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So. I Instagrammed about this a fair bit already and some of it crossposted here, but.
We spent the last couple of days in a lovely, if remote, hotel sort of thing in the Westfjords, and did a lot of sitting in an outdoor hot spring pool thing near a greenhouse with a pool in it, and such, and now today we’re dealing with the fact that bad weather means our flight back to the capital today was cancelled, and that continuing bad weather meant there’d be no replacement flight tomorrow, and we’ve got to fly home (well, back to Toronto) tomorrow evening. It was the hotel proprietress that made us see that no, in fact, going and waiting at the airport up in the north country wasn’t going to help– we had to start driving south if we were going to make it.
So that was today, and I Instagrammed it, but what I wanted to come here to mention is something I haven’t been putting in any of my Instagram stuff because it wasn’t really a funny story yet until now.
So. At the hotel thing in the Westfjords– it’s called Heydalur, it’s a former dairy farm rehabbed into a tourist destination hotel resort campground kind of thing– anyway, we were not the only guests! No. We were joined by one of those Sprinter vans full of Germans. Eight in total, all in athletic leisurewear. We made brief friendly conversation and then sat separately at dinner, as the hostess had seated us separately.
(the readmore: saga of the Germans)
Then the next day we each separately went to the same place. Holmavik, which boasts a restaurant with an attached museum about witchcraft. We were driving over the terrible road, nearly made it to our destination, and came upon a white Sprinter van going twenty km/hr under the speed limit, and so we overtook it and then found ourselves going rather faster down a snowy pass than we’d intended [I’m saying “we” but I was driving, you see how this goes], but we acquitted ourselves just fine and got where we were going– only to have the Sprinter van pull up about ten minutes behind us, and the Germans pile out.
So we entered this museum together, and the owner was startled by the sheer numbers of us, and then of course we wound up going through the museum in a big crowd, and then all wanting lunch at the same time, and then yet another group came in– coincidentally, five Austrians– and the woman was slightly cross, as it’s the slow season and she had no help and everyone wanted complicated things. In retrospect, we should have just had lunch first, and looked at the museum second, but I hadn’t really considered the Germans’ plans.
They left before we did, and the museum-slash-restaurant owner was slightly flustered and laughed with us about tour groups– “this is our slow season, I’m not prepared for crowds!” and when I said something about having had to explain one of the museum captions to them because it involved some knowledge of American history [literally just a mention of the Salem witch trials], she sort of scoffed and said, “Germans think they’re the center of the world!” and I laughed and said it was kind of her to say such a thing to an *American*– who wasn’t even bilingual– a New Yorker no less– but I don’t know if, of course, she knows the reputation of New Yorkers, so perhaps didn’t even really understand how self-centered I was being. Listen though, Germans can’t possibly outdo us at being The Worst, but it was kind of her to say so.
Anyway– we wound up in the hot tub together that night, Dude and I and several of the Germans, and meanwhile another white Sprinter van full of Germans had showed up to Heydalur, and I laughingly said “oh do you guys know each other?” because that’s a ridiculous thing to say, and they were stonily silent in return, and I was like how do I even explain that that’s a ridiculous joke and I know that so I gave up and moved the conversation along, and was like well, at least we won’t really see one another again.
This morning as we were all collecting ourselves at breakfast (during which several of the new Germans attempted to hold conversations with me in German, assuming I was from the other group) I overheard them conferring with the hotel owners about their plans for the day– which we did too, actually, the woman who owned the place came around and checked in with each group to ensure we really understood the weather reports– and determined that they were driving down to Reykjavik today, as their flight is early tomorrow morning. They hadn’t left any time to account for weather.
So they left before us, all piled into their van, about fifteen minutes before we did, and I resigned myself to following them at their timid speed, as the conditions would be too bad for overtaking.
And then we never saw them. There were no tracks on the road. Well, there was one set, and we followed it a while, expecting to catch up to a slow-going Sprinter van, and then… the tracks turned off at a farm, and were clearly coming from the other direction. (The Djupvager [highway 60] ]is two lanes wide, but it’s not a generous two lanes, and the rule seems to be that if you can’t see the lane markings then you just drive in the clearest part of the road, which makes perfect sense as you can see other traffic coming from a great distance due to the way the road doubles in around the fjords.)
So they weren’t on the road. They’d left fifteen minutes before, but hadn’t actually gone… the only way one can go on the highway. There’s only one way over the mountains that’s open in the winter, and it’s through Holmavik, and then across. There are no other towns large enough to stop in between Heydalur and Holmavik, and there’s no town the other direction that’s close (like, if they’d gone for provisions or something). The closest grocery store is Holmavik, or you have to go back to Isafjordur, an hour and a half the other direction.
