So, the park we went to watch the meteor shower from was about an hour East of Annapolis with no cell signal within a couple miles of it. We were meeting a few people who had also never been to this park before. When Ian and I didn’t find the field we were advised to use on our first pass through the area, we decided to go find the map he looked at online the day before.

We backtracked to the last place we had consistent signal and used my phone’s internet connection to tether the shiny new [hand-me-down] netbook Anna gave me (Ace). We looked up the map, downloaded a local copy of it, and then called the people we were meeting to make sure they had directions to meet us at the site.

A little while later, we were happily star-gazing! I used my compass app to position our blankets in the direction of optimum meteor sightings. And, as it turns out, the sky map app on my phone works without signal/GPS activated! It takes your last known position or you can enter in a position and it’ll show you the stars in the sky from your position.

Technology is the best! :)

I tried a few times to take pictures, but my camera doesn’t have the option to leave the shutter open as long as I needed. This was one of my best pictures. ;)

We made our way to the signs pointing to the terminal we needed… took a shuttle that dropped us off outside some locked doors. After waiting a few minutes for someone inside to notice us, a security guard let us, and our 20 new friends, in. We followed the signs, again, to the direction of our terminal. Only to find that we were now outside the secure area and had to go through security again.

The place was a mad house. They were moving people through pretty quickly, but it was still really crowded. I went through my bag trying to find the liquids I had gotten out since the Copenhagen airport and put them back in my ziplock bag. Found the 1/2 liter bottle of water I refilled past security in Copenhagen, which I needed to be rid of. I wanted to keep the bottle, though, in case I wanted water later. So, I started chugging while taking off my shoes and digging out my laptop… Ian took pity on me and had a swig of water to help me finish it off. Made it through security and booked it over to our gate… which got moved! Fortunately, it only moved a couple gates over and the line was being held up by a big group of American teenagers.

The flight back was pretty uneventful. Each seat had a TV in front of it, so we had our pick of movies and TV shows to watch the entire flight back (watched How to Train Your Dragon, Date Night, Inglorious Bastards, and a couple episodes of the Simpsons). They kept getting interrupted by announcements though, which were incredibly difficult to understand. At one point, I realized I understood more of the French than I did the English. And when I mentioned it to Ian, he didn’t even realize they were speaking English!

Finally made it back to VA! Ian and I very diligently documented all the items we brought back on the customs form, so we would be ready when we arrived. When we got up to the customs agent, he asked us what food we brought back. Various Danish candies, crackers, and other snacks. The guy looked at us like he was trying to stifle a laugh. He waved us past and we were on our way!

Lenny was awesome enough to pick us up from the airport, so we got a chance to stop in and say hi to Steph and the nieces. E2 was so happy to see Ian! And E1 was excited to show me everything that had changed while we were gone. It was nice to see them, but we were tired and so ready to get home. Steph was nice enough to send us home with some fresh fruit though, so at least I didn’t need to worry about scrounging up snacks later.

Headed straight home, lugged all our stuff up to our apartment… and then discovered that we were locked out. While we were gone, we had Steph’s uncle in doing some contracting work for us, so we gave him one of our keys. We gave our other key to Yenny so she could water our plants. We can buzz ourselves into the building with our phones and our front door has a mechanical punch lock that doesn’t require a key, so we figured we could get home and then retrieve the keys from people later. Except that we also have a deadbolt that we don’t use… but after the last time building management locked me out of my apartment, I started carrying that key around just in case. And so that “just in case” key was used and we had no way in.

Tracked people down… The construction guy had the key, which he dropped off in the uncle’s mailbox since the uncle was out of town, and I went to pick it up from his house. And an hour later, we were finally inside our home and everything was as it should be (plus a fancy bathroom!). Until we did our first load of laundry and the washing machine flooded the kitchen again.

Home, sweet home.

Helsingor, Hamlet’s castle, was more of a fighting castle. They had a moat, an embankment, and cannons — like they wanted to keep people out and made sure people knew it. Walking in the main gate, they had speakers embedded in the hills around the cannons and they had horses galloping by with voices yelling in battle. It was a little unexpected.

