The Southern Coast

On our second to last day in Iceland, we drove along the southern coast as far as Vik, and saw lots of cool things!

My sister and I at a glacier

Kenio Crater

Seljalandfoss

Behind the waterfall!

Puffins!  They were supposed to have left by now, but not these!

Iceland has tons of rainbows on drizzly days

Magical Lobster Soup

The second half of my family's Icelandic adventure was spent in Stokkseyri, south of Reykjavik, which boasts a fine seafood restaurant.  Its lobster soup is especially well-known, and my family checked their website to see if they did take out.  We found a very interesting English translation of the menu (my comments in italics):

----------------------------
Fjorubordid
and the sea said ok

Have you strolled along the black sand on Stokkseyri´s beach? Have you been spellbound by the white foaming waves out by the horizon and let the silvery waves lapping at the shoreline chase and tease you? Under a blue-pink sky mirrored in the water, this surface tempts and draws, yet is the harrowing limit of our human world. It´s where golden lobsters hook their claws together and dance a belly dance while mermaids serve tables amongst shrimp wrapped in seaweed, clapping shellfish and inquisitive haddock. This is a magic moment carrying you away to an intoxicated state of well-being and lust. Your greatest desire is to lick on lobster in garlic butter, gulp down the soup that has been lovingly pampered – little changed through the years.

The soup is magical. It is suitable for numerous occasions and happy moments on ordinary days, but the seashore takes no responsibility for consequences or stirring adventures that could result from ingesting it. It has a will of its own and, as such, it is risky for those who don´t want to venture beyond the average. This is the most famous lobster soup in the Republic of Iceland, prepared by handsome cooks who step naked out of the ocean at Stokkseyri with their catch: the Plumpest lobsters who desire only one thing – to get onto dry land. Adventurous creatures from the ocean world want to join us in just the same way as we want to join them in the depths.

People have struggled against storm after storm to get here and enjoy this soup. The desire for it can be so strong that rational thinking simply blows away with the wind. Below the black rock face at the Þrengsli mountain pass, between mountain vistas, under the stars, people rush toward the sea to sit down with our guests and party-happy ghosts, surrounded by some tickling pleasure coming from magical bowls at the Seashore, where a thousand candles cast their glow on weathered faces and loving wine skins. Matarást, the Icelandic expression for “love of food” takes on a new meaning.

The Seashore Restaurant in the village of Stokkseyri is an enchanted place of delight. People have to tear themselves away from it – but that´s alright. There´s only positive magic inside, tickling both stomach and soul. And now the magic has been sealed into jars for those who struggle with an irresistible craving for this great seafood delicacy from Icelandic waters, even when they´re unfortunate enough to be not close to the restaurant. Enjoy! Remember to live life to the fullest, and enjoy every pleasure and suspense that a good day brings.

---------------------

Where to start... the sea only said "ok"?  Not "yes" or something more enthusiastic?  "Ok" sounds like the sea really doesn't want to do anything but doesn't see a way out of it.

I have never seen lobsters do a belly dance.  I don't think I want to.

What sort of stirring adventures are we talking about here?  Is this a disclaimer absolving the restaurant of responsibility should their soup give you food poisoning?  Cause that's what it sounds like.

Handsome naked cooks?  Oh my.  I'm afraid I didn't see any of those in Stokkseyri.  It doesn't seem like a very practical way to catch lobster, and believe, the North Atlantic is cold.  Really cold.  Skinny dipping in it does not sound healthy.

I think the party-happy ghosts refers to the neighboring "Ghosts, Elves, and Trolls" Museum.  I'm not sure why they're party happy.  YOLO (you only live once)?  That doesn't make any sense.

Again with the tickling stomachs.  If my stomach ever tickles, I make a mad dash for the bathroom.  Stomachs should never tickle.

Literary criticisms aside, it was actually very good lobster soup.  Very different from the New England soup I know.  I would recommend it!

The Golden Circle

The Golden Circle is the standard tourist route from Reykjavik, hitting three major attractions and is something one must do in Iceland!  We completed the circle (more like a triangle for us, since we didn't start in Reykjavik) and the sights were impressive!  The first was Thingvellir, the location of Iceland's parliament, first formed around 1000AD.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is possibly the oldest legislative body in Europe.  Considering Iceland was an inhospitable island filled with Vikings, it's remarkable how peacefully governing occurred!  Instead of a king, 51 representatives from across the country gathered at Thingvellir every year in a rift in the land, with fresh water and lots of shelter.

