FURTHER: A TRAVEL BLOG: Icebergs, Pandora and a box of wine

For the past week we have been traveling with our daughter Katherine. Knowing our time was short with her and being “type A” travelers, we jam in as many experiences and places as possible. Consequently, instead of the leisurely hiking and minimal driving trip that we initially envisioned, this has turned into a rapid fire road trip. We have had to face the reality that we are people who are driven to see what is around the next bend in the road; in this case not traveling deep, but traveling wide.

We awaken to a dreary day which is all too common in Iceland. After all, you don’t get green without a lot of rain. We had hoped for a clear day to tour the Eastern Fjords of Iceland but Mother Nature refuses to cooperate. We leave camp under partly cloudy skies and drive the fjords looking up at steeply sloped mountains zooming along curvy roads wedged precariously between mountain and sea. At first the clouds only threaten. Then light showers dampen my windshield and soon turn to steady rain. I scrunch further into my seat, flip the wipers on, crank up a Jackson Brown station on Pandora, and cruise through a steady downpour. After an hour of rocking to the radio, weaving in and out of fjords, I stop for a break and peruse the map. I realize that we are only a few hours from a fjord with a massive glacier at its’ head; a glacier famous for calving enormous icebergs that drift out to sea…right next to Highway 1. Since Kate only has a few more days, and there are very few places in the world that you can drive right up to an iceberg, I say, ”How about let’s go and check out some icebergs?” Kate is excited about this proposition so I turn the wipers up another notch and push through the rain ignoring clouds of water kicked up by oncoming semis. The drive becomes monotonous and just as Deborah starts questioning the prospect of icebergs by the road we spot many house sized chunks of ice that seem to sprout out of the pavement ahead.

We pull into a parking lot and snake a space that fronts the fjord. Before us lays a placid lagoon choked with giant icebergs tinged an impossible blue. Hulking masses of ice are stuck on the bottom of a shallow lagoon awaiting their fate of melting, fracturing and eventually washing out to sea on the ebb tide. We walk around in the freezing rain catching fleeting glimpses of the head of the massive glacier through the foggy gloom. Finally, soaking wet and frozen, we return to our camper and drive out to the beach to check out remnants of icebergs washed up by the churning waves. Deb grabs a chunk of thousand year old ice to make gin and tonics in camp that night.

We reach the convergence of time and space that our schedule allows and so retrace our track back to camp on the Eastern Fjords for the night. Tired and road weary, we relax as Deb whips up some gin and tonics with the aforementioned thousand year old glacial ice.Afterwards, we crack open a three liter box of Tuscan red wine, nosh on a pan of eggs, spinach, onions and Havarti cheese and crawl into bed dreaming of icebergs, Pandora on the radio, and cheap Italian wine.