Thingvellir also happens to have been the assembly site for a bunch of ancient viking tribes who came together there to decide and arbitrate laws. Coincidently there is a ‘drowning pool’ near the ‘law rock’ – from the interpretive signage the drowning pool was exclusively used for problem women. I didn’t see mention to any ‘chopping rock’ which I assume is how the man problems were solved.

And as often happens with pagans they came into conflict with the spread of Christianity. The park signage told us that the dispute between the two religions was handled peacefully. One of the pagan law makers went into a cave for a couple of days – when he came out he told everyone that Christianity was going to be the way to go. There was some subtext that the decision was political and expansionist. The pagan law maker knew that Iceland would only thrive if immigrants came in and helped build the country. There were more eager Christian immigrants than pagans. You usually don’t hear this story told with an immigration context around it.

We froze our butts off but the park was gorgeous!.

Oh.

So we killed time, drove around and looked at sheep farms, and we found the landfill!

We spent some time at a local pizza shop/mini mart/cafe and watched Chinese table tennis.

It was a random morning.

The rental car return process was alarmingly casual. The airport terminal clerk took our car keys and threw them in a bucket with a number of other keys. I kind of stood there for a minute waiting for the paperwork and the dent inspection. He just shrugged and said, “They come for it.”

I’m sure this won’t cause any problems for Kaety’s reimbursement with UABC.

The lot of us ran like we were being pursued by wild dogs towards shelter…and beer.

The tour resumed from a chair in the town cafe as everyone dripped and fogged up the place.

We learned many things about Suðureyri which we swiftly came to learn was essentially a company town. The processor owned all the quota and everyone in the village worked for the processor including the fishermen, the baiters and the cutters.

One interesting tid-bit we learned from the Q&A session after the tour talk – the high school bus driver was the only guy in town who caught seals to ferment their flippers and purportedly enjoyed eating them with a big glass of milk.

Good stuff.

After the slightly depressing talk about how great their nicely marketed sustainable fishing village was they fed us…lamb. We were super confused.

Dinner with the international GIS people ended up being a complete trip. I talked with guys who were map makers from the Soviet Union who had smuggling ARC Info software across borders. There were so hungry for data layers that they would find any printed copies of maps they could find and digitize them – sometimes entering plot points by hand just to understand and visualize their world better. They would risk imprisonment by smuggling GIS software computer manuals into countries where owning such things was illegal.

Talking to them made me realize how far we’ve come and how important GIS data is to so many people.

Their criticisms of early benthic mapping were interesting – much of what the world used until the 70s was built on 5 transects and a lot of imagination.

Another guy I spent time talking to was a data consultant who worked with global industries harvested kelp – not the eating kind, but the food additive kind. The global politics regarding ownership of marine territory was fascinating.

We finished our meal in the community center and by 11 were convinced that our soaking wet lower halves would be sending us into hypothermia if a hot shower in a communal bathroom weren’t had soon.

When we got into the warm embrace of the GentleSpace we stripped out of our wet clothes that had become a clammy cold second layer. Kaety dug around near the closet and found the knob to our geothermal heating apparatus and announced, “Honey, I’m turning it up to 3!”

When we found the turn-off to the waterfall we realized that we’d never make it. We had 26 more miles of snow covered gravel road ahead of us to navigate in our roller-skate…nope!

When we arrived we got a detailed bathroom orientation from the owner. After our 9 hour drive I didn’t hear a word she said. I did notice all the slightly shaming signage urging you in ambiguous terms to ‘speed things up’. I wondered absently how competitively I’d fair in the common bathroom race and what the measure for success exactly was.

The most troublesome aspect of the common bath was trying to figure out if it was available. There was no place to hang out and wait that wasn’t weird.

We took to making our run at the bathroom a group activity. It would start in our room – one of us mentioning that going to the bathroom might be in the future. Then we’d lay in the bed until the need became urgent. It reminded me of camping where getting dressed and going out into the cold was so odious you would risk kidney damage.

Once one of us decided – a multi step prep began. Getting dressed to socially acceptable limits had to happen, then navigating a complicated skeleton key lock on the room door, then creeping down the hall and peering into the bathroom to see if it was occupied. The peering became part of the process after being surprised several times by the owner standing silently in the dark bathroom doing…something.

When all the bathrooming was completed we’d reverse the process.

Last night Kaety announced during one of many such forays, “Ok, I’m really OVER the shared bathroom thing now!”

I looked up from wondering if laying on the bathroom’s heated floor would be weird and said, “Kaety, the GentleSpace doesn’t like loud voices”