Week 2: Rural Iceland

Hey everyone!

Thank you for your patience. I’m learning how to find “normal” while traveling full-time. The hardest part has been figuring out daily timing. I make it all the way through morning work, afternoon exploring and dinner and then I just hit exhausted and want to curl up and go to sleep. Doing so much is a great problem, but being so sleepy in the evenings does make it hard to ensure I’m journaling and updating the blog. Finding a journaling and blogging pattern is one of my goals for the next few weeks, so hopefully you won’t have to wait so long between posts again!

A lot has happened since I posted last. We had a week exploring rural Iceland and just finished our first week in Amsterdam. I’ll post in a few days about Amsterdam!

When we were in rural Iceland, we stayed in a village called Húsafell. Calling Húsafell a village is probably being a bit generous to the size. Húsafell consists of a hotel, a swimming pool, a small convenience store/bistro and some summer cabins. Our cabin was absolutely adorable and the area was so beautiful and peaceful.

For school this week, we kept it pretty simple. We kept our pattern of work in the morning and exploring in the afternoon, but the “exploring” portion was a little different this week. We hiked around the area, made salt dough sculptures, cooked traditional Icelandic food, went to a geothermal heated swimming pool (after learning Icelandic swimming pool customs) and hiked through a lava tube. The girls also wrote their first reports this week. Audrey wrote a report on different types of waterfalls using waterfalls in Iceland as examples of each type. Maurene wrote a report about the Folklore of Iceland – ghosts, elves and trolls!

One of our ongoing projects for the year is to make a cookbook full of recipes from the different countries we visit. For Icelandic food, Audrey and Maurene chose to make baked salmon with lemon and spices and macaroni soup. The salmon was delicious. The soup was good too, but super sweet! Only after tasting the soup did I really understand how it could be classified as a desert.

My favorite part of the week was the lava tube. The tube was formed in the year 900 during a volcanic eruption. There was evidence that someone even lived in the tube around the year 1000! It was literally freezing in the tube, so there were ice stalagmites formed from glacier water that was dripping after being filtered through the lava rock. There were also lava roses (rounded lava stalagmites), lava candles (taller lava stalagmites) and lava straws (hollow lava stalactites)! Most caves in Iceland are stripped of their roses, candles and straws because people went in and took them. This particular lava tube was sealed off by ice for hundreds of years, so it was very well-preserved and amazing to see. At the end of the cave, we turned off all of our lights and experience complete darkness. It is physically impossible for your eyes to adjust to pure pitch darkness, but if you move your hand toward your face your mind still tricks you into thinking you can see a shadow of your hand. The girls did an amazing job staying positive and enjoying the experience in the cold and dark.

Over the weekend, I got to hike to Hraunfossar and Barnafoss waterfalls. These waterfalls are special even by Icelandic waterfall standards, because they are on the very edge of a lava rock field. They are formed from the glacier water that has been sifted through the lava rocks across the field, so they are full of incredibly pure water. I was astounded at just how much water was pouring out of the field at any given moment. The hike was beautiful.

The rest of the weekend was spent relaxing in the hot tub and preparing for our flight to Amsterdam!

To sum up my time in Iceland, I’ve compiled a list of my 10 favorite things I’ve learned here.

1. There are over 900 waterfalls in Iceland! There are also 130 volcanic mountains, 35 of which are active! There is a volcanic eruption in Iceland on average once every four years. At the same time, 11% of the country is covered by glaciers. Hence the nickname, “the land of fire and ice.”
2. The sheep roam free over the summer. Watch out when you’re walking or driving, because they are everywhere! In the fall, the people of Iceland get together and round them up before sorting them back to their original home.
3. Most of the bridges in Iceland are one lane. You have to wait for any oncoming traffic before proceeding across the bridge. They do this because when a volcano erupts and causes glacier water flooding, the bridges are very likely to be destroyed. It’s cheaper and faster to only have to replace a one lane bridge instead of a two lane bridge.
4. Iceland is spreading apart at a rate of 2cm per year between the European and North American tectonic plates.
5. Iceland doesn’t have a military. Only a Coast Guard. The crime rate is so low that the police officers don’t even carry guns.
6. Icelanders have their first swimming lesson between 3 and 6 MONTHS old. (Isn’t that crazy!?) Starting in 1st grade, swimming is a compulsory tested subject in school until the 10th grade. Most towns have swimming pools, as by law towns above a certain size are required to have a pool. This interest in ensuring everyone can swim is related to how large the fishing industry is in Iceland.
7. The last name system in Iceland involves taking your parent’s name and adding -son of or -daughter of. So my last name would be Bennettdóttir or Kerilyndóttir, meaning daughter of Bennett or Keri.
8. Icelandic has changed so little over the years that kids still read the Icelandic sagas written a thousand years ago in school!
9. It gets colder in Kansas during the winters than in Iceland. The temperature in Iceland usually only gets down to around freezing.
10. Icelandic horses are considered the purest horse breed on Earth. That’s because in the year 982, it was decreed that no more horses should be brought to the island. All of the horses in Iceland are descendants from the horses that were brought to the island before the year 982. Any horses that leave Iceland are not allowed to be brought back to Iceland because of the disease risk.

I absolutely loved my time in Iceland. It is currently toward the top of my list of places I want to go back to. I know I’ve said this before, but if you have the chance to go to Iceland, do it! It’s an amazing place.