When in Iceland, do as the sheep do... (#1)

Wear wool!

Started the trip out at the Orlando airport thinking of our destination with Arctic water!  Closer examination revealed misleading labeling, as we just had good ol' Florida spring water in our possession.

We promptly refilled the bottle with true arctic waters once we made it to Reykjavik and throughout the trip!

*Disclaimer: I will not be using any accents or special letters in the Icelandic words throughout.  I will otherwise try to spell words correctly, but apologize in advance for any misspellings (Icelandic words are hard)! 

 

 

 Iceland is known for its hotdogs.  We found that we weren't impressed with the gas station pylsur (as shown in this photo), as they were wrapped in sub-par bacon.  But towards the end of the trip we discovered what the hotdogs were really all about - little pylsur stands in Selfoss and Reykjavik served up delicious dogs with "everything:" raw onion, fried onion, ketchup, mustard, and remoulade.  (No bacon).  

Beautiful cemetery, Holavallagardur, across the street from our first Airbnb.  Very peaceful place to walk around and enjoy the trees, flowers, and birds (redwings and white wagtails).  

Leaving the iconic church, Hallgrimskirkja, in Reykjavik, we walked through a little sculpture garden that may have been part of a museum.  It included this interesting sculpture, which I thought could be entitled: Efficiency in milking, or efficiency in disease transmission.

A friendly cat greeted us along the street and solicited pets.

 

We had really wonderful weather throughout the first half to two-thirds of our trip.  Quite a bit of sunshine and relatively warm temperatures (it doesn't really ever get warm in Iceland!) made for great walking in town and hiking and camping further afield.  

 

Lake Tjornin mallards.

 

 

Icelandic horses across the fence from our first campsite at Olafsvik.  The horses were quiet company, compared to the noisy gulls nesting on the cliffs above.  We found that with 24 hours of daylight, the birds don't go to bed, they just keep up a ruckus at all times of night!

Our first night at Olafsvik we took a drive into the northern part of Snaefellsjokull National Park.  We did several mini-hikes throughout the evening.  It was weird getting used to the fact that we didn't need to worry about getting stuck out on the trail in the dark or needing to bring a headlamp (something in retrospect I did not need to pack); we could keep hiking as long as we wanted into the night.  First we stopped at Gufuskalar to see the fish-drying huts (above). 

 

 Next we stopped at Skardsvik, where we saw the site of a viking grave (the remains from which we saw in the National Museum in Reykjavik), examined the sand, and put a hand into the cold Atlantic waters.

 

The we moved on to Gardar Beruvik and a hike through a lava field with Snaefellsjokull in the distance and what appeared to be a possible explosion crater off to one side (but we didn't actually hike up to it, so we're not certain).  The fissures and rock formations were incredible.  The diversity of mosses, lichens, tiny flowers, and grasses growing on the rocks was even more incredible.  Here we also saw a ptarmigan and golden plover!

 

 

Our last stop of the evening was at Ondverdarnes.  There was a colorful lighthouse here.  We encountered our first eiders of the trip - a flock of males flew over as we were admiring the scenery.

 

There was also a magical well here that the settlers had discovered and built a walled ramp leading down to.  The fresh water is said to be holy.

 

Back at camp, we had dinner around 10:30 pm!

Goodbye to Olafsvik and Snaefellsjokull.  Our first close encounter with Icelandic sheep on the side of the road.  There are sheep everywhere in this country, the only real exception being the streets of Reykjavik, but I wouldn't put it past them to have some festival and parade sheep in!  The ewes had scraggly wool skirts on their butts, and the lambs were so adorably fluffy that I wanted to smuggle them home with me!  

We only wished we had had more time to explore this national park and peninsula.  Another trip will have to happen!  The road was placed precariously between ocean and mountains.  Unlike in the US, roads on the side of a mountain with a steep drop off usually do not have any kind of barricades or guard rails...makes for fun driving.  Granted the speed limit is never fast in Iceland; fastest allowed speed is 90 kph, which translates to about 55 mph.  We had people pass us, but they couldn't have been doing more than 100-110 kph on the straight stretches.

 

We left the Snaefellsnes peninsula with a stop to climb Helgafell, a little hill of a mountain surrounded by private land (sheep/horse farms) and overlooking the Breidafjordur Bay.  You are supposed to climb the mountain without speaking or looking back, and you may make three wishes while facing east.  There was an interesting sundial-appearing thing on top of the mountain, which we discovered was a directional guide pointing out the landmarks all around (these turned out to be placed at many overlooks in Iceland).