That night, we had dinner in and enjoyed some of the beers Sune and Ian had picked out earlier in the week. Then had a quiet evening and got packed up to leave in the morning.

From there, we went to check out the Rosenborg Castle, but decided we didn’t want to pay to look inside.  Instead, we took a stroll through the King’s garden.

The National Museum has free admission on Wednesdays, so we stopped in to check out a couple exhibits. We weren’t interested in everything, so it worked out well.

We picked up lunch at a deli with Danish open sandwiches and found a bench to do some people watching. From there, we caught a bus to get to the Carlsberg Brewery. Spent the early afternoon there, enjoyed our beer samples, and then headed back to get ready to go out for dinner.

We had dinner in this nice restaurant outside of Freetown Christiania. They have a casual atmosphere with daily menus incorporating fresh ingredients, so they’re hand-written and different each day. Very good food!

After dinner, we took a walk around Christiania. I’ll stipulate that this area was different. And that was part of the reason Sune wanted to take us there and show us the “funny houses.” There was a main area where they had a wide variety of, um, plants available for sale. It was their own style of botanical garden.

Christiania… is a self-proclaimed autonomous neighbourhood of about 850 residents. From an official point of view, Christiania is regarded as a large commune, but its relation to the authorities has a unique status in being regulated by a special law, the Christiania Law of 1989 which transfers parts of the supervision of the area from the municipality of Copenhagen to the state.

Christiania has been a source of controversy since its creation in a squatted military area in 1971. Its cannabis trade was tolerated by authorities until 2004. Since then, measures for normalising the legal status of the community have led to conflicts, and negotiations are ongoing.

We took a stroll around Christiania, walked up an embankment, and made our way across a bridge and around a trail. I have very few pictures from this part of the day because there were a lot of signs prohibiting cameras in this area and while the enforcement of their rules may have been questionable, it just didn’t seem like a battle I wanted to take on.

After our walk, we made a stop for some coffee and hot chocolate and then headed back for the night.

So we spent the rest of the morning walking around Copenhagen and window shopping. Well, window shopping until I saw this super cute dress:

On the way back, we stopped by the Copenhagen Cemetary to visit Hans Christian Anderson’s grave. There are many other famous people buried there (Niels Bohr, Caspar Frederik Harsdorff, Søren Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Ørsted just to name a few), but we didn’t go searching around for all of them.

We made a stop at the Post Office and a candy store after that. And then I baby-sat while Ian and Cassia went to the gym. We had a quiet dinner in that evening and got caught up on the World Cup.

While everyone else took some down time after breakfast, Sune took me next door to show me around the dairy farm his parents used to own. They retired last year, moving into the retirement house his grandfather built on an adjacent lot. The farm was sold to a neighboring farmer they’ve known for decades, so it was ok for us to just go poking around.

Cassia and Sune were married in the church opposite the farmhouse, but had their reception in the garden. Ian and I missed their wedding, so it was cool to see where they had all the festivities.

After we investigated all the changes to the farm over the past few years, Sune took me to see the waterwheel nearby.

By the time we got back, everyone was ready to head out to Flensborg, Germany. Julia got to stay with the grandparents for the afternoon, while we did some site-seeing. We stopped by a beach, the cathedral, had lunch at a cafe, and found a cute little rum shop.

After some window shopping, we decided it was time to head back. We stopped by a store right before the border to pick up some supplies — alcohol is much cheaper in Germany than in Denmark. We had a quick dinner with Sune’s parents before heading back to Copenhagen.

We made it to Sune’s parents’ in time for lunch: a mix of traditional Danish sandwich makings, new potatoes dug up that morning, and scrambled eggs.

From there, we left for an afternoon in Ribe. This was another town dating back to the Viking Age. We visited the Cathedral, went up the tower to see the town, and also saw the totem pole marking the flood lines from the many times the city had flooded. Ribe also has a viking museum, but we ended up saving that for next time since we would have had to rush through to see everything before they closed.

We stopped in a cafe for some coffee (hot chocolate for me!) and people-watching. The cafe was in a really old building with doorways that have long since settled, so I took some pictures inside before picking a table outside to enjoy the weather.

