Norse

This is my first posting for a wee while. I have been away on a road trip around the entire Icelandic sub-continent with my parents who came to visit for a week. Also confounding my output is the fact that Atli's computer died on me the other day. He'd lent it to me when my own computer finally went tits up. Atli's has come down with the same problem and shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. Conjoined with this we got a bill for the first six weeks of Internet use in the house. It ran to nearly one hundred pounds. This included a bill for their technician to come out and not do the job he'd been asked to do.

Pretty much how I feel about computers right now...

Enough about this nonsense, lat week was dominated by the arrival of my parents, they had been blackmailing me to stay as long as I could so they could come over for a visit. I would have quit here a lot sooner had they not been coming. Anyhoo, we embarked on a road trip which was initially supposed to take in the South Coast and a bit of the Eastfjords, but turned into a marathon dash around the entire ring road. The going was easy after the obligatory day in Reykjavik, dull little town that it is. The southern part of route one was easy going in good conditions, they oohed and awwwed at all the right places. I'm not going to bore you with the places we visited as it won't mean much to most and I pretty much took them to all the places I visited just before Christ's Mass with Justin and Lucy. We continued on up the East coast and I convinced them to carry on with the driving and head for Myvatn and Akureyri. We had been slightly put off by some English Hippy Naysayers in Cafe Margret, but the owner of the cafe, a massively toothed German woman told us the roads would be fine. Fine maybe for someone in a tank with 4WD tracks. The little Toyota Yaris we had was thrown about the road by the piles of ice and snow like a cork in a washing machine. The going wasn't made easier by driving at 40 KPH with the attached frustration from my father.

what 'good going' on Icelandic roads does to a Yaris...

We finally made it around the full ring road, my first time, but we had to miss out on a planned trip to the Snaefellness peninsular due to snow and ice on the gravel roads. Reykholt and the wonders of nature that like in its proximity had to do instead. Being so close to Reykjavik we decided it would be better and cheaper to head back to my place and spend the night there. The following day we spent tootling around Keflavik and the surrounding area, finishing with a trip to the Blue Lagoon for my mum, as she had just sat for two days in a car. They left the following day and as I haven't heard anything since leaving, I'm assuming they got home fine.