Rain, Fog, and Pizza
The drive back to Reykjavik is long and much quieter than the drive out. It is raining, and we are both really moved and impressed by what we have seen at Jokulsarlon.
Kristen finishes teaching me the name of the volcano, however. Aye-ah-fiat-la-yo-coot-leh. I practice saying it over and over, so I won’t forget.
About 30km outside the city, we hit a patch of dense fog. The fog is thick and heavy, with visibility cut to perhaps 5 feet in front of the car. The high beams do nothing except illuminate the fog itself, and Kristen has to drive by trying to follow the center line of the road - as the edges are totally obscured on this winding mountain road. If a person or animal or another car were to suddenly appear in front of us, it seems impossible that we would not hit it.
We are still too far outside the city for there to be any kind of street lights, and there are some places where the center line doesn’t exist, and we are just doing our best to guess based on the small patch of road that we can see in front of us, and what the GPS is showing us might be up ahead.
Also, as I previously mentioned as a nice thing, there is very little traffic outside of the cities - so if you drove your car off the road, who knows how long it would take for someone to come along and spot the accident? It was completely terrifying, and it seemed to last for hours.
Eventually, it lifted, as suddenly as it had started. We had survived the most dangerous activity since the volcano hike.
A shaken Kristen admits that she really wants to celebrate our survival with a cheesy pizza. This sounds really good, as we have been surviving mostly on the food of the road today. But we are also eager to just go back to the guest house and not go out again.
I decide that when we return, I will attempt to have a pizza delivered to us.
We make it back, and find parking just up the street. I find a pizza place in our district with a menu that is at least partly in English, and call them to order.
It seems very uncertain as to whether the pizza will ever reach us, as our guest house has two different addresses and no sign out front. Also, we realize that we do not have enough local currency to pay for the pizza, so we will have to either pay mostly in krona with a few American dollars on top (ugly American move!) or hope the delivery guy can take a credit card.
We wait in great suspense, until I see a car with the logo of the pizza place going by outside the window. I rush as fast as I can down the spiral staircase, but by the time I make it out to street, the pizza car is parked on the corner and no delivery guy in sight.
I search the area, and spot him a ways down the street. I end this night chasing a pizza delivery man through the streets of Central Reykjavik, but eventually catch him back near the car itself. He does have a credit card thing with him (Iceland is very big on credit card readers), I heroically take the pizza back up to our room, and we wolf it down in the undignified way that is only acceptable when you have boated on a glacier and then survived a near death experience in the fog.
Kristen finishes teaching me the name of the volcano, however. Aye-ah-fiat-la-yo-coot-leh. I practice saying it over and over, so I won’t forget.
About 30km outside the city, we hit a patch of dense fog. The fog is thick and heavy, with visibility cut to perhaps 5 feet in front of the car. The high beams do nothing except illuminate the fog itself, and Kristen has to drive by trying to follow the center line of the road - as the edges are totally obscured on this winding mountain road. If a person or animal or another car were to suddenly appear in front of us, it seems impossible that we would not hit it.
We are still too far outside the city for there to be any kind of street lights, and there are some places where the center line doesn’t exist, and we are just doing our best to guess based on the small patch of road that we can see in front of us, and what the GPS is showing us might be up ahead.
Also, as I previously mentioned as a nice thing, there is very little traffic outside of the cities - so if you drove your car off the road, who knows how long it would take for someone to come along and spot the accident? It was completely terrifying, and it seemed to last for hours.
Eventually, it lifted, as suddenly as it had started. We had survived the most dangerous activity since the volcano hike.
A shaken Kristen admits that she really wants to celebrate our survival with a cheesy pizza. This sounds really good, as we have been surviving mostly on the food of the road today. But we are also eager to just go back to the guest house and not go out again.
I decide that when we return, I will attempt to have a pizza delivered to us.
We make it back, and find parking just up the street. I find a pizza place in our district with a menu that is at least partly in English, and call them to order.
It seems very uncertain as to whether the pizza will ever reach us, as our guest house has two different addresses and no sign out front. Also, we realize that we do not have enough local currency to pay for the pizza, so we will have to either pay mostly in krona with a few American dollars on top (ugly American move!) or hope the delivery guy can take a credit card.
We wait in great suspense, until I see a car with the logo of the pizza place going by outside the window. I rush as fast as I can down the spiral staircase, but by the time I make it out to street, the pizza car is parked on the corner and no delivery guy in sight.
I search the area, and spot him a ways down the street. I end this night chasing a pizza delivery man through the streets of Central Reykjavik, but eventually catch him back near the car itself. He does have a credit card thing with him (Iceland is very big on credit card readers), I heroically take the pizza back up to our room, and we wolf it down in the undignified way that is only acceptable when you have boated on a glacier and then survived a near death experience in the fog.