When we got back, we had an Independence Day snack. Nanna got out the American flag from Cassia and Sune’s wedding (they merged 3 nationalities and many more languages at their wedding) and we had fresh bruschetta and champagne.

Nanna cooked up a wonderful meal for us for dinner: roast beef, ham, duck, 2 different kinds of potatoes, asparagus, cauliflower, and fresh breads. We discussed what we saw in Ribe (though, I’m sure she’s been there dozens of times) and our plans for the next day. For dessert, we had fruit and ymer, a Danish soured milk product that is a cross between yogurt and buttermilk. Nice, refeshing end to a filling meal.

After dinner, I took a walk around Skodborg. I brought some carrots with me to feed the neighbor’s horses, saving some for when I finished my walk as well. I wandered up the block trying to get a better view of the windmills. I ended up following the sunset until I got out to a main road and figured that was as much as there was to see in that direction.

I turned back and took pictures of the interesting flowers people had in their gardens. I also really enjoyed the variety in the houses. A lot of the houses had a year written on the side indicating when it was built. Most noteworthy: there were no cookie cutter, model homes here!

I walked up to the school, passing the grocery store, the building formerly serving as the train station, and the cellphone/internet place. The sports fields by the school had a gate closed and locked in front of them… but no fence. So if you wanted to use the field, you could just walk around.

I walked back to finish spoiling the horses and they ran right up expectantly. One of them even neighed loud enough when he saw me that Ian heard him from inside the house.

As I was heading inside, I heard some rustling in the gravel near me. I looked around… and waited… and finally saw these little frogs crossing the path. Cute, but the horse seemed uninterested. So, finally headed in for the night.

We visited the Roskilde Cathedral, built in the 12th and 13th centuries. Royal tombs spanning over a millennium are buried here. The architecture here is very interesting because royalty was buried here over many centuries, so as additional wings were needed, they were built and decorated in the style of the time, incorporating Gothic and Romanesque features.

The Viking Ship Museum, Vikingeskibsmuseet, was one of my favorite museums to visit. We started in the reconstruction exhibit, where they show how they resurrected the ships that were deliberately sunk in the waterway to prevent enemy attack by sea. These ships were later replicated and on display in the harbor.

In the outdoor area, they had displays about Viking ship design and construction, explaining the Nordic clinker-building method. They also had a row of trees, representing each type that might have been used for shipbuilding. The harbor had about a dozen replicas on display on the water. And they also had some tours available where you actually go out on a viking ship that the participants have to row.

Inside the main museum building, they had the original ships that were resurrected from the fjord and exhibits on the history of war at sea. They also had an exhibit on Havingsten fra Glendalough (Sea Stallion), a 30-m warship found in the fjord. The ship was replicated and set out on a 45-day journey from Roskilde to Dublin, documented by Timewatch. The purpose was to “test and document the seaworthiness, speed and manoeuvrability of the ship on the rough open sea and in coastal waters with treacherous currents.”

We got back pretty late in the afternoon, so had some down time before heading to Nyhavn (New Harbor) in downtown Copenhagen to see some of the nightlife.

I got a little turned around because I turned early on one street to avoid construction, and then turned the wrong way when I got back to the cross street I meant to turn on. Fortunately, I brought my map with me! I would’ve been hosed if I had relied on Ian and my algorithm for getting back (go down [street we can't pronounce, a.k.a. "Main St"], turn right at [other street we can't pronounce, a.k.a. "7-Eleven St"]). Oh, and there were three 7-Elevens that I saw on Main St. Not sure how many more there were if I had explored in the other direction.

Melissa (Ian’s cousin) & Fredrick arrived soon after everyone got back and cleaned up. They were in town for the day on their way to their week-long travels across Europe. We all headed out for lunch at Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus.

After lunch, Ian and I headed back to do some laundry and take naps while everyone else went out to do some shopping. Front-loading washing machines are fantastic. Definitely want a front-loader when I need to buy one.

We spent the evening in Tivoli doing some site-seeing and watching the free Friday night concert (Fredagsrock). Dicte, a favorite of Sune’s, was playing that night.

It started to rain, so we took a car tour of the Southwestern coast. 

We made a stop to feed Julia and were attacked by some birds while we hung around outside and eventually just took cover in the car until we were all ready to go.