Thingvellir

One person was the Lawspeaker, and he would stand up on a certain rock and recite the laws of the land.  This would take a couple days, then the Thing (as they called their parliament) would debate to add or change laws.  During this time, people built huts in the rift and lots of trading, celebrating, inflicting punishments on criminals, and arranging marriages happened.

The next stop on the Golden Circle is Geysir, the geyser after which all others are named.  Geysir itself isn't so active any more, but its next door neighbor erupts every five minutes or so, drenching tourists standing downwind! (not us, luckily)

Geysir

 Finally, we visited Gullfoss, an impressive waterfall.  Gullfoss means "golden waterfall," which could derive either from its muddy yellow glacial waters, its frequent rainbows, or legends of greedy men tossing their riches down the river to prevent others from having them.  The waterfalls were performing nicely, but there was a strong wind which made us rather damp.

Gullfoss

Despite being crowded, the Golden Circle was a lot of fun and well worth the trip!  I'm a bit behind in my posting, but soon there will be tales of puffins, waterfalls you can go behind, "magical" lobster soup, glaciers, and a trip into Reykjavik that involved sampling whale (not the endangered kind, I promise!) In the mean time, I've got to get ready to leave - I fly back to Wisconsin tomorrow!  Hooray!

Myvatn, One Last Time

It was a bittersweet farewell to Myvatn as I got to show my family around!

Giving a tour of the research station

My sister and her new friend at the Vogafjos Cafe

Myvatn Nature Baths

A rarer sight - a red-throated diver at the bird sanctuary

Then I made the drive from Myvatn to Akureyri for the last time.  I will miss Myvatn and I hope to go back some day!

Asbyrgi-Dettifoss

Here's some belated picture posting - Asbyrgi and Dettifoss are very different from the places I've been this summer and very cool!

Pond at the base of Asbyrgi

Puffins at some bird cliffs!

Asbyrgi

I finally made it to Dettifoss!

The Blaa Kannan

My sister and I visited a cafe called the Blaa Kannan (also known as the unofficial Akureyri office of the Myvatn research station) one evening.  It is a very lovely cafe and my sister liked it a lot, too.

mmmm!

Very pretty decor!

Hverfjall

I do have some pictures I haven't shown yet - on my last night in Myvatn, I climbed the crater Hverfjall.  It is a tephra ring which was formed in one massive steam explosion.

The climb up was pretty steep and gravelly!

Looking into the crater

Sunset from Hverfjall

Touring the Northeast

The past few days have been whirlwind tour!  Our base of operations is Akureyri, and we have made two day trips to Myvatn and one longer trip to Asbyrgi and Dettifoss.  I've been letting my dad take over as photographer - he just got a new camera that is much nicer than my hand-sized fuschia little device, although it's served me well this summer - so as soon as we all sit down and relax for a bit, I'll get some pictures from him and post them here!  You've probably seen a lot of similar pictures of Myvatn already.

Our activities thus far:
Day 1 - Myvatn
- Pick up Alex. Yay!
- Kalfastrond Lava Pillars
- Complain about the number of black flies.  Alex laughs.
- Dimmuborgir
- Lunch at Daddi's Pizza
- Smelly pots
- Krafla

Day 2 - Asbyrgi/Dettifoss
What are these strange names, you may ask?  Asbyrgi is a horseshoe shaped canyon that was carved out in one massive glacial flood, or made by Odin's eight-legged horse, depending on who you believe.  It is the Grand Canyon of Iceland and very impressive!  I will be sure do another post just on Asbyrgi.

Dettifoss is the biggest waterfall in Europe.  I've been trying to get there all summer with no success, and so dragged my family there (they were all more than willing!).  If you've seen the new movie Promotheus, I've heard that Dettifoss was filmed for that, although I haven't seen it myself.  The drive to Dettifoss was on a dirt road through a desert (due to overgrazing, probably), which didn't seem like a bad road to me at all, but made my family rather nervous! 

