Musings and Ravings

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fred-wilson:

Catch The Light - Sin Fang

icelandic music for the win!

4 months ago 24 notes Fred Wilson Dot VC

Love this

10 months ago 2 notes

Halldor Orri equalizing for Stjarnan against Valur tonight. The game ended 1-1 but Stjarnan was unlucky not to finish Valur off

10 months ago 0 notes

Oli Johnson for Norwich »
I never get tired of watching this

11 months ago 0 notes

End of the road

We arrived in Iceland this morning. That’s it. Road trip over. The past few weeks have been truly amazing.

5,216 miles (8,394 kilometers). That’s a lot of driving.

For reference, it’s equal to 6.3 times around Iceland.

It’s almost the same combined length we flew from Boston, MA to Austin, TX and Seattle, WA to Keflavik, Iceland - 5,305 miles (8,538 kilometers).

We averaged 29.5 miles per gallon so our fuel consumption was around 177 gallons.

Below is a picture of our entire trip (click to enlarge)

I haven’t had a chance to properly reflect on the trip so below is a round up of our last few days in Oregon and Washington and a brief summary of the highlights as I see them right now.

Last few days

We left Tommi and Vanessa in San Francisco and drove to Eureka, CA. According to Lonely Planet, which was excellent with most of their recommendations, Eureka is a quirky town, well worth a visit.

On this instance though, Lonely Planet was far, far off the mark.

Eureka is completely dead on Sundays. Most restaurants are closed. We went to two different locations and both were closed. The third location, however, was pretty busy. So busy in fact, that they couldn’t accommodate us without a reservation. It makes sense that this place was busy - it was the only one in town open.

So, tired after the drive, we ended up at Applebee’s. I know. Stupid, stupid decision. My justification was that I just wanted something really quick to eat so we could camp while it was still bright out. Also, I had never been to Applebee’s. For a good reason.

The place was packed. Pensioners with a sprinkle of family people made up about half the restaurant. The other half was made up of young teenage guys that wanted to take advantage of the $4 Jaegerbombs. The oddest mix of crowd I have ever seen.

We ate and made our way out of Applebee’s in a record time. After almost having gotten run over by an old woman who was driving at 3x the speed limit, I had had enough of the quirkiness of Eureka. Only one thing to do, withdraw some cash from an ATM (for the campground) and then be on our merry way. We went to 3 different locations, which contained a working ATM according to Google Maps. None did. On the fourth location my debit card was eaten by the bloody ATM.

I screamed.

Agony.

Get me the hell out of here.

Which we did. We camped at Patrick’s Point, which was nice.

The following morning we drove through the Redwoods. They are truly an amazing spectacle. One can easily fit a London apartment complex into one of those bad boys. The trees are really that big.

Also, let’s be honest, London apartments are not very big.

We kept on driving until we came to Crater Lake. We had high hopes for the place. It’s a lake formed in a volcanic crater. It’s the deepest lake in the US (1,949 feet). It’s supposed be amazingly blue and you’re also supposed to be able to hike down to it and jump off a cliff into the ice cold water.

Crater Lake was pretty cool, but not worth the long drive. Especially at this time of year. The park was mostly closed because the snow banks for still well over 10 feet. The lake was beautiful but since we couldn’t hike down to it and jump off the cliff, it was a bit of a disappointment.

We spent the night in Bend, which is a pretty cool Oregon town. On Tuesday I woke up early to go to Sun Mountain Fun Center. I have wanted to try my skills in the batting cages since I came to the US two years ago.

I was terrible. Absolutely abysmal. I managed to hit a couple of balls - in the soft ball cage. I didn’t hit a single ball out of the 40 I tried in the baseball cage. I have terrible hand-eye coordination. Apparently.

From Bend we drove to Mt. Hood (and saw the Sisters mountains from far away) before arriving in Portland. We camped just south of the city and finished our bag of marshmallows.

We met Jessica Lackey at Mother’s Bistro for breakfast on Wednesday. She gave us some pointers about Portland. Armed with those, we checked out Powell’s City of Books. It encompasses an entire city block and is (self proclaimed) largest used book store in the US (or the world - can’t remember).

We also checked out the International Rose Test Garden which was really beautiful. On our way out of town on Wednesday evening we also checked out the Columbia River Gorge which is also the final segment in the Lewis and Clark expeditions.

We arrived in Seattle on Wednesday evening and spent our final days there. We stayed in an exceptionally disgusting motel. Terrible. The fact that I got locked in the lobby for a good while, with the concierge that didn’t speak English, doesn’t even begin to describe how bad this motel was.

Seattle was great. We checked out the Pike Market and the original Starbucks location. We visited the Space Needle and had plenty of micro brews. We met Charlie Davis and Brad and Anna Bonnett for dinner and then we met Brad and Anna again for breakfast the following morning.

And that was it. After breakfast we returned our car and chilled at the SeaTac airport for a few hours. The flight back home was uneventful - I slept through most of it.

***

Highlights / Observations

It was a fantastic trip. No mishaps. Amazing sights. Great, great food. Great food. Amazing company. Just truly amazing.

Below is my take on the highlights:

Most amazing sight: Grand Canyon (this one is easy). Runners up: White Sands, NM and Yosemite, CA

Best food: The lamb frittata at BLD in LA. Just really, really good. Runners up: Brass Monkey deep dish pizza at Littlestar in SF and randomly the fish taco at Diablo’s Cantina in Las Vegas (we were a little tipsy so this is maybe not an entirely unbiased comparison)

Biggest revelation: Fish tacos. My god. I was very late to the game on this one. Sigrun looked at me when I was eating one and asked me why I was sad. My reply? I’m 28 years old and just now discovering fish tacos.

Biggest disappointment or least value for money: Universal Studios. I really just wanted to see the studio lots. The studio lot tour wasn’t great and the park was obviously designed for toddlers.

***

I’m definitely going to revisit this after I have had time to reflect on the trip further - these were just the few observations that I wanted to share immediately.

Written at my parents house in Gardabaer, Iceland