 

Our next campsite was in the town of Skagastrond.  The benefit of a semi-unplanned trip is discovering places off the beaten track, just like this.  Below our campsite were the bird cliffs, Spakonufellhofdi, and above our campsite was the mountain, Spakonufell.  We first attempted an evening hike of the mountain, but after following an unmarked footpath behind the campsite that wasn't looking promising, decided we could not find the trailhead on foot and that we would drive to it instead.  The directions in the little town hiking guide led us to a dead end at the back of a neighborhood, quite far from the mountain.  Turned out we were at the bird cliffs! 

  So we hiked there instead, which was great.  They had signs along the path describing different bird species that nest on the cliffs.  We enjoyed watching a large group of arctic terns chase away a gull from their grassy nesting knoll.  There were lots of gulls resting on rock shelves on the cliffs, common eiders with so many fuzzy ducklings in the shallow, protected waters, and oystercatchers here and there.

 

 

 In the morning, we found the trailhead to Spakonufell.  Finding the trail itself was more challenging.  There was a faint 2-wheel track going uphill, vaguely towards the mountain, so we followed that until it petered out.

There were no obvious cairns or trail markers in sight, so we decided to just head towards the mountain.  The great thing about Iceland is that there are no trees to obscure the view, so you can say "well, we need to get to that peak, so lets walk that way" or "well, we need to get down to the ocean, so lets walk that way" (as we also lost the trail again on the way back down to the car).  Along the way we stumbled upon a boneyard with multiple horse skulls, vertebrae, ribs, and leg bones.  Not sure what that was doing there... 

 

Our "bushwhacking" then led us through a marshy bog, where we disturbed a pair of black-tailed godwits.  

The trail we got onto after the marsh yielded a whole fleece, no sign of the poor chilly sheep who lost her wool.

We did eventually manage to find the trail, only after multiple erroneous forays on well-defined sheep trails (we were sharing the mountain with a handful of sheep who kept a wary distance from us).  We figured out that when we ended up on a well-rutted track, it was the wrong trail.  The human trail was a barely visible, faint disturbance of vegetation, marked with rebar stakes about a foot high wrapped in faded yellow plastic (not exactly highly visible against a backdrop of green/brown/yellowish shades of mosses and rock).

 

It was cold and windy on top of the mountain.  The top is a wide plateau, covered in spongy mosses.  Grand views of the ocean in one direction and mountains in the other, all shrouded in a fine mist.

A sampling of arctic, alpine wildflowers.  Hiking in Iceland was wonderful in part because even if you had to look at your feet, the view was so pretty.

 

The view from our Airbnb on the other side of the fjord from Akureyri.  We had a nice respite from camping, with the best shower of my life (not exaggerating), laundry, delicious breakfast and coffee, and the friendly company of our host Gudfinna.  It was neat finally getting to really talk to an Icelander and learn about the country, the language, the sheep (Gudfinna and her husband have a small flock of sheep who were up on the mountain summer range), etc.

 We went to the botanical garden in Akureyri, the northern-most botanical garden in the world.  We found some of the plants we'd been seeing while hiking.  We also found this funny Dr. Seuss-like plant!  It was a well-done garden and was lovely to walk around.  It also happened to be Independence Day in Iceland (June 17) so there was a festival with lots of kids attending, not deterred by the rainy weather.  We ducked out of the rain into the garden cafe for kaffi and te.  It proceeded to hail, but nothing too serious. 

*I am skipping ahead in time here, past our next two days camping at Lake Myvatn.  I am going to come back to that in a 2nd post, because it was so cool it deserves more time. 

 After camping at Lake Myvatn for two nights, we moved on to the east (reindeer country, although we didn't see any, and we actually didn't see any on the menus throughout our stay (although we didn't eat out that much)).  Our break from camping was another Airbnb on Lagarfljot (a long narrow lake that is home to the worm monster, a sort of Icelandic loch ness monster).  We walked the lake shore looking for the monster.  We didn't see it, but we did find lots of polished stones - red, green, white.

 After dinner, we drove to Seydisfjordur, a quaint fishing town.  Supposedly the town is something to see, but we were way more impressed with the drive between Egilsstadir and Seydisfjordur.  We did encounter Harlequin ducks and a pretty church in town (constructed with corrugated metal siding - lots of this in Iceland). 

 

Waterfalls abound in Iceland, and this drive was no exception.  There were narrow falls streaming down the sides of the mountains towards Seydisfjordur from the snow melting above.  There was also a large waterfall - Gufufoss.

