spend the ENTIRE rest of the night photographing the lagoon.

The stretch of the Ring Road leading up to Jokulsarlon is the windiest, most desolate and dangerous portion of Iceland. I learned that during the winter, the wind is so extreme, due to the glacier, that it rips up chunks of asphalt and blows them off the road towards the sea (which explains why the shoulder is so bad, or nonexistent). I experienced a taste of that somewhere around midnight, and with Chris off photographing ALL NIGHT, it was up to me to reinforce the tent with various volcanic rocks and return to my makeshift office.

I mock Christopher's zeal, but I have to admit that he had been waiting for this part of the trip for six months, and it took quite an effort to time our arrival with the one day of the summer that actually produced sunlight, albeit between the hours of 12 am and 5 am. He earned the right to go a bit crazy, but I did not approve of riding glaciers in the name of art...

Secretly...it was my favorite place, too.

I wouldn't want Christopher to know that, as it would result in more primitive camping, probably right on top of a glacier, and I don't know that my body could take that kind of beating right now (but Jokulsarlon is the totally the coolest place on the planet).

I was surprised to find that the lake, seemingly stationary in photos, has a tide that nibbles unexpectedly at your toes. Fjord is maybe a better word than lagoon, as the fresh water flows out into the churning sea, right across the road. Seals are known to sneak up from sea to fresh water and hunt, but we weren't lucky this round. However, for the second time (Vik being the first), I have seen a mother duck and her ducklings swimming in a river that mingles with an entire ocean just a few feet beyond. Such unexpected sights that Iceland produces.

After no sleep and much wind, we packed up once more, soldiered on, and found ourselves in Hofn. As far as pronunciation goes, Lonely Planet tells me to inhale on the 'h', like a hiccup. In practicing, Chris and I have successfully choked, spluttered, and inhaled bugs. We are sticking with 'ho-fun'. And, really, when isn't a ho fun?

We have been "resting" in Hofn. In Christopher's language, "resting" means "going running together" and "making your petrified girlfriend go running by an Arctic tern nesting ground so you can video the birds swooping down at you." Since I'm so rested now, we will be moving on to Egilsstadir and riding 25 miles into the boonies. Chris originally told me that we were looking for an ancient Loch Ness type critter in the lake there, but I did some research and suspect we are actually riding out in the middle of nowhere to see something called Hengifoss.

In case you don't remember, 'foss' is 'waterfall.' We're going to see another waterfall.

This is what marrying a photographer is.

But I can't be tricked. I'm finding me that Nordic Loch Ness...

See my Arctic tern head wound??

Effing birds.