Robling Loop

I don't do the Robling loop often but it is a good winter ride to do for a change of pace. Its short mostly flat and brings us on some roads we don't often do. I posted the ride for the Friday after Thanksgiving and got a good turn out. Laura, Bob, Ricky, Dave, Chris and Pete joined me on a barely 40 degree morning.There is nothing particularly scenic or interesting on this route but it does get us a look at the Delaware in Florence.

Its not the best looking part of the river especially because of all the industry along it. The road is wide and quiet so its not a bad place to ride. We rode down along the river until we went under the turnpike bridge then headed west to some of the roads we usually ride in this area.

Although it was sunny and had warmed to the low 40s the constant 10-15 mph wind made it feel colder than it was. We hit pockets of head winds as we worked our way back to the start.

We stopped at the Jacksonville deli for our rest stop. I don't really like this place it as there is no bathroom and they really don't have a good selection of food and drink. Being a holiday weekend I wasn't going to be choosy as there aren't a lot of place open so you have to take what you can get.

We fought the head winds for most of the way back from the rest stop so the ride felt tougher than the 42 miles would suggest but it was still good to get out and work off some of the Thanksgiving meal.

Moment of Inattention

I should have know it was going to be a strange ride when the birds were circling overhead before the went out for a ride. Neither Laura and I had listed a ride so I ended up going to Cranbury to do Tru's ride. Its good to do a different every now and then to check in with some I don't see on a regular basis.   

Riding is a very safe sport as long as you follow some basic common sense. One of the reasons I ride with the PFW is that it is safer to ride with a group and everybody in the club knows how to ride together. So it was usual when less than a mile into the ride somebody fell behind me. The person that fell was the last person I would have expected to lose control of the bike especially since it was a stupid fall. He ran into the mirror of a parked car. There was no traffic on the road and no problems with the road surface. It was just a moment of inattention that caused this person to drift into the car. It was a violent hit as he didn't just nick the mirror but took it clear off the car. His front well came off the bike as part of the fall. Luckily he didn't break anything and seemed fine. The car however is going to need some repair so information was exchanged and we moved on.

Tru has had a couple of accidents during some of his rides lately and had warned us at the start to be careful. I guess not everybody listened.

Tru had a very circuitous route planned. The rest stop was in West Windsor which is only 9 miles away but it took us 22 miles to get there. We went by most of the usual places we start rides from including Etra and MCP so the entire ride felt like we at the beginning or ending of all the rides I lead in this area. We ended up circling close to my house twice during the ride so it felt like the whole ride went nowhere.

Still it was fun and interesting ride as there was a lot of good banter and a few other minor  mishaps during the ride. Jim ended up with some glass in his tire and got a flat as well as a cut on his hand. And because I forgot to strap my pump back in after Jim's flat it fell into my front gear ring and locked up my cranks. Luckily I was coasting at the time or I would have went over my handlebars.

I did make it home safely after 46 miles. So despite the mishaps I'm always happy when I can get in over 40 miles on a cold day.

Winter Biking

It seems like since I got back from Iceland it has gotten a lot colder here and in fact this weekend felt a lot like the middle of winter. I did lead a 40+ mile ride on the road last Sunday out of MCP but the reason I rode on Sunday instead of Saturday was because it was below freezing last Saturday. We did this route which is a modified New Egypt run to be able to stop at one or our favorite coffee shops down that way. It felt good to get out on the road again after 2+ weeks off the bike but I was dragging a bit at the end.

This week neither Saturday or Sunday was really going to be warm enough to be on the road although I know some people will be doing the Cranksgiving ride on Sunday. This Saturday I switched to the mountain bike and lead a ride up the canal to from Washington Crossing to Bulls Island and back. We went up the PA side to avoid a strong north headwind because the PA side has more cover. It didn't really matter though because when we went down the NJ side there wasn't much of a tail wind and in fact we had a strong head wind at times.

This is the earliest that I have had the mountain bike out as is usually doesn't get cold enough to have to go onto the trail until beginning of December. Let's hope this cold snap is temporary and not a sign of a cold winter. This mountain bike ride is the first time I rode the new mountain bike in the cold as I got it in the early spring. Since I did the GAP trail and other trail rides in the summer it felt a little strange to ride it in the cold.