 

Although we had been around small snow fields on our way up Spakonufell, Andy had yet to actually touch snow, so his chance came at the pass between Egilsstadir and Seydisfjordur.  It was cold up there!

 It's nice to interact with friendly pets while away from home.  There was a super friendly cat at the Airbnb who snuck in through the kitchen window.  There was also a super friendly dog, but no picture!

*Stay tuned for Myvatn adventures, Iceland's forest, the South, and the end of the trip. 

Canning 'maters.

It's hard to believe it's been about two years since my last post.  Vet school will do that to a blog.  It will also induce gastric ulcers and stress colitis... My friendly ulcer has caused my doctor to recommend a reduction in ingestion of acidic foods: citrus (no! my favorite fruits, very unfair to a Floridian) and tomatoes (no! we have loads of tomatoes ripening in the garden this summer, very unfair to a vegetable gardener).  So despite doctor's orders, tomatoes must remain on the menu, but in an effort to reduce consumption as my poor stomach heals, I decided to save some for winter!  In the past we typically haven't grown more than we can eat throughout the season, mostly because we don't have the space (once we have some land I foresee growing at least enough to stock for the winter), but this year we planted 4 varieties to share with our neighbor and we are inundated!  One of Andy's coworkers recently gave us a large canning pot with basket, so today I put it to use canning tomatoes.  The varieties in the garden this year: fox cherry, black cherry, roma, Wapsipinicon peach, plus "the deadly nightshade" sungold cherry (no one freak out, it's just a sungold that sprouted unexpectedly from the compost, not a wild nightshade!).  

I haven't taken the time to look this spider up, so for now, just calling it the zipper spider.

We had a really mild winter (not sure if it even froze once), which made the insects really happy, and the humans really annoyed, in the winter garden.  (Normally the winter garden is easy in Florida - warm enough to grow great veggies, cold enough to keep away the pests).  But so far this summer, we have been relatively pest-free, thanks in part to our biological pest control!  So far we've only seen two tobacco hornworms, and both were parasitized - way to go wasps!    

The unripe-looking tomatoes are the Wapsipinicon peach.  They are ripe.  They are a nice yellow color in real life and are quite good little slicing tomatoes.  The black cherry are purplish and are very sweet.  I think the fox cherries are my favorite, though.  

  
I miss the days of picking berries and making preserves with my dad.  Canning the tomatoes was not very different - lots of cleaning and sterilizing, working at a steady pace to keep the process moving, and lots of boiling.  I am so thankful my parents shared their knowledge of growing and preserving food with me.  If something crazy happened and our careers went up in smoke, at least we could subsist on a plot of land somewhere :)   

In which Shadowfax gets some camouflage.

When you're raised in the nursery business, even when you leave, it never really leaves you.  It's in the blood - there's always something being sprouted, planted, and watered at our place.  The veggies are going bonkers and swamp mallows that I started from seed are looking like plants that might actually flower next year.  This summer's project was a little coontie production area on the back step.  I took some seeds from my parents' numerous coonties, soaked them for 24 hours to loosen up the orange seed coat, then scraped it off and planted the seeds.  

This started out mostly as an experiment because I've never seen a coontie started from seed.  A google search helped me with getting the seed coat off, but I couldn't find any reliable information about how to plant the seeds, so I put some on the surface, some halfway submerged, and some buried just under the surface.    

Turns out they like to be on top or halfway in the soil, not totally buried.  It took on average 3 weeks for seeds to sprout, although some were speedy and others are taking their sweet time.  

Here, the speedy ones are just beginning to unfurl and put out baby coontie leaves at the tip of their shoots.  

When I planted these seeds my expectations were low.  I was hoping for one or maybe two to grow, but wasn't going to be disappointed if none did.  Et voila, about 90% of them have sprouted at this point.  Now I just have to keep them alive, then I'll have more coonties than I know what to do with.  Maybe start a nursery?  Just kidding!  

In other news, Shadowfax felt that her coat was not providing her with adequate camouflage for sneaking up on squirrels, raccoons, and feral cats, so she invested in some greener camouflage.  She calls it Real Grass Collar Camo.  

In which boats abound.

On a rare almost-study-free weekend in April, I headed back to the panhandle to take Swan to the Apalachicola Antique and Classic Boat Show.  My dad, Brian, and I each entered our home built wooden boats.  It was an overcast Saturday and the wind was hurtling down the street where our boats were on display, but people came out to admire all of the boats, and we kept warm with hoods up, drinking steaming coffee and tea from a cafe down the street.  (If you ever have a chance to try cardamom tea, I highly recommend it!)

