The winds south of Borgarnes almost made me late for my appointment at the Blue Lagoon.
I left for Borgarnes late Monday, after two nights at the Airbnb outside Sauðárkrókur. I had just lounged around the house the previous day; I suppose I could have driven around to see the sights, but there had been a lot of snow the first night, and I was happy enough to relax rather than fret the snowy and icy roads.
The family was nice, too: the father was an ex-musician, now running their “hobby farm”; the mother taught elementary school; and the two sons played music and basketball and watched lots of YouTube. We talked about music (the dad didn’t like Sigur Rös, which I didn’t know was allowed in Iceland), the arrival of Costco (and their frustration that local shops were lowering prices in response, which suggested that they’d been charging too much all this time), and the relationship of Icelandic to Old English (a friend and former dean had told me that Icelandic is the closest modern language to Old English, and the father and younger son seemed to confirm this by reading and, for the most part, understanding the opening lines of Beowulf in the original).
I had originally planned to drive back the way I’d come in, as Google said that would be the shorter distance. But the family recommended I head directly south; it would add an hour or so to the drive, but would be more scenic. So I packed up Jimmy again, waved my good-byes, and headed south.
It was good advice. The road threaded through a smattering of mountains, which was rare; mountains are scattered, generally, and separated enough that the roads can wind their way among them without much need for changes in elevation. (I understand that this is not true in the central part of the country, but those areas are generally closed during the winter.) But once through the mountains, the road spilled out onto a wide open plain, with constantly changing terrain and mountains off in the distance.
The roads were unpredictable, too. In some points (as in the picture of the road winding through the mountains, above), they were perfectly clear—no snow, no ice, just comforting, solid asphalt. Other parts, though, were icy; at several points, I drove on the wrong side of the road because, for some reason, there was no ice there. I saw many more cars on this road, too, which made me less nervous about getting stranded somewhere. (Being nervous about such things was pretty silly, of course, and I knew it. But that didn’t make me any less nervous.)
The weather shifted a bit restlessly. The clouds seemed to be clearing up a bit; the sun slipped in an appearance in the mid-afternoon, again looking more like a sunset than a mid-afternoon.
But that didn’t last long. By the time I circled around to the main highway, it was fully overcast, with occasional bouts of light rain.
I found my way to the main highway, Highway 1, and not too much later closed the loop, passing the highway that had taken me north to Skagaströnd. From the other direction, though, it didn’t feel like the same road. Indeed, I thought that I was in new territory for much of my drive to my next stop, Borgarnes—but a look at a map makes it clear that my drive north had actually passed through the north part of the town. None of the drive covered new territory.
Iceland is notorious for its lack of places to pull off the highway. (A major cause of highway accidents is stupid tourists stopping in the middle of the road to take pictures. I had to dodge such tourists twice, and it is stupid. But the roads have steep shoulders, so there’s no way to pull to the side.) But I found one vista point: Kattarhryggur.
Kattarhryggur, which means “Cat’s Arch,” is a road originally designed for horse-drawn carts. In the photo (above), the road is indicated by the way the snow has settled, curving down to the concrete bridge. In the foreground is a frozen river. I could hear water running underneath, though I couldn’t capture that on video because a couple was sitting in their car, engine idling, arguing over a map. (They later turned up in the room next to mine that evening.)
I pulled into the long—and heavily iced—driveway to Bjarn, my guesthouse for the night. It used to be a farmhouse, with a place for the family to live (the first two tall gables, closest to the water) and a place for cattle (the other two tall gables). Later, they built smaller sheep pens (the other, smaller gables). I stayed in one of those, in the pen that had apparently been devoted to the wife’s favorite sheep.
I started to walk down to town, but I found myself slipping and short-stepping in a way that concerned me, particularly because I knew I’d be returning in sheer darkness (and, it turned out, in fairly heavy rain). So I drove into town, left my car at a park, and went out for a walk.
I wandered across a narrow bridge onto a pier at the very end of the town, at the tip of the finger of land that juts out into Borgarfjörður. Of course, just as I reached the end of the pier (at the farthest possible point from where I had parked) it started to rain—a cold, persistent drizzle, at first, but growing to a respectable downpour, with strong winds to match.
By the next morning, the winds were a problem. Iceland has a great website devoted to road conditions and weather, and it indicated that there were places on my route with winds exceeding 35 meters/second (about 80 mph). So I ended up cooling my heels at the guesthouse until (as predicted) they died down enough to continue my trek south.
I’d set up an appointment at the Blue Lagoon—thankfully, for the afternoon—so the delay didn’t concern me too much. The winds still buffeted Jimmy a bit, but for the most part the drive was uneventful. The temperature had not dipped below freezing, so the rain cleared the roads. I knew to stay in the left lane at the Hvalfjörður tunnel. I had no trouble working through the labyrinth of Reykjavík traffic circles. And I pulled into the Blue Lagoon parking lot just a few minutes before my scheduled time.
“Appointment” and “scheduled time” somewhat overstate the situation, though. The Blue Lagoon has not been significantly upgraded for some years (though they’re working on it), which means that its capacity is far below demand. The weather had delayed a lot of people, so everyone had shown up late, and those of us in line had to wait for people to leave before we could be allowed in.
Nonetheless, they handled it well. Employees provided regular (and realistic) updates, as well as some history of the place. I learned, for example, that the Blue Lagoon is not a natural hot spring (as many are in Iceland); it was the result of a big oops, when they put a geothermal plant too close to the ocean, and seawater got into the cooling system, messing up the generators. But over time—through some luck, and someone paying attention—they found that they could use the system to create a hot saltwater spa, which had benefits for various skin diseases. Thus a business was born.
I’d read that the Blue Lagoon is a great place to begin an Iceland trip. Flights into Iceland arrive at around 4 a.m., and by the time you’ve retrieved your luggage, had a leisurely coffee, and found your rental car (all of which I did), the spa is fairly close to opening. Fortunately, I waited too long to sign up—it was sold out when I went looking—because the spa was perfect for the night before the flight out. (The day of the flight would have been risky, as evidenced by the number of people in line complaining about how little time they had before their flight was scheduled to leave.)
The one disappointment: the bar. My own fault, probably; somewhere I’d gotten the idea that the “first free drink” in my package could be a cocktail, but the only alcohol was beer (and not very good beer, at that), wine, and fruity sparkling wine. Alas, I had envisioned a martini. No luck. (Pretty, though….)
The Blue Lagoon kind of marked the end of the trip, even though my flight didn’t leave until the next afternoon. I spent a night just outside Reykjavík, in an Airbnb room in an apartment where I barely saw the host. I walked into town to grab dinner, but basically went straight back to the room and to bed—a mix of not wanting to explore in the rain, and being thoroughly relaxed from the Blue Lagoon.
The next day was just travel: returning the rental car, wandering around the airport, buying souvenirs (mostly T-shirts for the boys, but also my new favorite coffee mug), flying for 9-ish hours next to another sleeper, stumbling through customs, and so on.
There’s something anti-climactic about coming home.
This is one in a series of six posts about a 10-day trip I made to Iceland in early 2018. The first four describe the actual trip; the last two reflect on my experiences:
- Iceland: New Year’s in Reykjavik
- Iceland: South and back
- Iceland: A Taste of the north
- Iceland: The last leg of the journey
- Reflections on my Iceland trip, part 1: Some good choices
- Reflections on my Iceland trip, part 2: Some room for improvement