We woke up at 5:20 Iceland time (so 1:20AM ET) but I had been up for a bit already, as I often don’t sleep well before a flight. However we soon found out that our flight was delayed by an hour. The upside was that, at least this way, we’d get to eat breakfast for free at the hotel instead of the airport. So we finished packing and dillydallied for a while before heading to breakfast exactly when it opened. And it was already a zoo. Presumably, a lot of people had day trips.
As you know, I don’t like GPS. For as long as I can remember I have had a better sense of direction than most people I know. I don’t remember how young I was but my parents gave me the map at a pretty young age, if we were going somewhere new, as I could figure it out. I am one of those people that almost always knows where north is, unless I’m indoors or in a downtown with too many skyscrapers. Given that I have this, um, ability, I have long been resistant to GPS and have used every mistake a GPS has never made in my presence to claim that it’s a useless technology even though it helps millions of people every day. (Because, frankly, most people are lost in a new place most of the time.)
But Jenn is never without her phone. As a result, I have started to rely on GPS over the years, usually while grumbling, instead of maps or instinct. I have regularly been confused by GPS map orientation for example and gotten confused myself because the map wasn’t oriented with north at the top. (You know, like a map.) But, much like with cellphones and other technology, slowly I’ve come to rely on it more and more as we travel. I’m not sure we ever relied on it more than we did in Iceland even though there are fewer decisions to make in Iceland when driving the Ring Road, but I think I have a good reason.
In The Most Human Human, Brian Christian talks about two kinds of gibberish. He mentions Noam Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as a sentence that is gibberish but we have to think about it at least for a second. But “hf;iohfh” is obviously gibberish and you don’t need to think about it. Well, I have to say that place names in Iceland mostly struck me as gibberish, the latter kind. Especially anything that looked like it was at least four syllables. Sometimes we’d come to a road with four different places/things on it and they all started with the same syllable. For example, there are numerous places and sights in Iceland that begin with “rey” or “reyk” or “reykj” in addition to Reykjavik. And there are numerous places that start with “la.” (Seemingly an infinite number.) So you’d see a sign with four names on it, all beginning with “la,” and all at least four syllables long. It’s hard to make a split-second decision to slow down and turn in that circumstance, especially when there’s no shoulder.
So what happened is I started relying on GPS to tell me which of the turnoffs was the right turnoff, so I didn’t have to try to memorize multi-syllabic words that looked, to my mind, like gibberish. And that is how we ended up, Tuesday morning, with me insisting the GPS was right and Jenn wondering if it was wrong.
Because the GPS was sending us on a detour because the highway to the airport was supposedly closed in a brief section. (This could have been true. There was construction. There was an ongoing eruption near by.) And that detour got stranger and stranger while I, Mr. GPS Skeptic, insisted it was right. Eventually we arrived at a private road that Google Maps did not understand was private. (There were so many cars turning around here, so we were hardly the only ones who were fooled.) So I looked at it and I saw lines intersecting to the south. And my map brain assumed road. And so I turned south and headed off into the countryside. As I approached what should have been the intersection I saw a sign and it dawned on me – those were district or county boundaries, not roads. (Why Google Maps shows district/county boundaries on its directions app I’m not sure and I’m also not sure it shows them in Canada.)
So we turned around and just drove back to the highway. Jenn had been trying to tell me she didn’t just distrust the route but she distrusted that the highway was closed. That’s because the traffic data is hilariously wrong, with one car generating “yellow” in the rural areas and a couple cars generating “red.” And it turned out that the highway was not closed at all, it was just, briefly, down to one lane, as it had been when we arrived.
I mention all of this because I am now going to be so much more obnoxious about GPS. I’m not getting over this for like a decade, even if it was only a ten or fifteen minute detour. Back to maps for me.
Anyway, everyone and their mother was going to the airport this morning so we got in our second Icelandic traffic jam. (Also, the 5th largest city/town in Iceland is next to the airport and it was, um, rush hour if they have one.) We got gas right near the airport and were lucky to just get in before a big rush. We then headed to our rental car office and how that they prioritized returns so we were out of there almost before I could throw our garbage out. Then we took the shuttle to the airport to try to figure out what we could do about our connection that we would likely miss. (We took a non-direct flight because it was cheaper and earlier in the day.)
They were unable to tell us what we could do about potentially missing our flight but it was a super fast bag drop and we were through security in no time. We went to the Duty Free where, for some reason, they have like four different beer taster packs that aren’t available at the Duty Free when you enter the country. I wasn’t willing to carry that on the plane so instead we got some stranger stuff we have yet to try. I got dill aquavit, which I had seen at a hotel bar, and Jenn got an alcoholic bitters flavoured with birch. Jenn shopped a bit and then we went through the exit visa process.
Once we got on the plane we learned that the wings were frozen and we needed to wait for them to defrost. I don’t know how long we sat on the tarmac but it was a while. It ended up adding nearly an hour to the delay overall, meaning there was very little chance of us making our connection in Montreal, having to go through customs. (Though customs was a breeze.)
Fortunately it turns out there an absolute ton of flights between Montreal and Toronto on a weekday. So we were put on one a couple of hours later. I have actually never been in the Montreal airport before. It is…narrow and there isn’t a lot of seating. So we wandered around and found a less busy place to sit. Later we went for tee and coffee and then came back. There were so many flights we got confused about the time but fortunately Jenn got an email and we made it to the gate in time. The plane from Montreal was a 330 and was nowhere near full, which was kind of nice, even though it’s a really short flight.
Then we had remarkably good luggage luck for Pearson, but that’s probably because we were on a domestic flight.
Anyway, I highly recommend going to Iceland if you like scenery. If you don’t like scenery, I’m not sure there’s much to do. The flight is basically the same as flying to LA. As I said at the beginning, it’s possible to do it cheaper than we did, if you’re willing to camp or sleep in a van or campervan and/or willing to buy your meals at the grocery store. I don’t know how much that costs but I do think it’s probably not that insane if you do that. It might not be the most comfortable trip, though.