In some non biking new I took Monday off the see the transit of Mercury across the Sun. I managed to get a couple of good pictures using my Canon SX740 mounted to my telescope. The 40x zoom is good enough to get a reasonable picture of the Sun through a solar filter.

I also got to see a good sunrise as the transit started about 30 mins after the sun rose.

In one last piece of news from Iceland I found a web cam that looks over the harbor at Reykjavik at the Imagine Peace Light. You can look at the live stream to see what an aurora looks like in real time. They also archive the live stream so you can look through previous nights instead of having to watch it live. If you want to see what an aurora looks like in real time click on this link and scroll ahead to 1:55 or 3:35 and watch it for 10 mins and you will see what it really looks like as opposed to pictures of it. The web cam is not the best quality so you don't see the purple and yellow spikes rolling through the aurora but is still pretty interesting to watch and cheaper than a trip to Iceland.

Iceland History and Folklore

Iceland is visually beautiful but underneath that beauty is a dark and strange history. The stories of Iceland are very tragic and the folklore reflects the hard life of Icelanders. The stories and traditions of Iceland are almost as interesting as the natural wonders.

Our education on Iceland began on the ride from the airport to the blue lagoon. The driver was telling us how beer wasn't legal in Iceland until 1989. You could drink wine, vodka or most other sprints but Iceland didn't want to legalize beer because they thought cause a lot of drinking problems. I'm not sure the logic of its OK to get drunk off your ass on vodka but beer is evil. Our driver remembers the day beer was legalized because she was in 8th grade at the time and remember all her teachers were "sick" for a couple of days after beer was legalized.

Iceland was founded by people from Norway who were looking for some land to farm since it wasn't easy to own any good land in Norway. Its hard for me to imagine that people saw the rocky shore of Iceland with its poor soil and short growing season and said this will be a good place to live. You can't grow any good vegetables in Iceland because the weather isn't warm enough. The only thing that really grows is grass. The Norwegians did bring over sheep and horses which do well in Iceland because of the abundance of grass. The winters are also not overlay harsh. In the lowland it doesn't get much below freezing most days. There is also a lot of good fishing around the island so if you like lamb and fish you can scratch out a living. Of course since you can't grow any vegetables or fruit you have no source of vitamin C so your going to have scurvy. The only way to combat that was to eat some seaweed and I'm not talking the good tasting stuff that is wrapped around sushi.

Although the fishing is good, this is the North Atlantic so the seas are rough and unpredictable. The chances that your boat is going to survive the sudden storm is not really good. If you are lucky you will be able to run the boat aground and only half the people will die of drowning and exposure.

This is why for most of Iceland's history the women far out numbered the men. As our driver told us men didn't really have to be well groomed to get women until about 30 years ago when fishing got a lot safer because of better boats and better safety gear.

Assuming you didn't die because of malnutrition or being killed at sea there was still the fact that about every 5 years some major eruption occurs in Iceland. The volcanoes in Iceland have many different ways to kill you. There is the normal volcanic explosion that rains lava and rock down on your village and you die. Then there is the volcanic fissure when opens up and hot lava rolls through your village. You can easily run away from the lava but your farm is now a wasteland where nothing will grow for 30 years and your house and all your food stores have been wiped away so you have no way to feed yourself and you die. Then there is the volcanic eruption that happens in volcano far enough away that you are not affected by lava or ash of the explosion but because the volcano was under a glacier the eruption melts the glacier so fast that a massive wall of water flows down to the sea and right through your village and you and ever thing you own gets washed out to sea and you die.

