Iceland Day 8 — Westward bound

I woke up at 6am to put in the dryer the last set of our clothes we washed last night. I planned to get two more hours of sleep and then start packing for our journey to Westfjords. However, as soon as I happily closed my eyes and started to fall asleep I heard the dryer beep like crazy. I went to see what was going on: the dryer stopped working and was trying to communicate its dissatisfaction to me. I turned it off and on again, and went back to sleep. In 5 minutes or so, the dryer’s beeping woke me up again. After several attempts to make the dryer work, I moved from the bedroom to the bathroom where I sat on the toilet and tried to resolve our disagreement. The problem was that we spoke different languages, the dryer spoke Icelandic and I spoke English. I had no choice but to sit near the dryer and turn it on every 5 minutes. Finally, after an hour of the newly invented dryer torture, I woke up Alex and told him about the crazy dryer. Our combined efforts produced exactly zero effect as the dryer would spray the clothes with water every single time before starting any drying, and nothing we did made it change its mind. We ended up using the washing machine spin cycle to dry clothes as much possible. Around 9am we decided to take a break for breakfast. We went to the same place as last night and had some mediocre scrambled eggs with ham and cheese. Luckily, the breakfast was saved by Belgian waffles which were the best waffles I ever had.

A little bit of trivia about parking in Iceland

In our Akureyri apartment, among other things that were lying around, we found two white and blue cards with a clock dial on each of them. After a bit of thinking about their possible purpose and a further bit of googling we found out that those were parking tags. As it turns out, parking in downtown Akureyri is very ingeniously designed. First of all, it is FREE all the time. However, on weekdays from 10am to 4pm the parking is limited to 2 hours. So you must set the start time on the parking tag. If you want to park for more than 2 hours, you have to come back to your car before your parking time is up and reset the start time on your parking tag. And if you don’t — well, then you get a ticket, and then you pay.

After breakfast we returned to the apartment and made a hard but necessary decision to move on and let our damp clothes dry in the car. We needed to cover 385 km (239 miles) to get to Drangsnes in the Westfjords. We did not plan to visit any sites that day but we were confident that Iceland’s nature would find a way to surprise us in some unexpected ways.

We drove through Öxnadalur, a beautiful valley enclosed on both sides by mountains. We stopped at a parking lot with an information board and a magnificent view on the valley’s mountains. The information board was put by locals to protest against installing power line pylons that would spoil the views of the valley. We agreed it would be a shame to spoil such a view (not to mention that the view would indeed be spoiled by the pylons).

We also made a stop to see an old turf roofed Víðimýrarkirkja (church) near a small village Varmahlið. It was build in 1834, but many artifacts inside were from 17th century. A very charming place.

For several days in a row, Alex was wondering why Icelandic dandelions were so big. Tall, tough and meaty, they didn’t seem to be the same little dandelions that we got used to seeing in the US. Plus, some dandelion stems seemed to branch right before the flowers, which we have never seen before. After several days of wondering, Alex finally decided to determine if those dandelions were really different, and here is what he found out: the huge Icelandic dandelions are actually not dandelions at all! Instead, it’s different flowers called hawkbit and hawkweed. Which one is hawkbit and which one is hawkweed? I think Alex is still trying to figure it out.

The rest of the drive was quite uneventful. The nature was beautiful, of course, and we had scary 15 minutes driving in the clouds over a mountain pass, but we managed, and by 6:30pm we arrived in Drangsnes. Here are some of our on the road pictures taken mostly from the car.

Drangsnes is a small town (about 67 people according to Wikipedia), but it is quite busy with tourists. When I tried to book our accommodation, 4 months before the trip, all rooms with private bathrooms were booked and I could only get a room with a shared bathroom. For a while we tried to find the reception but none of the buildings seemed to have one. Then we saw a restaurant on the second floor on the side of a building that looked like a big garage. We went there and tried to explain to a waiter our predicament. Apparently, he couldn’t understand what we were talking about until we mentioned the key words, “check in”. “Oh, check in?” he said, “Wait.” And then he was gone again waiting tables. We waited, and in about 5 minutes a waitress came out of the kitchen and asked us if we wanted to dine (her English was marginally better). No, we said, we would like to check in. “Oh, check in?”, she said, “Wait,” and she was gone waiting tables. We kept waiting. In about 5 minutes the waiter appeared again, looked at us and, as if having remembered something, told us to wait. Finally, after another 5 minutes the waiter and the waitress met near the restaurant counter and apparently discussed our situation. Then they optimistically told us to wait and went on about their table waiting business. At this point I was mildly annoyed and tried to take my mind off all that by studying a big Icelandic fish poster with dozens of fishes we have never seen or heard of. Finally the waitress appeared, asked the name on the reservation and told us to wait. (I should mention here that a big coach bus was in the hotel driveway, and a couple of dozens of tourists were waiting to dine in the restaurant as we came in. The waiter and waitress had to serve them all and, apparently, make the food, too.) This time she wasn’t gone for long and appeared with a key. She gave us a key and showed a general direction where we needed to go. Well, I thought, how hard can it be to find a room, especially if we have a key with the room number? Not that easy. The first building had twelve rooms numbered 1 through 12, the second building didn’t have any numbers for rooms, so we thought it was probably an apartment, and the third building had room numbers starting from 15. Finally, we realized that the second building was all number 14, with a common kitchen and living room, 2 common bathrooms and 4 separate bedrooms, A through D. But which one was ours? The key had no letters on it. We took a wild guess that the bedroom with the door ajar and no luggage was ours, and moved in. I guess we were right, at least no one told us otherwise.

The waitress-hostess told us that they serve dinner at the restaurant until 8pm. It was already 7:30pm so we quickly went back to the restaurant. The menu had several fish dishes, and we decided to try something that we haven’t eaten before: wolffish and devilfish. “You can see them on that poster by the door,” the waitress-hostess told us. “They may look scary, but they’re very tasty.” And indeed, they were both amazingly delicious, especially the devilfish, which, incidentally, was also the scarier-looking one. In fact, these two fish dishes may well be the best fish dishes I have ever eaten anywhere. We were served alternately by the waitress-hostess and the waiter-owner, who, by the look of his earring and many tattoos, must be a fisherman in his spare time. Overall, it was the best dinner we have had in Iceland, complete with a World Cup soccer game on a big-screen TV across from our table. It more than made up for any wait we had during our check-in.

After the dinner we packed our bathing suits and went to the shore to enjoy bathing in geothermal hot tubs overlooking Greenland sea. However, before we could dive into a hot tub we needed to take a shower (to get into Iceland’s public pools you must first take a shower naked and there are usually no separate shower stalls other than for men and women) and then change into our bathing suits. The problem was that the two changing and shower stations were located across the street. When we got to the tubs we were freezing. There were three tubs with cooler (actually, lukewarm), warm and hot water. We opted for hot (a wise decision), then tried cool and warm. Once you get into each of the pools and sit across from the ocean, it looks like an infinity pool if you slide in low enough. Across from the pools, we could see the Grimsey island where we planned to travel the following morning — uninhabited, but home to a great variety of birds and a lone lighthouse. It was a great ending to a driving day with not that much sightseeing. Plus, it was Friday night, although I guess you could say that by this time we have had 8 Friday nights in a row.