Nov 1 — Saturday — Samedi/laugurdag

Au Revoir, France, Kleebenklop Iceland! (That’s not Icelandic)

Of course it was raining when we got up to finish the packing begun the night before in a burst of drunken determination.  I eventually stumbled out to get coffee, croissants and a baguette.  ‘Cause I am walking out of here with a baguette sticking out of luggage.  Mais oui!   At Chaize, I  struck up a conversation with the barista — kind of late-night rocker from San Diego named Charlie — and when I left with the breads and java the rain was coming down hard.

On the way back I spotted an injured pigeon in the middle of the cobblestones and, hands full of soggy cardboard amid pelting rain, I continued on without trying to help it, immediately thinking I had cursed the day.  A broken wing?  A flight ahead?  Next to a cemetery?  What the hell was I thinking?

But Kathy got us rounded up and we were off to the races through the rain with rolling bags coming down the four flights for the last time and with a sense of how to get the right trains to the airport.  Unfortunately due to broken winged pigeon bad juju, we ended up missing trains and connections until we made it just in time to CDG and found our beleaguered way to a plane bound for Iceland. 

Humping and puffing up and down stairs, accepting or rejecting help from the ever courteous French young men who tend to make the offer.

Bagage et baguette!

The relatively short three hour flight, aided by my baguette which I had sticking out of the carry on all the way through TSA and whatever else, landed us once again at Keflavik, where we picked up the rental car, foolishly deciding to “bring it back empty.”

Based on suggestions as to the best food available — it was already getting dark at 5 pm or so — we hit a fish and chips place.  No Orso this.  But about the same price.  Iceland is expensive.  They are apparently propping up their currency with some kind of monetary fu and so everything costs thousands of ”ISK" or kronors and trying to do the math is impossible until you check your card and then, whew, OK.  One of the dinners we’ll cook ourselves.

We made it to the Bnb which was on a horse farm outside of Mosfellbaer (I think that’s right.  From here on I will do what the Icelanders have done and that is to name things with lots of rearranged consonants and vowels and umlots and letters you have never seen or could find on a typing keyboard — “As we say in Iceland Goda Klud! or some such which maybe means ‘Have fun’” except the d’s are some kind of lower case d with a bent cross on top? — so that most of the place names are obviously phonetic spellings of made up words from a long time ago — like Gaelic — and so getting places is like traveling to Rick and Morty planets and you basically go through the roundabouts using the first few letters and hope for the best.  Or going around the roundabout a couple of times until you think you’re right.)

This first night was spent drinking some wine we picked up at duty free, some baguette and brie and hoping to see the Northern Lights.  Which did come on later in the evening though mostly hidden by clouds.  Still, always cool to see and our location overlooks a mountain range and is little bothered by ambient light from the nearby town.  Which, for some reason has a spotlight coming out of it.

Saturday Night Lights.