On the tour our guide told us many stories about all of the different the volcano eruptions that occurred in Iceland and the story always ended with "and many people died". The worst eruption that occurred was in Iceland was the eruption of Laki in 1783. This was a volcanic fissure which erupted for 8 months spewing out 42 billion tons of lava and 120,000,000 tons of sulfur dioxide. Not only did this kill 80% of the sheep and 50% of the horses in Iceland but 25% of the population died not only from the sulfur dioxide but also from famine since the eruption poisoned the land for may years. This eruption was so large that it affected the entire world. The amount of sulfur dioxide was large enough to cause clouds of it to cover parts of Europe where many people died or were sicken. The clouds of the eruption were so large and lasted so long that they caused major weather changes in most of the world. Causing either very hot or very cold weather with lots of violent storms. It is estimated that a total of almost 6 million people died as a direct or indirect result of this eruption.

This violent Iceland history comes with a equally dark mythology and folklore. Trolls are a big part of the Icelandic folklore. According to the myths, trolls can only come out in the dark and if they are caught in the light they turn to stone. As we drove around Iceland our guide would point our various rock formations and tell us some story about some trolls that didn't make it back to their cave before dark like this one of some trolls returning in their sailboat and getting caught in the sun just before getting the their cave on the beach.(I guess I can kinda see it)

One of the darker stories about trolls is centered around Christmas. Iceland doesn't really have Santa Claus. They instead have Gryla and the Yule Lads

Gryla is a giantess who likes to eat misbehaved children. She is on her third husband. The first two she ate. She walks around collecting bad children then cooks them in a large pot. She has 13 children of her own, called the yule lads who steal things or harass you. You can look up the Yule Lads for details. One of the yule lads visits you for each of the 13 days before Christmas. So if you are a kid and still alive by Christmas its a good year.  It makes getting coal in your stocking seem kinda lame.

Modern life in Iceland is much better than it use to be. Many of the hardships of living in Iceland have be overcome by improved technology. Fishing is now a very safe way to make a living. The people in Iceland have learned how to manage the land to be as self sufficient as they can. They have produced an abundance of lamb, beef and fish which they trade for other food and resources they need. They are also producing fruits and vegetables in green houses powered by geothermal heat.

In fact 95% of all power and heat for Iceland comes from geothermal power plants which tap the deadly steam and hot water that is bubbling below the surface. The other electricity is produced through hydroelectric dams. This make Iceland a very clean place with cheap power. The typical power bill per house is $20-$30 a month. Its even better when you realize that houses don't need any furnace or hot water heaters. Hot water is piped directly from the power plant to the house where it flows directly to the shower for hot water and directly through the radiators to heat the house. The left over hot water flows under the driveway to clear the snow then the water flow out of the house and eventually into the sea. So each house has a hot water line,a cold water line and and electrical line coming into it and that's it. 

There is still the threat of volcanic eruptions but they have early warning systems in place so most people will be able to get to safety before their house is swept away by lava or flooding. That doesn't mean a major catastrophe can't happen. As recent a 2010 there was a major eruption that stopped air traffic for months and caused ash to rain down on most of the island...but they weather it and there was no major lost of life.

The coast of living is high in Iceland because a lot of things have be imported but the standard of living is good and they have a good health care and social services. If you don't mind long dark winters or the threat of volcanic eruptions its probably not a bad place to live.

Vacationing in the Land of Fire and Ice

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Iceland is a harsh mistress but one that you come to appreciate after spending some time there. Iceland has a cold and inhospitable climate that is almost impossible to live in. At any moment an
earth quake or volcano eruption could occur that can put the entire island at risk. Yet this constantly changing and dangerous land is unbelievably diverse and beautiful. This place is a geologist dream. Iceland sits astride the North American and European tectonic plates so it is very geologically active. As you drive around you will see evidence of volcanic explosions and lava flows as well as the presents of geothermal activity. The produces a constantly changing landscape filled with natural wonders like waterfalls, geysers, glaciers and many other strange things. If you are lucky you may even be able to experience the northern lights on a clear night.

But as important as the seeing the many sights in this country is understanding the history and folklore of Iceland. The harsh nature of the land has created some interesting legends and given a special character to the people here. The way they have harnessed the forces of nature here and learn to live with the constant threats is an amazing story and one that you only appreciate after seeing the landscape

I can not fully describe all that we saw and experienced but will try to provide the highlights. The first cool thing we did just after landing in Iceland is to go to the blue lagoon. This is the most famous of the many natural hot springs in Iceland and really lived up to the hype.