So they were gone. We puzzled, intermittently, over our vanished Germans, until we got to Holmavik, ascertained that they hadn’t beaten us there, and then we mostly forgot because there was so much terrifying driving to do.
Until dinnertime. We got to Búr∂ardalur around, ehh, like 3pm? I’d made quite good time, possibly driving faster than I ought to have, but listen I have a lot of experience on very snowy roads and the thing I’ve sort of learned is that for drifted snow, which was the problem for much of it, there’s a technique– you accelerate smoothly toward it, take your foot off the gas, hit it as square as you can with the car aimed in the direction you need to go, and then touch no pedals and hold the wheel firmly in the direction you need, only adjusting to steer in the direction of any skid that happens. You will rapidly lose momentum, but you mustn’t spin your wheels or hit your breaks; you want the car to roll, fluidly and smoothly, and your momentum must be sufficient to carry you to the other side of the drift. You ideally also want there to be a great deal of leeway either side of this drift, but as it doesn’t matter which lane you’re in on the mountain roads, I didn’t find it difficult. It was exhausting, and it required steady focus and a very iron nerve, but it also meant I was traveling relatively fast for most of it. Because I know that if you stop you get stuck, and if you hit the brakes you die.
So it only took me about half again as long as the estimated time to make my trip, because we didn’t stop and the conditions weren’t icy, they were snowy. Maps says now it’s an hour’s drive; I think I took an hour and a half. So–
(I also had rather a lot of trouble getting disoriented, when visibility was ten meters or less, so that took a lot of concentration as well– it was impossible to tell if you were going uphill or down unless you really paid attention to the way the car was pulling, which made it hard to regulate speed. But I did all right, obviously, as I survived.)
Anyway– we made it past Bur∂ardalur and then had to turn around and come back when the road was closed a bit further on, which is good because the wind was so upsettingly dangerous and much harder to accomodate than drifting or falling snow– and then settled into a guesthouse after much searching, and then we went to the only open restaurant in town, when they opened at 6 pm.
We walked in, and as we entered the dining room, there was a group of people, and one of them looked up at us and started laughing hysterically.
It was the Germans.
We couldn’t understand where they’d been, but they told the waitress that it had taken them three and a half hours to come from Holmavik. I don’t know where they’d been before that, if they hadn’t really left or where they’d hidden– maybe they’d moved their van to load it, and we got out before they did somehow– but they’d come the same way as us, and with a great deal less expedience.
They wreaked havoc in that tiny restaurant, got the waitress all flustered, and then had to have her split their check eight ways (and bicker over the details) as three more groups of stranded travelers came in for a shift I’m sure the waitress had assumed would involve maybe five customers total.
As they left, we discovered they were pushing through to Reykjavik tonight, and had to stop until the road re-opened, but were continuing on now. We wished them luck.
They left, and another tour group of nine Germans came in, joining the group of four and the group of two and the group of five, and we watched our waitress’s eyes glaze over, and hastily took our leave.
If we see those Germans again it’s because something terrible happened to them, so I really hope not.
I do have an anthropological question, though, which is– why do Germans vacation in packs??? Why is that a thing? I’ve encountered it elsewhere too? Always herds of unrelated adults, is what I’ve found, and this may be anecdata but they also always seem to be attired as if for athletic exertion regardless of whether they’re traveling by bus or bicycle, and I don’t really get it, but maybe there’s something I’m missing, or maybe there’s some anthropology there. (All the unrelated German groups were dressed for hiking but none of them actually did any, that I could find out about– there’s not much hiking to be had, in this amount of snow, and there are snow sports to be sure but there was no evidence of any of them either?)
Fascinating.
So. I Instagrammed about this a fair bit already and some of it crossposted here, but.
We spent the last couple of days in a lovely, if remote, hotel sort of thing in the Westfjords, and did a lot of sitting in an outdoor hot spring pool thing near a greenhouse with a pool in it, and such, and now today we’re dealing with the fact that bad weather means our flight back to the capital today was cancelled, and that continuing bad weather meant there’d be no replacement flight tomorrow, and we’ve got to fly home (well, back to Toronto) tomorrow evening. It was the hotel proprietress that made us see that no, in fact, going and waiting at the airport up in the north country wasn’t going to help– we had to start driving south if we were going to make it.
So that was today, and I Instagrammed it, but what I wanted to come here to mention is something I haven’t been putting in any of my Instagram stuff because it wasn’t really a funny story yet until now.