Day 3 - Myvatn
We had intended to make this a half day in Myvatn and then come back to Akureyri, but we took a bit longer in Myvatn than we'd thought we would.  That's probably my fault...
- Visit the research station!
- Lunch at the Cowshed Cafe.  Pet the cows.  My grandparents and my dad know cows pretty well, and managed to have cows rolling on their sides to have their necks scratched!  Even my little sister rolled a cow over!
- Alex makes the car stop to look at ducks.  Only my dad was impressed that they were Barrow's Goldeneye ducks, the iconic bird of the Myvatn area.
- Walk the pseudocraters
- Alex makes the car stop to pet horses.  Everyone was a little more impressed.
- Myvatn Nature Baths, another place I've wanted to go all summer and never made it!  However, Iceland not been living up to its name, and gorgeous, warm days aren't the best for nature bathing.  The blue mineral water was pretty cool though!
- Alex makes the car stop at the bird sanctuary.  Once again, my family was not all that impressed, especially since all we were seeing is mallards (common as dirt in the Midwest), but then we spotted a loon on the way out!  It was close to the car and posing beautifully.  Mission: get my family excited about birds - accomplished.

Today we plan to hang out around Akureyri.  Tomorrow,we head south!

Vacation Time!

My family is coming tomorrow!  I think I might burst from excitement.  Finally, I get to show my family what I've been doing all summer!  It almost seems weird to think that they will be in Iceland - they are in Iceland currently, actually.  Tomorrow morning, my parents, sister, and 2 grandparents are driving from Akureyri to pick me up.  We've dubbed it the Linz Invasion of Iceland, since there are so many of us! 

We will be spending 4 days in the Myvatn/Akureyri area, then driving along the west side of Iceland to a town a bit south of Reykjavik.  I believe we'll be staying in Stokkseyri, but I'm not 100% sure.  Then we fly home from Reykjavik!  Iceland's been great, but I'm really excited to go home!

The flip side of this is that I'm not sure if I'll be able to blog while I'm trekking around Iceland.  If I don't find some time and internet to tell you what my family and I have been up to, I'll be sure to post all about it when I get back to the States!

Until next time,
Alex

Yet Another Gorgeous Sunset

The great thing about Icelandic summers is that if you see a beautiful sunset, you can wait half an hour to get your camera because it'll still be there.  Not so anymore - it's getting late enough that the sun set at 10 and quickly became dark.  I managed to get a few pictures while it was still light out!

Click for larger image!

The Freshest Fruit You'll Find in Iceland

Leaves are already starting to yellow here, although the temperatures have been warm by Icelandic standards - except that we've had an incredibly strong wind of 20 m/s (40 mph).  More importantly, the unassuming little plant I've been identifying as "vaccinium" all summer turned out to be a blueberry bush!  We went out on Kalfastrond to see what we could find and ended up with a lot of blueberries!

Half of our haul!

So far with only been eating them on cereal, in skyr, or just straight, but there are plans for blueberry pancakes in the future.

Here's a picture of the lake right outside our house - Kalfastrond is the most sheltered part of the lake and is usually relatively calm even when it's not safe to go out on the rest of the lake.  Not so much today, though.

White caps = bad

And here's a panorma shot from Nammifjall, the mud pots I visited a few days ago:

Click for a larger image!

One last blog tonight, I promise!

My apologies for the severe lack of blogs followed by four in one night - I forgot one more little adventure to tell you about!  We've already got blog-worthy plans for the next two nights, so I wanted to get these posted before I became swamped in pictures and stories.

We were driving between field sites on the Ring Road, Iceland's major highway, when we saw this:

First off, that's what happens to your windshield after driving in midge columns.  More importantly, that's a horse walking down the Ring Road, with three accomplices grazing in the ditch.  These were escaped horses from one of the neighboring farms, and they looked like they were having a grand old time sampling this ungrazed space and occasionally sauntering up to see what's happening on the road.  We stopped in at Daddi's Pizza and told them about the horses.  Since everybody in Iceland knows everybody else, the woman working at Daddi's simply called the farmer and let him know about the horses.  Crisis averted!