Made it to the airport with a slight delay in the flight and were back in Copenhagen that night.  Had Danish hot dogs for dinner, which had toppings similar to Icelandic toppings, plus pickles, but the hot dog were really narrow, and was about twice as long as the bun.

Today was Ian and my 1-year anniversary!  So, it was pretty fun to be up with all the family for the banquet the night before.  We met up with relatives for dim sum takeout for breakfast and to have an early celebration for grandpa’s birthday. Then we spent the afternoon in the car with my sis coming home.  Spending the rest of the evening at home and just hanging out.  :)

Reykjadalur was recommended to us by the night clerk at the hotel. He told us it was a favorite of locals, so we gave it a try. We hiked out about an hour and got to a hot river where we could take a dip. Over the years, people have piled rocks strategically along the river to create dams where little pools could form, decreasing in temperature moving downstream.

Ian and I wandered around a bit and found where 2 rivers interesected to feed the stream. One was a hot river and one was cold, so you could stand in the pool with your feet in water differing by ~60 degrees.

When we got back to town, we decided this was a good day to try some Icelandic hotdogs. After some effort, we were able to find Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, the most popular eatery in Iceland.

The casing was much more elastic than American hotdogs, more like sausage casings, but were similar in flavor to hotdogs. The big difference was the toppings available. They had ketchup, sweet mustard, fried onion, raw onion and remolaði, a mayonnaise-based sauce with sweet relish.

After hotdogs, the group split up for the afternoon. Cassia, Sune, and Julia went shopping in search of an elusive Icelandic sweater. I headed over to the National Museum for free Wednesdays! And Ian got some quiet time back at the hotel.

The National Museum was mostly history of Icelandic culture. Each time period had a main display that showed an artifact that played a significant role in their history. Since I had only an hour before they closed, the people at the info desk recommended I focus on those and look more in depth at the exhibits for the time periods around the items that caught my interest. Definitely worked as a good strategy for me.

After the museum, I finished up my postcards and headed into downtown Reykjavik to get them mailed off. The people at the post office were very friendly and told me a bit about their postal system. They have teams of carriers for each region, typically delivering mail within 3 days of send date. The rural carriers deliver mostly to intersections, so all residents on a rural road would have to go to the junction to collect their mail.  Occasionally, routes will be closed due to weather, but most of the year, they are able to access the populated areas.

The international stamps I bought for outside the EU were pretty cute too. I got frogs and waterfalls — and they were old-timey where you have to moisten the stamp before it will adhere.  I then got into a linguistics discussion with the other teller and a French woman until the post office closed.

I spent the next hour slowly making my way back to the hotel, taking pictures of pretty much anything that caught my interest.  Some of the buildings and statues only had placards in Icelandic, so I looked them up later.

I made a stop in the Kraun Design Gallery because they had a picture of yarn outside and I wanted to know what it was.  They had a photo exhibit of Iceland’s role in WWII, a yarn exhibit that was closed for the day, and a super-expensive arty store.

After that, met up with everyone else to have dinner at Fish Market.  The food was fantastic, but the visit was a bit odd.  We didn’t have a reservation, so they said that we could have a table, but would have to be done in an hour and a half for a reservation that was scheduled.  We agreed to the terms, were seated, and put our orders in.  We got our appetizers relatively quickly, but then waited an hour before our waitress came to tell us our entrees were getting started.  This was about 10 minutes before our deadline, but the restaurant was still relatively empty.    We explained the agreement to the waitress who was completely uninterested.  The hostess eventually came out and let us know that we were not going to be held to the deadline.

We had dinner at Caruso, an Italian place, following a recommendation in the tour book. I had salted cod there that was seasoned and not overwhelmingly salty. And some really good veggies, which seem to be rare in the country. Food was pretty good and the portions were quite filling. Our waiter here had, what sounded like an American accent, but not quite and we couldn’t figure out what kind of accent he had. So we finally asked him where he was from — LA, but he was picking up an Icelandic accent.

Did some souvenir shopping after dinner and called it a night.  Got some Icelandic wool for the knitters in my family and mittens for myself.  *SO* excited for winter!  The mittens have separate hand and thumb partitions that flip up, so I can type on my phone and keep the rest of my hands warm!

