Someone Else’s Awesome

And so we were off!  Off to claim an exciting adventure that actually belonged to my friend Mike, but one that I secretly coveted and wanted to re-live, as if such a thing were possible.  I’d sent the viking a request for a couch the day before, but he cordially got back to me saying his couch was full, though he’d love to show us around the town and sorcery museum if we stopped by, and he gave several links for other places to stay.

Holmavik is located in the Westfjords peninsula in the northwest of Iceland.  To get there from Reykjavik, you drive north on Highway 1 several hours and then turn off onto a smaller road.  Under normal conditions, it wouldn’t be a difficult road to travel but if, say, you’re just relearning how to drive manual in a 2 wheel drive Yaris in the impenetrable fog on loose gravel interspersed with stretches of sheets of ice, well….you have yourself a party.  After the terror had largely subsided and the fog cleared, we found ourselves approaching the town of Holmavik.  Did I mention that no one lives in Iceland?  No one lives there.  Reykjavik is unmistakably a city, but once you’re out, villages are few and far between, and often composed of only a couple of houses, every so often a church.  So Holmavik was populated by comparison to the surrounding countryside, but by no means should that lead you to believe that more than 375 people live there.  A quick drive through revealed a gas station, a cafe, and one Museum of Witchcraft and Sorcery.  First on the agenda was food.  We tried the cafe, but they told us they were closed (although they were obviously cooking pizzas!), and that the only place in town to eat was the gas station.  Fancy.  Holmavik was starting to look depressing.  Like we’d driven a really, really long way and there was nothing here.  We tried the museum, but it was closed and there were no cars parked outside to indicate someone’s presence inside.

We weighed our options.  At this point completely plan-less, mind you  Goal-less no but plan-less, pretty much.  The plan had loosely been to go have an equal or greater awesome experience in Holmavik, but that had fallen quite through.  And more than anything, that was a lesson for me, because here I’d drug Vin and wasted both his and my time and beaucoup gas money making our way to a town where there was absolutely nothin doin.  Lesson:  You really can’t live anyone else’s life but your own.  And of all the things to covet, experience is probably the most disappointing (with material possessions being plausible yet unfulfilling and talent somewhere around the futile but possibly motivating mark).  This coming from someone who considers herself something of an experience connoisseur, constantly engaged in the development and often outright invention of my own little adventures– I should have known better.

So we left!   There was nowhere to sleep in Holmavik, the viking was nowhere to be found, it was around 3 in the afternoon; all that was left was to turn around and head back to good ole Highway 1 towards the next biggest dot on the map, Blonduos.  Without knowing anything about Blonduos, we could only hope for 2 things:  that it was bigger with places to stay and that it was of clear sky.  Once again, I’d brought terrible weather with me and this did not bode well for seeing the Northern Lights as intended.  But it is possible to hunt the lights based on cloud coverage and solar activity.  I had been closely following weather patterns to find areas with high visibility and Blonduous was in that general direction.

Highway 1 is only two lanes, but mercifully scant of traffic, so it’s possible to take in the landscape while driving/panicking.  Iceland on the whole is appropriately named, at least in the winter time.  But though one may drive for hours without reaching a town, seeing naught but the snow covered mountains and plains in the meantime, it somehow never gets boring.  The landscape changes just enough, incorporates the occasional body of water, blanketed in white and giving the appearance of perfect sterility, an enchantingly serene vista as far as the eye can see….but aside from that, there are also miles upon miles of small hills that look like boobs.  Yeah, you read that right, boobs.  It’s really something.  On the top of each and every hill, it appeared someone had gone around very thoroughly and stacked a pile of rocks to create nipples.  And there was a pile on every hill.  How did this happen?  There just could not be any other explanation than someone who’d gone to the trouble of turning miles of the Icelandic landscape into  a field of erect teats–a visionary pervert with a lot of time on his hands.

We arrived in Blonduos after dark.  We stopped for a limited dinner in a guesthouse that ended up being too expensive to stay, as were all the guesthouses in Blonduos.  We drove around town until we could pick up a wifi signal and I tried Skyping local establishments–the only cheap hotel in town had a note on the door with a note to call if no one was around.  I knocked on a window of a kitchen I mistook for a guesthouse and scared the bejesus out of the inhabitants there.  Eventually we gave up, but I was getting a second wind and offered to drive to the next biggest dot, Akureyri.  It was getting late, and we still had no idea of what actually awaited us there.

Another couple of hours on, we arrived in a city that was actually worthy of the label, “city”, again driving around to find free wifi in order to locate a hostel.  Uuuuuunfortunately, the hostel was closed for the evening.  No problem!  We had sleeping bags and a car.  But why not check out the town a little before calling it a night.  We drove up to the main street in town, looking for a bar to pass some time, but as we were driving–
“VIN!  LIGHTS!”

He’d already spotted them and was pulling the car around on a hill to get a better look.  There they were.  They were not especially bright that night, but they were out, 2 green streaks in the sky.  One official bucket list item fulfilled.  We stood staring until they began to fade, then got back into the car and sniffed out an awesome bar.  We hung there until closing time and then parked ourselves outside the hostel, brought out the sleeping bags, reclined the seats, and I actually slept like a wee Nordic babe.

To be continued…again…