Farewell to Husavik

After a rather interesting charter fishing trip taken by some members of our group led to complementary dinners at a swanky restaurant in Husavik, we decided to take one last trip up to Husavik before the end of the summer.  Husavik will always hold a place in my heart as the closest outpost of civilization and the place we'd usually go to do touristy things and eat at restaurants.  Because we didn't all get free meals at the fancy restaurant, a few of us went to a different seafood restaurant we had coupons for.  I'm not usually a big fan of fish but the cod shish-kebab I had was pretty good!  We also hit up the souvenir shops.  I think I found everything I needed for a special someone back home, but I'm not telling what I got!

We also decided to check out a thermal pool just outside of Husavik.  It was possibly my favorite swimming spot in Iceland!  It's a man-made dam in a hot stream which resulted in a good-sized, bathtub temperature lake.  We could tell it was artificial because of the sandy bottom, strategically placed plants to prevent erosion, and some goldfish I spotted swimming in the lake!

The steaming stream

In and Around Kalfastrond

Our big project yesterday was taking down the midge exclusion cages at Kalfastrond.  Although we always take them down for the winter (our poor mesh contraptions could never survive an Icelandic winter!), the cages will be moved to a new site next year.  The problem is that this site is rather wetter than the rest of Myvatn and not very representative of the area.  Compound that with goose grazing problems, horse pooping problems, and what appears to be sheep-gnawing-on-the-cages problems, it seemed like a good idea to move the midge exclusion experiment to a dryer, fenced area.

 It's also haying time at Kalfastrond! It reminds me of the Midwest a lot.  It's even starting to feel like fall here, and there seems to be something close to true darkness around midnight now!  I'm hoping I can spot some Northern Lights.

Krafla

In our last week, we've been making quite the effort to see the sights around Myvatn we've missed before it's time to leave!  The biggest miss of all of these was Krafla, a caldera visible from our house that is rather active and last erupted in 1984 (and rumour has it that it's overdue for another one!)  Krafla isn't like a traditional cone shaped volcano - think more like Yellowstone, but with the potential to crack and ooze lava on occasion.  And like Yellowstone, it has mudpots!

Driving past (and underneath) the geothermal power plant, we next arrived at the site of the most recent Krafla eruptions.  This lava flow was created in the 70's and 80's.  Before that, the most recent eruption had been the Myvatn Fires in the 1720's, when lava could be seen spewing from the Myvatn area from a distance, and a lava flow destroyed three farms while miraculously missing the church.

There was steam coming from cracks all over the lava field!

Paths of the most recent flows

Sunset over Krafla (around 10:30PM!)

For more reading:

I'm guest writing on the lab blog Smidge of Midge about all of the counting we've been doing!  If you want to check it out, the link is: http://uwmyvatn.blogspot.com/2012/08/one-mite-two-mite-three-mite-four.html
There's all sorts of great posts about our work there as well!

And for a different perspective on the summer (as well as some awkward photos of me dancing), check out my roomie Elsemarie's blog at http://onthetopofthemidgeworld.wordpress.com/# !

The Last Push

I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but it is suddenly August!  That also means I have only 12 days for research, then my family is joining me to tour around Iceland for 10 days, then back to Madison!  As fun as this summer has been, I'm really excited to be a tourist and to get back to Madison.

Half the group is leaving around the same time I am, so there is a big push to get everything done in the next week and a half.  That means final rounds of routine sampling, taking down experiments, setting up new ones for next year, and of course finishing up all of the counting that still needs to be done.  Yesterday, we went on what we thought was going to be the last transect collecting run, but there were so many midges out that we decided to leave them up for another week - there's a second, smaller midge emergence in late summer, just in time for my family to arrive! (Sorry guys).

Bug collecting station!

We get to see a lot of beautiful places while collecting transects

Midge column!

We also went to Akureyri to run some errands.  We didn't have time for any sight-seeing, but we did stop for hot dogs at the most scenic gas station I've ever been at.

European Fanta is better than American Fanta

French fry thief

I don't think I've waxed poetic on Icelandic hot dogs yet.  Hot dogs are pretty much Iceland's unofficial national food and can be bought freshly grilled from most gas stations.  They are made primarily of lamb, which makes them taste better than American hot dogs, in my opinion, and the toppings are ketchup, a mustard/mayo mix, fresh onions, and fried onions.  In Northern Iceland, the toppings go underneath the hot dog; in Southern Iceland, they go on the top like we usually do hot dogs in the States.  They are delicious and are a great, cheap dinner on the go!