On our way to the museum, we saw a sign indicating hard hats and steel-toed boots were required to go down a side street. It seemed that Reykjavik had a dry dock! We were able to get a closer look later from the other end of the street that did not require safety gear.

We spent about an hour in the museum learning about the history of trawling and then another hour in Óðinn, Iceland’s decommissioned Offshore Patrol Vessel.

Definite highlights were having the tour guide tell us about all 3 Cod Wars and pointing out that the gun on the ship was built in 1898. Oh, and Óðinn was decommissioned in 2006.

We met up with Cassia, Sune, and Julia early afternoon to head out to Þingvellir and learn about Viking parliament! We saw the law stone, which was lost due to earthquakes, but a flag was placed in the approximate location and stadium seating was available to listen to the speakers.  The continental drift between the North American and Eurasian Plates (which cause the earthquakes) can be clearly seen in this region.

For dinner, we tried some “authentic” American-style dining at Grillhusid.  The burgers were pretty adequate, but their “cold slaw” was not cole slaw.  They claimed it was mayo and sugar, but it tasted a lot like whipped cream.  Weird. And Ian’s meal was somewhat noteworthy for how old his potato looked, like it had been baked, frozen for months, and then re-heated. So, if you’re looking for low-end dining in Iceland, go for the fries.

We passed between 2 glaciers, Langjökull and Hofsjökull. Along the way, we stopped to look at a map and found some sheep a few meters away hiding from the wind. They stuck around long enough for me to take a picture and then walked away. We also stopped in Hveravellir to see the hot springs and mud pools.

This video is kinda boring, but it’s a synopsis of our ~6-hour car ride. I used my camera’s time lapse setting to make a video using a picture taken every second and included videos I took in the places where we stopped. Because of the distance and areas we traveled that day, this video shows a lot of the different landscapes in Iceland. Most of the roads we traveled on were gravel, with some areas worse than others as becomes apparent in the video when it looks like I’m filming an earthquake.

Coming back into civilization, we made stops to visit Gullfoss and Geysir. Gullfoss is a popular tourist attraction, since it’s more easily accessible than Dettifoss. It’s also a pretty strong waterfall, averaging 140 m³/s of water running over this waterfall in the summertime.

The word “geysir” is derived from the Icelandic word for “to gush.” According to the tour book, it’s the only Icelandic word that has made it into the English language (I guess Bjork doesn’t count). Iceland’s Geysir, or The Great Geysir, was the first geysir found, but is now only active following earthquakes. The active geysir remaining in the area is Strokkur, erupting every 8-10 minutes.

We made it to Reykjavik just in time for dinner (the hotel knew of 1 restaurant that was open). The wait staff at Þrír Frakkar (3 Coats) were super nice and seated us without a reservation and brought a book out for Julia to play with while we ate. The decor was very fishy, including a cod clock and other types of fish mounted on the walls.

Ian and I shared the Arctic charr appetizer, while Sune and Cassia tried the whale sashimi. The Arctic charr was served with scrambled eggs and chantilly sauce, which was good, but definitely did not sate our craving for scrambled eggs. For our entrees, I had the cod in mustard sauce and Ian had the redfish with wasabi sauce. We got a couple desserts to share and they were garnished with a fruit I’d never seen before: gooseberries. They taste like a tart plum, but with the texture of an apple, the size of a blueberry. Craziness. All around, very good!

photo by underbunny

After dinner, we got back to the hotel for Internet! Granted, we only had connection from the stairwell to the lobby. But it was worth the trouble after going days without!

Our first stop was Goðafoss. This is the waterfall where statues of pagan gods were thrown in to symbolize Icelanders’ adoption of the Christian faith.

Skútustaðagígar Pond is adjacent to Mývatn lake and surrounded by pseudo-craters formed by steam explosions when lava spray hits water.  This was our first introduction to Icelandic gnats. They didn’t bite, but they were attracted to heat, so they swarmed our faces as we walked around.

