We had a nice lie in this morning and didn’t get up til 8am. A quick breakfast at camp and then we walked straight to a glacier.

Glacier

We didn’t get to touch it or go on it because it is sadly melting. The water that melts from the glacier runs underneath the glacier and veins out into a web of rivers, much like the effusive volcanos. Therefore, there were many small and large rivers of freezing water that prevented us from getting to the glacier itself. Furthermore, those little rivers or lakes (if the water aggregates on flat land with no outlet) have icebergs!

River in front of glacier

Mark was so kind and took off his shoe (modern day Cinderella) and stepped in the cold water and grabbed an iceberg for me so today I held my very first iceberg!

Me and my pet iceberg

Yes, the icebergs are fun to watch and they’re beautiful. They glisten in the light and are even more fun to discern shapes of than clouds! But, it is sad. The existence of icebergs are the breaking off of part of the glacier. Some icebergs warm so much from the sun that they break off even more from each other and float down the river and eventually end up in the ocean. Each glacier here has receded exponentially since 1890. I hope the next generation will get to see these glaciers, even just one. Their ephemerality make them even more of a beauty. If you haven’t seen one, do yourself a favor.

Icebergs. There are seals and fish in this water, amazingly!

We completed our 7hrs of driving today on an F road. F roads in Iceland are gravel roads. They can be treacherous off-roading and some car rentals ban a short list of F roads. We were on one today & it was a blast. We crossed a series of rivers, one of which Mark held his breath while driving over. The land is largely flat on either side with large glaciers or volcanos jutting up from every horizon. Think Jurassic Park. Iceland is the size of what US state? Answer at the bottom. What’s Iceland’s population? Answer at the bottom. Sheep, cows and horses adorned the edges of the road again today. They amble along without looking up at us.

Camp is lovely. We had a beautiful little hike to a waterfall.

It’s 10pm and bright as day out. 5am wake up with an 11hr drive ahead of us. Last full day in Europe!

Seep well, wherever you are!

M+D

Kentucky. Did you guess that small?

375,318. Tiny, right? So as you can imagine we’re not seeing many people (besides tourists) or homes for that matter. 1.7 million tourists last year!

We have arrived in Iceland! we woke at 4:20am, checked out of the Radisson Blu and walked across the street to get our bus to the airport. We were there within 20 minutes, bag tag printed and through security within 10. We had a nice 1hr flight from Tromsø to Oslo. And then a 3hr flight from Oslo to Reykjavik. Iceland is 2hrs behind so it’s as if we have been up since 2:20am so I’ll do the best I can here!

We took a shuttle bus to our car rental and within 15 minutes or so we were up and running. Mark rented a Jeep, please let that be stated for the record :)

It has a camper van on top. Will he fit? What is everyone’s wager?

Once we got in our Jeep today around half 11, we hit the ground running! We drove about 120 miles today. We headed a bit SE and our first stop was a lava cave. It was soooo cool! ;) We learned that there are two kinds of volcanoes: erupting and effusive. There is a volcano currently erupting in Iceland. We plan to see in on Weds, before our flight, if conditions are still safe. The erupting volcanoes are the typical pointy ones everyone’s mind conjures up. The effusive volcanoes are flat, their lava spews and creates veins on lava running from the volcano. When the lava is exposed to the cool environment it cools, hardens and becomes black. But there is still lava flowing under that black layer. Our guide was hilarious and needs her own standup!

The below caves were made exclusively from lava from an effusive volcano that erupted for 3-6yrs 5000 years ago. Crazy!

The red marks are iron, the gold sulfur and the white volcano bacteria! NASA studied this very cave a few years ago because that bacteria may be the life we potentially find on Mars as it is volcanic. So cool!

Next, we stopped at a gigantic, ginormous, high, spluttering waterfall! It was beautiful but I know nothing about it hence the excessive use of adjectives.

Money please! Taller than Mark! Magnifique!

Then, we drove 20 minutes to a crashed plane. It was a US plane that crashed her in 1973. Other details are varying online so hang tight till we get to the bottom of it. It was a 4mi hike out and back to it. We arrived to the parking lot at 5pm. We were hungry and tired but we wanted to see this plane so we power walked and got it all done with 1hr 10mins. We were impressed with our timing and accomplishment. Now it was dinner time!

We drove another hour to dinner and had a lovely meal at Systrakaffi. One of the best mushroom tagliatelle in cream sauces I have ever had. Each mushroom was different and bursting with flavor. Mark got a burger and the fries were perfectly seasoned.