So. At the hotel thing in the Westfjords– it’s called Heydalur, it’s a former dairy farm rehabbed into a tourist destination hotel resort campground kind of thing– anyway, we were not the only guests! No. We were joined by one of those Sprinter vans full of Germans. Eight in total, all in athletic leisurewear. We made brief friendly conversation and then sat separately at dinner, as the hostess had seated us separately.
(the readmore: saga of the Germans)
Then the next day we each separately went to the same place. Holmavik, which boasts a restaurant with an attached museum about witchcraft. We were driving over the terrible road, nearly made it to our destination, and came upon a white Sprinter van going twenty km/hr under the speed limit, and so we overtook it and then found ourselves going rather faster down a snowy pass than we’d intended [I’m saying “we” but I was driving, you see how this goes], but we acquitted ourselves just fine and got where we were going– only to have the Sprinter van pull up about ten minutes behind us, and the Germans pile out.
So we entered this museum together, and the owner was startled by the sheer numbers of us, and then of course we wound up going through the museum in a big crowd, and then all wanting lunch at the same time, and then yet another group came in– coincidentally, five Austrians– and the woman was slightly cross, as it’s the slow season and she had no help and everyone wanted complicated things. In retrospect, we should have just had lunch first, and looked at the museum second, but I hadn’t really considered the Germans’ plans.
They left before we did, and the museum-slash-restaurant owner was slightly flustered and laughed with us about tour groups– “this is our slow season, I’m not prepared for crowds!” and when I said something about having had to explain one of the museum captions to them because it involved some knowledge of American history [literally just a mention of the Salem witch trials], she sort of scoffed and said, “Germans think they’re the center of the world!” and I laughed and said it was kind of her to say such a thing to an *American*– who wasn’t even bilingual– a New Yorker no less– but I don’t know if, of course, she knows the reputation of New Yorkers, so perhaps didn’t even really understand how self-centered I was being. Listen though, Germans can’t possibly outdo us at being The Worst, but it was kind of her to say so.
Anyway– we wound up in the hot tub together that night, Dude and I and several of the Germans, and meanwhile another white Sprinter van full of Germans had showed up to Heydalur, and I laughingly said “oh do you guys know each other?” because that’s a ridiculous thing to say, and they were stonily silent in return, and I was like how do I even explain that that’s a ridiculous joke and I know that so I gave up and moved the conversation along, and was like well, at least we won’t really see one another again.
This morning as we were all collecting ourselves at breakfast (during which several of the new Germans attempted to hold conversations with me in German, assuming I was from the other group) I overheard them conferring with the hotel owners about their plans for the day– which we did too, actually, the woman who owned the place came around and checked in with each group to ensure we really understood the weather reports– and determined that they were driving down to Reykjavik today, as their flight is early tomorrow morning. They hadn’t left any time to account for weather.
So they left before us, all piled into their van, about fifteen minutes before we did, and I resigned myself to following them at their timid speed, as the conditions would be too bad for overtaking.
And then we never saw them. There were no tracks on the road. Well, there was one set, and we followed it a while, expecting to catch up to a slow-going Sprinter van, and then… the tracks turned off at a farm, and were clearly coming from the other direction. (The Djupvager [highway 60] ]is two lanes wide, but it’s not a generous two lanes, and the rule seems to be that if you can’t see the lane markings then you just drive in the clearest part of the road, which makes perfect sense as you can see other traffic coming from a great distance due to the way the road doubles in around the fjords.)
So they weren’t on the road. They’d left fifteen minutes before, but hadn’t actually gone… the only way one can go on the highway. There’s only one way over the mountains that’s open in the winter, and it’s through Holmavik, and then across. There are no other towns large enough to stop in between Heydalur and Holmavik, and there’s no town the other direction that’s close (like, if they’d gone for provisions or something). The closest grocery store is Holmavik, or you have to go back to Isafjordur, an hour and a half the other direction.
So they were gone. We puzzled, intermittently, over our vanished Germans, until we got to Holmavik, ascertained that they hadn’t beaten us there, and then we mostly forgot because there was so much terrifying driving to do.