Next, we went to Dimmuborgir. This area had a lot of interesting rock formations created by lava pooled over a small lake. As the lava flowed across the lake, the water started to boil, the vapour rose through the lava forming lava pillars. As the lava continued flowing towards lower ground in the Mývatn area, the hollow pillars of solidified lava remained.

We got lunch at Gamli Bærinn (The Old Farm) in Reykjahlíð before moving on to Námaskarð to see the sulfur fields. The sulfur fields were super stinky, but pretty cool to see. I kinda rushed through the lower area because the wind would blow the steam into the valley and get trapped there.

Next, we went for a swim in a nature bath.

The last stop of the day was Dettifoss, the northern-most point in our trip. Dettifoss is the largest waterfall in Europe in terms of volume discharge, having an average water flow of 200 m3/s.

We got dinner at the Gamli Bærinn again on the way back since we expected everything to be closed by the time we got back to Akureyri (and it was the only place still open in Reykjahlíð). We saw the start of sunset on the way back to the hotel, but didn’t stay up to see it “fully” set.

- corn flakes
- meusli
- skyr (a yogurt-like product that I later found out was Iceland’s national cheese)
- sliced hard-boiled eggs
- platter of sliced sandwich meats and cheese
- breads
- crackers, salty and sweet (like animal crackers, but in round and rectangular forms)

I think Ian summed up best what we were all thinking, “All I wanted was a plate of scrambled eggs the size of my head!” Seems the entire country is unfamiliar with scrambled eggs. We didn’t find any the whole trip.

After breakfast, we explored the Snæfellsjökull area. There were a few easy trails nearby with interesting scenery, so we went to see some volcanic craters and waterfalls.

Around noon, it was time to hit the road for Akureyri. We decided it would be prudent to find a grocery store for some emergency rations and possibly a restaurant for lunch before we got too far away from civilization, so we made a stop in Olafsvik — the largest town on that peninsula.

Olafsvik was a really cute town. We went a little overboard at the grocery store, but we all had our hungry memories of the night before fresh in our minds. Ian and Sune searched for high-protein snacks, and not being able to find any jerky, settled on some dried fish. I’ve had chinese dried fish and it looked very similar, so I vouched for its edibility. (To be continued…)

We had lunch at Olafsvik Hotel, which had somewhat small portions, but really good food. Ian had their monk fish and even I thought it was delicious! Though, I did find a lot of fish entrees that I enjoyed throughout Iceland; maybe I just haven’t been trying the right kinds of fish at home.

From there, we drove west across 2/3 of the country and made it to Akureyri in time to pick up Ian’s bag from the airport before they closed.  We even made it to Hotel Edda with a half hour to spare before their dinner buffet ended.  Down side: no internet! It was broken and they had no idea when it would be fixed.

So, this was our first experience with Icelandic dinner:

- a few typical salad options, breads, rolls, crackers
- 3 kinds of pickled herring
- reindeer pate
- tuna pate
- smoked salmon
- salted cod
- smoked whale
- smoked puffin
- roast beef
- ham
- roasted potatoes
- french fries

I tried a little of everything except the smoked puffin.  I accidentally got smoked whale twice, which wasn’t particularly noteworthy.  Everyone else thought the puffin was very strong, but mixed response as to whether it was good. I didn’t much like the reindeer pate.  It had an odd texture to it.  The pickled herring was pretty good, though very strong. It’s traditionally a breakfast food, but I definitely would not eat it for breakfast. I think it’d make a reasonable side to a lunch, like a pickle would. The salted cod was alright, but I didn’t know what it was and was really unprepared for how salty it was. And I <3 potatoes.

After dinner, we settled in for the evening. Ian and I both ended up staying up way later than we thought because we missed the sunset and sunrise… and thought it was still evening.  At that latitude this time of year, there’s about an hour between sunrise and set, which means dusk and dawn overlap and it doesn’t actually get dark. We started to learn not to use the sun as a guage of time after a while.

Around 8am or so, we decided we would make some oatmeal for breakfast. I went with Cassia the day before to the grocery store, so I knew she got some, but couldn’t remember what the package looked like. After searching much of the kitchen and some strategic googling, we concluded that Morgen Knas (Morning Bone) was cereal and not oatmeal.