We had one more hour drive to our campsite, arriving at 9pm. Our 6hrs of driving today have been absolutely majestic. The landscape has already diversified so much. Some green hills make me second guess that I’m not in Ireland. Other mountains are jagged and gray or dark black. There are glaciers that ascend above the cloud cover and it’s impossible to see where they end. It’s spiritual and awe inspiring. Caol Ait (pronounced kale oct) in Gaelic, meaning thin veil. That’s a place where the space between us and divinity is just a thin veil. I love that.

Green pasture on one side, black sand on the other

I hope everyone else is well. We miss you, and think of you often! Looking forward to sharing the rest of our stories in person! Night night!

M+D

We had a nice lie in on Sunday morning, knowing that hardly anything is open on Sundays in Norway. We woke at 9am and Mark realized that I had booked our Iceland tickets for Aug 31st instead of July 31. Oops! Not a fun mistake to make. So, the scramble and hunt to change that was quickly in motion. I called Chase Travel, who I booked the tickets through. They said they couldn’t get in contact with our airline, SAS, and so they couldn’t process anything. We took a bus ride to the airport to get in front of an SAS employee, but the airport is so small that the only employees there were baggage ones from Tromsø Airport and none specifically employed by SAS. They were able to give us an SAS phone number, which gave us information, so that was a clue in the saga. We took the bus back to the hotel, called Chase again and were able to get on the exact same flight, but with the correct dates. Three hours later and a chunk of change and it was sorted. Phew! We had a lovely breakfast of an omelette and parfait. I then headed out to the art gallery for a day two visit, while Mark stitched his bathing suit in the hotel room.

We are sauna hooked so we tried Tromsø’s sauna. This one was called Pust, which is Norwegian for breath. It was very fun. We couldn’t last more than 11 minutes in the sauna, followed by jumps into the Norwegian Sea. I found this water colder, but maybe that was because the weather was warmer in Tromsø than in Stokmarknes. We unfortunately didn’t take any photos. We decided that we liked Dypp a little more, and perhaps Bellingham needs one?

After a quick change we went in search of caviar. Unfortunately, the one fish restaurant open on Sunday was out of it. We still enjoyed a nice drink on the boardwalk. It was so warm we had to stay out of the sun. I think that’s a first this Norway trip. I asked the concierge in our hotel if they are busier in the summer or winter (as all Tromsø’s online recommendations seem to be northern lights geared) and he replied, “Oh far busier in the winter! Most people want to be somewhere warm in the summer!” Well, we missed that memo! We have largely had great weather, though. It has been chilly and gray at some point every day but we really lucked out not getting rained on while cycling. The chilly weather is perfect biking weather as well. It was nice to feel the sun and warmth today though.

We then went to a nice pizza restaurant and afterwards we watched the Tromsø - Bodø football match at a pub (Tromsø has pubs and is known nationally as a party town, but as they say, I don’t think they‘d be able to do much damage). Last night, our bartender warned us that this was a huge match and that the Tromsø - Bodø rivalry is alive and well. This is the same bartender that said to us, “What state are you from? You look like mountain people.” Keep in mind, this was said after we had showered and changed out of our biking clothes and put on our best ”going out” clothes. Yikes! I guess we’re not fooling anyone. We made it to halftime, with a score of 1-0, Tromsø. Tromsø was the underdog so that was exciting and they ended up winning 2-0. We had a quiet evening packing and finishing Master & Commander.

4:20 wake up for our flight to Iceland!

Some final thoughts on Norway:

1. It is so clean! There’s no trash or debris on the roads, which is unusual. Cleanliness is a national value, we learned. People’s lawns are perfect, flowers abounding, and their houses/paint are in great condition, especially considering the harsh weather they’re exposed to.
2. Eye contact is very important in Norway, but words are not. There is a lot of non-verbal communication and thus they have mastered the art of subtleties. Sudden/grand movements make people uncomfortable.
3. Cars are super respectful of cyclists.
4. Every fish is cod on the menu :)
5. Pubs are not a thing! When you google it, supermarkets are the only things to match your search and it is illegal for supermarkets to sell wine. They do sell beer, though. Wine is sold in a wine monopoly (really). We couldn’t even get a glass of wine to go at our hotel. Each town will have about 8 supermarkets and zero pubs. It’s not the culture. They spend their time fishing and hiking. Or indoors cooking, cleaning or doing art. We saw lots of galleries.
6. It is a late country. The roads are empty before 9am. We were turned away at 1:15pm for lunch being told, “You’re a little early for lunch. That starts at 2pm.“
7. The food has been absolutely fabulous! We truly ate our way through Norway. I only had one or two bad meals, and those were pizzas that were almost certainly frozen. It is a meat heavy cuisine. Every sandwich I got I pealed the ham off and handed it to Mark. Almost every dinner menu had a veggie option, but for the few that’s only option ended up being a pizza, it was not great. Otherwise, I had interesting and tasty and intricate vegetarian meals, even in very small towns.
8. We would recommend Norway a thousand times over! We of course only saw a sliver of it, but would return in a heartbeat. The part that we saw was jaw droppingly beautiful. Most of our rides were spent saying, “Wow!”, “Beautiful!” or “Look right! Look left! Look in front!” and each vantage point was unique and majestic. The photos show a fraction of its reality. There were lots of outdoorsy people there. Hikers, cyclists, rock climbers, kayakers, traveling by foot, bike, truck or camper van. It is an outdoor person’s fairytale. For those who are not interested in the outdoors, you’d be hard pressed to occupy your time in the towns/places we were. You can camp anywhere (you do not have to camp within an established campsite although there are those available as well), with only a few reasonable restrictions, so that additionally makes Norway a camper’s haven.