Swan and Blue Tang, decks swabbed, ready for the show to start.  

Brian's Tramontana, with his tent full of incredible watercolors in the background.  

(Click on the link above to see his website and artwork)

Were we surprised that people were amazed/incredulous/delighted that a girl built this boat?  Not really.  But I am always surprised by all the people that seem taken aback that I can sail it by myself - people don't have much faith these days.

Daddy awaits onlookers with his Blue Tang.

 A variety of other boats were on display.  There were quaint sailboats with tiny cabins, a grand Maine lobstering sailboat, the Governor Stone, steamships, canoes and kayaks, fancy-schmancy motor boats, and even antique cars and outboard motors polished so they'd shine even under the heavy clouds.    

At the end of the day, after the judges had come around twice, we heard our names being announced during the informal awards ceremony.  Swan won the Best Home Built Boat!  Tramontana won the Best Sailboat!

The cockpit of Tramontana with portrait of herself.

We enjoyed the antics of Joan of Arc's crew attempting to paddle up the canal to the boat ramp.  We took pictures while they worked hard.

I'd been to Apalachicola many times growing up because my great uncle and grandmother lived on their houseboat at the end of the same canal Joan of Arc was moving along in.  Since we always had the super-fun houseboat to stay on, we never got to stay at the Gibson Inn - so this time we finally stayed there.  It was a neat hotel - the bed was so tall I was afraid I might fracture my collarbone again.

This poor guy is just a surprise to end the post.  I guess he tried to get out of the house, but couldn't quite make it...

In which we search for sandhills and the pied-billed grebes laugh at our ambitions.

We'll start this post off with a quiz!  Can you find and name the animal in the photo below? Answer appears in the last picture of the post.  

We went out to Paines Prairie for a hike to see the sandhill cranes.  A small sampling of what we found instead was:

The sentry at the gate - an alligator basks at the entrance to his part of the prairie.

 White walkers - a great egret and snowy egret hunt where there's a current through a culvert. 

 Stormy skies and vultures.

 Stormy skies and great blue herons.

 Another great egret.

Another snowy egret, keeping a respectful distance from its seemingly-sleeping companion.  Note the gator's abdominal wound.

 Portrait of an alligator.

 Portrait of two human beings.

 A flock of red-winged blackbirds flushed.

A cohort of coots. 

 And the American bittern out of hiding.

The best sighting of sandhill cranes for us remains right around the block from our house, where hundreds of cranes are foraging and frolicking in the pastures with the cattle. 

FALL

It's a big deal when fall arrives in Florida.  We turn off the AC, open windows, go outside for extended periods, and bask in the sun - like these turtles.  Fall only stays for a few days, maybe a week if we're lucky, at first.  So we close the windows, turn on the AC again, and seek out shade when outdoors.  Fall and summer have a battle of wills for many weeks before winter swoops in to end the bickering.    

Anyhow, fall has made a reappearance in north-central Florida, so we're enjoying it while it's here with a day canoeing on the Santa Fe.  Yesterday was a day for turtles and turkeys on the river.  Turtles were covering most every log they could climb onto.  We kept hearing rustling noises in the woods behind the banks, and finally spotted four wild turkeys foraging on a slope down to the river.  The bald cypress are turning gold and brown, maples and sweetgums are just starting to turn red and purple.  The bald cypress are our southern take on Aldo Leopold's smokey gold of the tamaracks.    

There hasn't been much (or any) rain lately, so the water was low, making some fun little "rapids" in the limestone bedded parts of the river.  Before we reached the first set of fast-moving water, we stopped at a little spring bubbling up into the river next to the bank.  The rapids didn't look too intimidating, so we figured we'd paddle right up them (yes, we were going upstream).  About half the way up, we realized we were no longer making forward progress, so I jumped out of the boat and started pulling.  The water was nice and clear, so I only bumped my shin into a couple rocks along the way.  I jumped back into the canoe just in time upstream of the rapids, as the water was suddenly deep.  We encountered several more stretches of fast water, but were able to paddle up them successfully.  We ate lunch with a big turtle in a cove where water from the main channel was rushing in, swirling around in a whirlpool fashion, and being sucked down into the aquifer.  The paddle back downstream was much more leisurely - only steering required on the way down the rapids!   

On a separate note, here are my results from the dialect quiz (I think this guy did a masters or PhD dealing with regional dialects in the US).  You can go to the website and take the quiz if you are up for it (the full size one is long, but more accurate).  I found out that my speech patterns/phrases are more similar to those used by people in north Florida than those in Minnesota - hahaha no kidding!