At that point, I used google translate to see what oatmeal was in Danish, then did an image search to see what some common Danish oatmeal packaging looked like. This was when we discovered the flour-style paper sack we dismissed as cornmeal was actually oatmeal. And the “Korn Bord” and “Full Korn” label on it referred to the Danish Grain Board and whole-grain nature of the product.

Easy from there, right? Well… we translated the cooking instructions (in deciliters), looked up Quaker Oats to find out how much a serving was, converted that to deciliters, searched for a measuring cup (measuring liter?), and were ready to go. Oh, except for turning on the stove. They had a gas stove that didn’t have an auto-starter on it. Searched all over the stove area and kitchen counters — no matches. We finally found a stick lighter under some dish towels which didn’t have gas in it. Assuming they used it just for the spark to light the stove, we gave that a try. The first 20+ tries didn’t work, so we tried the burner next to it and it lit up on the first try. Four minutes later (approximately 90 minutes after we started our journey), we had hot bowls of oatmeal in front of us!

Soon after, we were packed up and ready for Iceland! Headed back to the airport for the second day in a row, landed in Keflavik, and went to retrieve our luggage only to find that Ian’s bag got left behind. The plane wasn’t full or anything. They just failed to put his bag on the plane. The airline people said they’d bring it to us the next day, but we’d be over 400 miles away by then. (Stayed in the mid-western peninsula of Snæfellsjökull [Snow fall glacier] the first night and then in the northern city of Akureyri the next day.) So, they flew his bag to Akureyri, the country’s second largest city (about the size of Old Town Alexandria) and it was waiting for us at the “airport,” i.e. runway with a building at the end.

When we got to Snæfellsjökull, it was about 8:30 pm, which we soon discovered was half an hour too late to get dinner. The grocery stores close around 5, so we were just out of luck. There weren’t really any other restaurants in this area. The bar was still open; they just didn’t serve food. So we had a few Viking beers and the remainder of the bread the wait-staff was kind enough not to throw out.

After “dinner”, Sune, Ian, and I did some exploring. These pictures were taken between 10pm and midnight (you know, midnight — an hour before the sun sets):

Before the witch-burning, they sing the Midsummer Hymn. In the third verse, they talk about the witches and trolls they burn to rid their towns of evil:

Midsummer song
We love our country
Text: Holger Drachmann, 1885
Melody: PE Lange-Müller, 1885

We love our country,
when it is redesigned in July
teeth star of wood with brilliance in each eye,
when the spring of each bird
over fields of beach
let the voice of greeting trills themselves bend:
we sing your law over the road, the street
we wreaths your name when our harvest is in charge,
but the most beautiful wreath
just can not wait, however, your, Midsummer,
it is the bottom of this summer’s hearts so warm, so happy,
- But the most beautiful wreath
just can not wait, however, your, Midsummer,
it is the bottom of this summer’s hearts so warm, so happy.

We love our country,
but by midsummer most
when every cloud over the field blessing transmitter
when flowers are most
and when the cattle in bucket
gives rigeligst gift for hardworking hands;
when we do not plow and harrows and drums,
when the cow’s dinner munching clover:
then go to the youth dance
on your bid Midsummer!
right as a foal and the lamb who freely across the meadow to tumble,
- Then go to the youth dance
on your bid Midsummer!
right as a foal and the lamb who freely across the meadow to tumble.

We love our country,
and with sword in hand
each udenvælts enemy dressed us know
but against the spirit of strife
over fields, under the beach
we will fire on fathers barrows turn:
each city has its witches, and each parish its trolls,
them, we will from life with joy torches hold,
we want peace in this country,
Midsummer, Midsummer!
it can be won when hearts just can not wait never doubting cold
- We want peace in this country,
Midsummer, Midsummer!
it can be won, where hearts never doubting’s going cold.

We love our country,
and we welcome the king,
who have tried and elected himself the right princess:
on his adventure castle
can every woman, every man
an example of life in love find!
Let the times grow old, let the colors fade,
a memory we will be in the heart us subscribe:
from narrative rich north
shows a gloss over land -
It is a wonderful reflection of its enchanting meadows
- From narrative rich north
shows a gloss over land -
It is a wonderful reflection of its enchanting meadows!