INTO THE NORTH

I figured out the very efficient and straightforward Reykjavík bus system with little trouble and picked up our little Kia nut-bucket rental car at the Budget office next to the cruise terminal on the east end of the Old Harbor. Get the extra gravel and wind insurance for $20 a day!

By the crack of noon, we were driving north from Reykjavik to Glymur Falls, Iceland’s second-tallest waterfall.  It’s a rocky 3-hour round-trip hike to the falls.  The place was mobbed with tourons but the hike along the narrow canyon was spectacular with panoramic vistas, spooky caves, a scary river crossing on boulders and a big log, and steep stone steps climbing up the side of crumbling volcanic hills. 

Glymur means “clang” in English and it comes with a nonsensical story. Every natural feature in Iceland has a silly supernatural story surrounding it.  Glymur involves a mischievous fairy, a giant whale, and a blind priest.

After our hike, we ate at Englendingavik, a green postcard-perfect restaurant along a sheltered harbor in the seaside town of Borgarnes, a city of 3,800 known as the “gateway to Snaefellsnes National Park”.  The seafood chowder was heavenly and the lamb shank was old-school Russian.  

Inna guessed our young waitress was Ukrainian, and sure enough, she had escaped the deadly war with her elderly parents and three-year-old son thanks to a national program that relocates refugees from the Ukrainian war to various towns around Iceland and provides them with $2,500 a month. When Inna asked what it was like to go from her lovely home in Ukraine to the icy middle of nowhere, Snezhanna said the peacefulness of her new asylum had given her back her life and saved her family from the deadly rocket barrage each night.  Hallelujah!

On our way through a series of desolate glacial valleys sprinkled with the occasional sturdy white farmhouse with a red metal roof, the Ring Road took us past sinuous streams, shaggy sheep, and snow-capped mountains.  It was a dreamscape of epic proportions.

Near the seaside village of Blönduós, we stumbled upon a historic roadside attraction called Pristapar, where on a cold January day in 1830, a double beheading took place, when Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Friðrik Sigurðsson were executed. They had been sentenced to death for murdering Natan Ketilsson and Pétur Jónsson at the farm Illugastaðir. The slaying was quite brutal.  Both men had their skulls bashed in with a hammer, and then they were stabbed multiple times before being burned after the ladies set the farmhouse ablaze. The district commissioner decided to make the execution an example and a warning to others—and no doubt fan his mommy issues. So he hired a family member of one of the deceased to chop off murderers’ heads and then mounted them on pikes atop Þrístapar Hill for all to see.  Then he buried the bodies in a nearby field.  This was the last execution in Iceland.

We stopped for the night at the timeless Hotel Blönduós as the sun was setting.  It was around 9:30.

The old town of Blönduós stands by the open sea, where many of the original houses were built when the town was booming as a major textile center.  The old women’s school at Blönduós houses the Icelandic Textile Center.

We strolled around town and checked out Hillebrandshús, one of the oldest wooden houses in Iceland, erected in Blönduós in 1877 (it had previously stood in Skagastrond for 130 years), and a lovely seaside church. Above the sleepy village sat one of the oddest churches I have ever seen. It was gunmetal gray and looked vaguely like a fort. They really go in for stark, futuristic churches in Iceland for some unknown reason. And they are usually locked.

We had left Reykjavik only twelve hours before but it seemed like another lifetime.  We had driven about 200 miles but the sensory overload had messed with our internal clocks and turned our brains to mush.  We were like newborns with our heads on a swivel, staring out at the world around us in utter amazement and confusion.  This would be our brave new world for the foreseeable future.