Random Notes on Iceland

When I first arrived in Iceland, I thought Reykjavik was a small town. Apparently all it takes is a few days driving around the island to change one's mind. After a week of seeing nothing but isolated farms and the occasional town with a few dozen houses, your perspective changes. Getting back to Reykjavik, it suddenly seems huge.

The roads are an interesting proposition. You have two-lane roads all around, but the bridges are almost always one-lane. We even get a few one-lane tunnels just for fun. 'Einbreid Bru' is some Icelandic you learn really fast. We have F roads which you can only drive through if you have 4-wheel drive. We have roads winding up mountains with sheer drops down the side and no guard-rails, followed by long straight stretches with guardrails. 

What they don't have are mile markers. I don't know why, but they were not there. It makes finding places a little more challenging. For us the work around was to put in coordinates in our GPS, but I have no idea how people handled this before then.

They do have raised posts with reflectors (cat's eyes?) along both sides of the roads. There was one spot we went that had them twice as high on one side of the road than on the other. I still haven't figured out what that was for.

There are sheep everywhere, and every time we got close to one they were branded. We saw branded sheep in places where there were no farms within sight, which makes me wonder, "how do the farmers find their sheep when it's shearing time?" Don't think they had trackers on them, and I'm curious as to how they handle this.

The other three animals we found in the farms where horses, cattle and rolies, big white cylindrical animals you could see grazing all over the place. Some people claimed they were just bales of hay in huge plastic bags, but I'm not convinced; they were moving around as much as the sheep. K. thought it would be a great idea to sneak into a farm and paint smiley faces on the rolies. In one of the places we drove by they had actually done that.

Swimming pools are a big deal, every town, no matter how small, had one. Heated of course, but used all year long.  The ones I saw were always covered, and a couple included huge water slides.

Everywhere we went the food was good. Everywhere we went the food was expensive.

When you first turn the shower (or faucet) on, it smells like sulfur. The smell goes away relatively fast, but it's definitely there.