Day 87-Icelandic Horse Festival

   March 31-The group got up relatively early today, loaded up in the vehicles, and headed off on the road trip portion of the Hays and Fritz visit.  Since there were relatively few clouds in the sky, we drove directly to Hallgrímskirkja when we arrived in Reykjavík, so the family could get good views from the bell tower.

A view to the north of downtown Reykjavík.  Akranes is across the bay on the horizon.

   While the visitors and our kids enjoyed the views, Sally and I ran over to Pam and Marilyn's house to drop off luggage that my family did not need for the road trip, but would need to take back to the States in a week.  Pam and Marilyn managed to get a great place near downtown (in the vicinity of the yellow house with a maroon "silo" on the left-hand side of the picture above.)  Unfortunately, we could not visit for very long, because we needed to get on with our plans in Reykjavík. 

   In particular, most everyone was interested in seeing the Icelandic horses parade through town as part of the weekend Icelandic Horse Festival.  The available evidence strongly suggests that the modern Icelandic horse is descended almost completely from the horses that were brought over originally by the Norse settlers.  Today, the Icelandic horse is its own breed, having evolved over the past millenium through natural selection to survive in Iceland and through selective breeding to serve the specific needs of Icelanders.  Since it is now illegal to import horses, it seems likely that the characteristics of the breed will not change much in the near future.  This protectionist stance even extends to Icelandic horses that are shipped abroad.  They are barred from ever reentering the country in order to protect the country's horse population from being exposed to foreign equine diseases.  One characteristic of the Icelandic horse is its innate ability to "tolt."  A tolting horse lifts its hooves high in the air like it is high-stepping as it moves at about the speed of a trot.  The result is a remarkably smooth ride for the rider, who is barely jostled.

   We all walked downtown to the Bæjarins beztu pylsur hot dog stand.  Its hot dogs are widely touted as the best in Iceland.  This may or may not be true, but the hot dogs over here are spectacular and this place makes them as good as any other place we have been.  If we can find the condiments they use when back in the States, we may start eating more hot dogs when we return home.  With hot dogs in hand, most of us went to watch the horse parade.



Alex and Diane try to figure out how they are going to get
all of the good stuff they are finding back to the U.S.



   My father is an avid junker and we know of only one junking store in Iceland, called Friða Frænke Antique.  Since it was open only two hours on Saturday, we skipped the horse parade and I took him junking instead.  As it turned out, the parade was not particularly long and the rest of the family was able to join us at Friða Frænke Antique.  In the end, everyone EXCEPT Dad found something to buy!  Yes, that is an event that is rare enough to be noted for all posterity in a blog post!

    As we wandered around the downtown area, we came across the Reykjavík 871+/-2 exhibit.  Any exhibit that explicitly states numerical uncertainty in its name is well worth

2+/-1 visits, so we went on in.  While constructing a new building in 2001, the remains of a Viking longhouse was uncovered and subsequently excavated.  The new building was still built, but the ancient structures were preserved in situ in its basement and numerous interactive multimedia displays were added to flesh out the exhibit.  The final result was quite fascinating.  The longhouse was occupied 930-1000 AD, which makes the name of the

exhibit a little confusing.  It actually refers to a turf wall just outside the longhouse.  The wall lies below a layer of tephra that was deposited in 871+/-2 AD when the volcano Torfajökull erupted.  The date of the eruption has been determined this precisely, because tephra from it has been found in the Greenland ice sheets, which have layers of ice and ice melt that are similar to tree rings.  This turf wall is one of only two structures that have been excavated in Iceland that are under this tephra.  This establishes that people were definitely on Iceland before the eruption, but not in large numbers, and maybe only seasonally, since both structures have been turf walls for animal pens.

This turf wall of an animal pen is one of the two oldest man-made structures in Iceland.

Animal bones were incorporated into the wall of the longhouse next to its front door.

   By the time we left the exhibit, the hot dogs we had eaten for dinner were a distant memory and everyone needed refueled, so we headed to the Perlan to see the views of the city again and to eat at the café.  The Perlan consists of five water tanks that hold the thermal hot water for the city.  Since they are on a hill, a museum, a café, and a swanky restaurant have been built into them.  With everyone's stomachs full, we drove out to Keflavík and the further west along the north side of the Reykjanes peninsula until we came to the town of Garður at its northwest tip, where we checked into a guesthouse.  It was located about 100 feet from the shore and maybe half a mile from the lighthouse at the end of the peninsula.  By the time the Sun had set, the fog had begun to close in and the lighthouse was turned on.  Being land-locked Coloradans, this was new for us, but there is only so long that a revolving light can hold your attention.  So, we put the kids to bed and then sat around making plans to visit the sights on the peninsula the next day.