Thank you, Norway, for a great 11 days and see you in the future, whales!

We made it! Today marks the end of our biking portion of the trip. We’re currently in a nice king bed in the Radisson Blu in Tromsø, and very much enjoying it.

We woke up around 8AM this morning and were very efficient trying to get out of camp. Unfortunately, we needed to burn the rest of our fuel so we could safely dispose of the canister, and that took around 1.5 hours, so we had to sit and wait at the campsite for that time. Luckily it wasn’t too cold nor too buggy!

We got on the road shortly after 10, and made good time to Tromsø. We made it to town by around noon (23 miles) and first went to the post office to pick up our luggage that we didn’t take on the bikes. For the avid reader, this is the package we shipped from Bodø at the start of the trip. Thankfully it was there! And we got it no problem.

With our luggage in hand, we went to the bike shop that we rented our bikes from and returned all the gear. Thankfully that went smoothly as well! (It should‘ve! We paid a fortune for those bikes!!) We had an extra canister of gas from the trip that we have to a couple that was just starting their trip starting from Tromsø. The wife was very excited when we offered the free canister. She told us that she had just bought one from the store, but was going to return that one for the one we gave her. It also helped us, as we didn’t need to dispose of a full canister of gas!

From the bike shop we walked half a block over to our hotel, where they let us check in early! By 1pm, Darragh was in the shower and I was sorting clothing. Let’s just say a decent amount of laundry needs to be done. We looked at doing it at the hotel, but just washing a single shirt is $35. Pass. We’ll do it at the first campsite in Iceland.

After we were all showered and looking like normal humans again, we went out for lunch and ran into the younger Swiss couple that we’ve seen a couple times now on this trip. They told us they were taking another rest day in Tromsø. When we asked what campsite they were stating at (we first met them in a campsite in Stokmarknes) they said, oh no, tonight we’re in a hotel. Based on their phrasing (somewhat emphasizing the word “rest” in the same way I said it) I’m going to claim credit for giving them the idea of rest days, and I think they love it!

After lunch we did some shopping around town. I tapped out after 45 minutes, I’ve had enough :). Darragh continued shopping for another few hire hours and found some clothes she was happy with!

We had dinner out in town at a place called Bardus Bistro, then had a drink at the bar next door, and then called it a night. We went back to watch “Master and Commander” (such a classic) but _someone_ started drifting off about halfway through, and someone else has seen the film tons of times before, so it just became bedtime.

Tomorrow we’ll sleep in, and then enjoy the city! With more photos as well. Then it’s off to Iceland! I just confirmed the rental car, and that we can take it on the backroads of Iceland, so I’m excited for that!

The sun is set for 2.5 hours tonight, so it may finally get dark as well!!

This will be a short post, as all the photos are on Darragh’s phone, and she is sleeping soundly.

Today was a very laid back day. We did about 25 miles, mostly after dinner! We slept in in our lovely cabin, and then had a lazy morning. Darragh read (she’s reading a book on Survival) and I looked for Iceland plans and looked ahead to my trip with Ryan biking through somewhere in the PNW (not sure where yet).

We rolled out of the hut at around noon to make a 2pm ferry to the region of Troms where Tromsø is. I didn’t get this until now but, we’ve gone through a few areas of Norway. We started in Lofoten which is a district in Nordland county. from there we went into Andøya, which is a municipality in the Vesterålen district of Nordland. we were in Senja yesterday (I’m actually not sure what county or district that is), and are in the county of Troms today!

We’re camped what seems like at elevation, but we’re just on a small pass between two fjords. I still don’t have video uploads working, so we’ll have to wait for those :(.

We had dinner in a lovely town called Sommarøy. It looked like it was gearing up for a bit of a weekend, with people coming up from Tromsø. We ate at “The Artic Hotel“ and it was excellent.

We then crushed 22 miles in under 2 hours (that’s great), and are now cozy in our tent ready for sleep!

Tomorrow will have a nice shower! (My first warm shower in a week) and explore Tromsø!