Why I can’t have nice things

I'm back in Iceland with my new improved campervan. I upgraded to a larger campervan that has an auxiliary battery for heat and to run the cooler. (The little campervan I had the first time had to be plugged in to an electricity source each night to give me a little bit of heat, and the entire back was just the platform bed—I could sit in the drivers seat or on the bed.) This one has lots of space. I can stand up in the back and I'm sitting at the table with the heat on right now.

But back to the nice things. My first stop after I got the camper was Bonus grocery store. Bonus is a tourist hotspot—the groceries are cheap and the logo is a happy bright pink pig on a yellow background. Anyway, I stocked up with groceries and since I had the nice cooler, I got lots of refrigerated items. There's a small control panel in the back of the camper that controls the heat, lights, and power to the cooler. It also tells me the level of the auxiliary battery. And the cooler is dual control—it can warm or it can cool. Are you figuring out where this is going? Yep, last night when I was turning off the lights, I turned off the cooler power switch. But, of course, I realized what I had done and flipped the switch back on, and then powered on the cooler again. And, when I opened the cooler this morning, I discovered that I had turned it back on...to heat. And, yep, this baby can really warm things up. The tub of butter was liquid. The bacon was limp. The cheese had turned gooey. Oh, well. I dumped probably $50 worth of food and then had to clean up the melted butter that had leaked everywhere.

But, as normal, I'm getting ahead of myself. John dropped me at the Bergen airport yesterday morning, and the nice SAS clerk didn't charge me for my overweight suitcase. I had to fly to Oslo on SAS to catch the Icelandair flight to Reykjavik. On the SAS flight I think I was technically only supposed to have one carryon (not one carryon and one personal item) and to pay for the second handheld bag, but I just ignored the announcement and got away with it. Both of my flights had about 100 people who had just been on a Viking cruise and were heading to Iceland for an extension trip. I wore my mask on both flights. I swear the woman behind me on the longer flight had Covid. She was coughing her head off most of the flight.

It was cloudy for most of the flight, but since we were over water for a lot of the time, it didn't matter. It did clear up enough for me to get some great pictures of the Vatnajökull glacier. I had seen it from the ground—in fact, I hiked to a part of the glacier—but I didn't have a feel for the immensity until I saw it from the air. If you look at the picture, you can see how far inland it goes. I just looked it up, and it covers 8% of the country. Also, technically, it's an icecap with 30 outlet glaciers coming off it. (I just learned that.) There are a lot of volcanos under the icecap, and when they erupt, the flooding can be extreme. I saw the remains of a bridge that got wiped out during one of those floods.

ICECAP FROM THE AIR

After I got the campervan and groceries, I headed to a campground about 20 miles outside of Reykjavik, as it was already late afternoon. And I discovered the only place in Iceland that does not take debit/credit card for payment. In fact, the guy that runs the campground delighted in explaining to me that he was the only one in Iceland who will not take cards. And I'm standing there thinking, oh, crap. He asked if I didn't have any cash...and I remembered the $20 I'd stuck in my phone case after Jake urged me to take some cash—he said I might need it! And wasn't he right! The guy happily took my $20 and gave me krónur in change. I have no clue what exchange rate he gave me, but I didn't care as long as I had a place to camp.

I used the nice campground kitchen to make bacon and eggs (so I didn't lose all of the groceries in the heated cooler), then plotted out my path for today, exploring the Snæfellsnes Peninsula.