Since we got to Iceland early in the morning it was still dark when we arrived at the blue lagoon at eight o'clock in the morning. The heat coming off the water created a fog that made it hard to see more than a few feet. Spending a couple of hours at the hot springs while watching the sun rise was perfect start to the trip.

We spend the afternoon near our hotel in Reykjavik walking around town. I had planned to go the bed early but saw that the sky was clear and there was a good chance for aurora activity so I headed down to the water front to try and catch the show. I saw the hazy greenish clouds of the aurora as I got to the water. It was very faint but over the course of the

next hour it moved and changed had a few brilliant outbreaks. The best way to describe what the aurora looks like is that it is a lot like greenish clouds except that they are more narrow and can twist and turn as they move. The pictures you see of them are not what you really see with your eyes as the time exposure of the camera catches more light than your eyes can. However the camera doesn't catch the subtle spiky patterns that can sometimes be present.

One of the reasons we came to Iceland at this time of year was to try and catch the northern lights. Iceland has a lot of cloudy weather and aurora activity is unpredictable so there is no guarantee that you will see them. Although I was really tired I am glad stayed up to see them because I didn't know if I would get another chance.

The second day in Iceland was the first day of our seven day tour. This would take us counter clockwise around the ring road of Iceland. We decided on a guided tour instead of doing it on our own as we knew the weather could be unpredictable this time of year and we wanted an experienced guide to get us around any problems as well as provide details about what we were looking at.

The first day of the tour we did the Golden Circle which includes the Þingvellir National Park where you can see where the North American and European tectonic plates meet.

The second stop is Geyser.This is an area where there is a lot of geothermic activity and some active geysers. The word geyser was actually invented here and is an Icelandic word. There was a geyser that erupts every few minutes so it was cool to stand around and watch it erupt.

The last stop of the day was the Gullfoss waterfall which is an impressive two step waterfall. Pictures just don't do it justice.

The second day of our trip was on the south coast of Iceland where we saw some of the many waterfalls as well as visited a horse farm to see the famous Icelandic horses.

The Icelandic horse is the only type of horse in Iceland and is unique because it has 5 gaits. One of the gaits is so smooth that you can carry beer with out spilling it. I'm not sure how useful that is but it made for a good demonstration.

These horses also seem to like to unzip jackets

The third day we continued on the south coast heading east. We saw yet another waterfall before heading to the famous black sand beach near Vix. Besides the black sand there are also basalt columns in the cliffs. These columns form as the magma from a lava flow cools.

The highlight of the third day of the tour was Diamond beach which was littered with tiny icebergs.

This was next to Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon which was filled with icebergs that have fallen off the glacier.

 

The number of icebergs in the lagoon and beach varies a lot. Sometimes the beach and lagoon are empty. However it was full when we were there and was a sunny day so it was impossible to take a bad picture.

The fourth and fifth day of the trip was spent on the east coast in fjords and bays there. 

It had snowed the over the past few days so the mountains were spotted with snow as was some parts of the ground but there was not much snow on the roads.

On the fifth day we visited another hot spring. This one was by lake Myvatn. This time we got to relax in the hot springs while watching a sunset. I could really get use to these hot springs.

On the last two days of the tour we drove through the northern part of Iceland. The landscape in Iceland changes constantly and in the north were snow covered peaks next to stony lava landscapes. The stony landscape reminded me of some pictures of Mars and in fact the Apollo astronauts trained here for walks on the moon.

We also visited the town of Akureyri the second largest city in Iceland. It reminded me of a ski town as it was built next to a large mountain. The harbor was very scenic.

The last day was another couple of waterfalls each beautiful and unique. The last one was really cool because the water for the waterfall came out of the rocks. 

We saw and learned so much about the many cool geological oddities on our trip that I have probably absorbed enough information to get a degree in geology. And as a bonus we got to see the northern lights a couple of more times during our trip. Although my wife and I don't like to have our picture taken I couldn't resist getting a picture of us with the northern lights in the background. After spending a week in Iceland I can now see why so many people say it is one of the coolest and unusually places they have ever been.