Until dinnertime. We got to Búr∂ardalur around, ehh, like 3pm? I’d made quite good time, possibly driving faster than I ought to have, but listen I have a lot of experience on very snowy roads and the thing I’ve sort of learned is that for drifted snow, which was the problem for much of it, there’s a technique– you accelerate smoothly toward it, take your foot off the gas, hit it as square as you can with the car aimed in the direction you need to go, and then touch no pedals and hold the wheel firmly in the direction you need, only adjusting to steer in the direction of any skid that happens. You will rapidly lose momentum, but you mustn’t spin your wheels or hit your breaks; you want the car to roll, fluidly and smoothly, and your momentum must be sufficient to carry you to the other side of the drift. You ideally also want there to be a great deal of leeway either side of this drift, but as it doesn’t matter which lane you’re in on the mountain roads, I didn’t find it difficult. It was exhausting, and it required steady focus and a very iron nerve, but it also meant I was traveling relatively fast for most of it. Because I know that if you stop you get stuck, and if you hit the brakes you die.
So it only took me about half again as long as the estimated time to make my trip, because we didn’t stop and the conditions weren’t icy, they were snowy. Maps says now it’s an hour’s drive; I think I took an hour and a half. So–
(I also had rather a lot of trouble getting disoriented, when visibility was ten meters or less, so that took a lot of concentration as well– it was impossible to tell if you were going uphill or down unless you really paid attention to the way the car was pulling, which made it hard to regulate speed. But I did all right, obviously, as I survived.)
Anyway– we made it past Bur∂ardalur and then had to turn around and come back when the road was closed a bit further on, which is good because the wind was so upsettingly dangerous and much harder to accomodate than drifting or falling snow– and then settled into a guesthouse after much searching, and then we went to the only open restaurant in town, when they opened at 6 pm.
We walked in, and as we entered the dining room, there was a group of people, and one of them looked up at us and started laughing hysterically.
It was the Germans.
We couldn’t understand where they’d been, but they told the waitress that it had taken them three and a half hours to come from Holmavik. I don’t know where they’d been before that, if they hadn’t really left or where they’d hidden– maybe they’d moved their van to load it, and we got out before they did somehow– but they’d come the same way as us, and with a great deal less expedience.
They wreaked havoc in that tiny restaurant, got the waitress all flustered, and then had to have her split their check eight ways (and bicker over the details) as three more groups of stranded travelers came in for a shift I’m sure the waitress had assumed would involve maybe five customers total.
As they left, we discovered they were pushing through to Reykjavik tonight, and had to stop until the road re-opened, but were continuing on now. We wished them luck.
They left, and another tour group of nine Germans came in, joining the group of four and the group of two and the group of five, and we watched our waitress’s eyes glaze over, and hastily took our leave.
If we see those Germans again it’s because something terrible happened to them, so I really hope not.
I do have an anthropological question, though, which is– why do Germans vacation in packs??? Why is that a thing? I’ve encountered it elsewhere too? Always herds of unrelated adults, is what I’ve found, and this may be anecdata but they also always seem to be attired as if for athletic exertion regardless of whether they’re traveling by bus or bicycle, and I don’t really get it, but maybe there’s something I’m missing, or maybe there’s some anthropology there. (All the unrelated German groups were dressed for hiking but none of them actually did any, that I could find out about– there’s not much hiking to be had, in this amount of snow, and there are snow sports to be sure but there was no evidence of any of them either?)
Fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-05 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-06 02:57 pm (UTC)They were complaining it had taken them three and a half hours to cross the mountains. We'd just driven that road and it took us two, while Maps's estimate had been one and a half. They must have been going SO SLOW and I'm really glad we never got stuck behind them, because no way could we have passed them.
But clearly, they're not used to driving in heavy snow, where as us-- well, we arrived home into identical weather conditions, just without the mountains. I know that creeping along at the slowest possible pace will only make it harder to keep going straight through drifted snow, and more dangerous! So I kept moving right along, and it takes razor-focus to drive like that but I've got 25 years' experience doing it, and the second advantage is that I was driving a car very very similar to the one I've owned for years, so I knew how it would handle and how much room it needs. If I were driving a Sprinter van full of friends and also wasn't used to snow, I don't know how I'd have fared.
But they had to push through, because they hadn't built a day in for weather to their schedule. Dude had planned on us spending a day down near the airport looking at a hokey tourist attraction, just so that we could scratch it and spend the day delayed somewhere. He just hadn't imagined we'd need to spend that day driving!
But I still cannot solve the puzzle of how the Germans left twenty minutes before us, drove a route with only a single lane and a single road (all others were closed), and arrived three hours after us, without us ever seeing their tire tracks or passing them. Magic may have been involved but if it was magic, it was crappy magic!
no subject
Date: 2020-01-07 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-07 12:55 am (UTC)It's impossible to overstate how deserted the area was.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-05 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-07 12:55 am (UTC)