It´s a real disorder.  At least to me.  I have a severe inability to sit through an entire film without falling asleep.  Because of this, I have seen only 15 minutes of most movies, which isn´t much more than a trailer, so I never really know if I´ve actually seen a movie or if I´ve seen the previews, or if I´ve seen just a few minutes and have fallen asleep.

Take, for example, The Sound of Music.  I mean, really, who hasn´t seen it?  Apparently, as I found out last night, I haven´t.  I´ve seen bits and pieces, the most famous music scenes, but as I watched it last night with my kids, I realized I haven´t seen the movie before.

I was shocked by the ending!  Who knew!  And then I looked it up online and found out all that was different about the real Von Trapps and the movie version, and how they didn´t really escape Austria as depicted in the movie but rather by taking a train to Italy on the very real premise that they were going to perform there, and then they emigrated to America.  Interesting.

At any rate, as I watched one of the first scenes where the nuns were musing about Maria´s place in the Abbey, I found the lyrics of their song more and more amusing as they related to my daughter.  In fact, if the name “Maria” is changed to “Anja”, it would be a perfect representation of what we put up with every day:

I could stay here forever.

The day before yesterday was full of adventure - and I mean adventure.  We went to a waterfall where we hiked around the back of it.  We went to Jókulsalón where we took a boat ride through a lagoon littered with massive icebergs while seals fished around us.  We hiked up the side of a mountain and down onto a glacier where we walked on millions of years-old ice.  We hiked a few miles up to one of the most beautiful places I´ve been, water cascading from perfect columns of hexagon-shaped basalt.  We drove through black sand deltas, through fields of thick, moss covered lava, next to glaciers spilling onto the grass, through fields dotted with rolls of hay that looked just like giant marshmallows, along mountains whose peaks were in the clouds, next to rocky islands jutting out of the water, below dramatic skies of surreal clouds, through sandstorms and windstorms and rainstorms.  It was 15 hours of unbelievable fun, one adventure after another, truly enjoying being together as a family. 

Alas, the pictures won´t be along until next weekend, after I get back.  I don´t want to go back.  Who would when you could be in a place like this?

There are still so many things I want to do, and not enough time to do them all.  We´ve had such a nice balance of adventure and sightseeing mixed with complete peace and quiet.  I just love it here.

We spent several days in Stokkseyri at the new (ca. 1901) house.  We went up there on my birthday and stayed until last night and just relaxed and hung out.  For my birthday, we went to a fantastic restaurant on the seashore and had an absolutely amazing dinner that still makes my mouth water just thinking about it: beef carpaccio with fresh mozzarella and tomatoes and delicate greens, the most fantastically simple yet most delicious lobster bisque, and basket after basket of freshly baked bread with wonderful sauces - olive tapenade, a sweet garlic sauce, and my favorite with the soup, tarragon yoghurt sauce.  The restaurant was serene: quiet, with simple, beautiful paintings on the wall from local artists, a really great chardonnay served in handmade clay decanters, and of course it´s right on the shore.

We went back to the house afterwards, a little tipsy from the wine and fat and happy from the dinner.  We put the kids to bed and relaxed for a while, and then just before midnight, B and I took a walk and took midnight pictures in the area - summer solstice. 

The next few days were spent playing Sequence, the kids running free, visiting the beached (dead and smelly) sperm whale, doing touristy stuff that I´ll post photos of later, and mostly just enjoying the solitude afforded by a house with no television, no radio, no internet or even a computer.  On Saturday night, we went to visit one of B´s friends that lives out in the middle of pretty much nowhere, with a view of Mt. Hekla (a volcano) and Vatnajökull in the distance and rode horses at midnight. 

I promise to post lots of pictures when we get back to Spain, but for now I have just a couple from our horseback riding adventure.

This horse was my buddy - everywhere I went, there he was. I´d turn around and he´d be right behind me. I´d go to the ground for a picture and he´d be right over me. He´s a younger horse and a total Mamma´s boy - any time she went outside of his eyesight when we were getting them ready to ride, he would get very agitated and start whinnying for her. Such a sweet horse!

I was taking a picture of something completely different and felt his breath in my ear and looked up and there he was - it´s a very impromptu picture but one of my favorite of the set.

Our very first full day back in Iceland, we visited the house in Stokkseyri that we´re buying in on - cute and charming and such a nice place to have a little home - and had grilled lamb and all the yummy fixins.

The next day was quieter and we had caught up on some much-needed rest and by the time we were going to get moving it was already noon.  B asked me what I wanted to do, and I didn´t really want to go far, so we decided to hit the Reykjanes peninsula which is where the other pictures have been so far.

My favorite part of the Reykjanes peninsula is Gunnuhver, which is the very very active geothermal area not too far from where the base was. The base where they had just pumped lots and lots of my taxpayer money just to close it down, nice!

At any rate, part of Gunnuhver was closed off because it is so active that the wooden walkways were too hot to walk on but we walked around the other areas and the kids got as much of a kick out of it as I did. The sights, the sounds, the smells were all very exciting.

Arctic terns are so aggressive - it´s the bird I think B hates the most.  The first time I was introduced to them, he wanted to show me how they are, so he took me out to an open field - I had no idea birds nested in huge open fields, silly me at the time (10 years ago) thought birds only nested in trees - and said, “Watch this.”  I sat in the car and thought it strange that he was taking a glass squeegee with him to the field, but whatever.

He took a few steps out and the birds started swirling overhead and making a strange “clicking” sound.  He reached down to pick up a baby bird and then the terns really started attacking.  Every time they´d start clicking, they´d dive and would go for the highest point - hence the squeegee.  That way the birds would only get so far as the squeegee.

The birds attacked the car, got past the squeegee and left him with a few small puncture wounds, and I understood why he didn´t like terns!  Not that he ever made a habit out of picking up baby birds, but if you even do so much as accidentally wander into a nesting field, they will let loose the furor of the birds from Alfred Hitchcock´s movie “The Birds”.

We went to the Reykjanes peninsula yesterday, which is where I lived for the 5 years I was here.  B took me to all the best places: the lighthouse and bird cliffs, the continental divide, an old volcanic crater, and my favorite, the geothermal area where the rocks were perfectly warm and you could sit on the ground all day and have a very warm bum.

The only picture I have ready for now is from the edge of the crater where we explored and found lots of cool little pieces of lava, black sand, a bird skeleton (but if you ask Anja she will tell you that it definitely is NOT a bird skeleton but rather a dinosaur.)

The secret I was alluding to in previous posts finally happened this weekend.  On Saturday morning, we left our house at 11am en route to Alicante, where we were flying out of for our trip to Iceland.  The only person in Iceland that knew we were coming is B´s brother who was picking us up at the airport.

From what I´d been told, and from how it looked from Google Maps, the trip to Alicante is supposed to take about 6 hours.  The directions given by Google Maps started us going North to Sevilla and then West through to Alicante. 

To save a few hours, I´ll summarize by saying this:  the directions were CRAP.

We ended up driving through Ronda and when we got through, all we saw signs for was San Pedro, which B couldn´t find on the map.  We stopped at a restaurant that was closed but someone was thankfully outside of who was kind enough to show us where San Pedro was.   It´s due South, right near Marbella - which was the other route we could have taken and would have saved us 3 hours of driving in one giant circle.  But San Pedro was only 45 kilometers away, and since we left with amount of buffer time, we breathed a sigh of relief and figured we´d be back on track shortly.

San Pedro.  Stupid (#$&/(!”#)%)#/ San Pedro.

The drive to San Pedro is only 45 kilometers. OF TWISTING ROADS GOING DOWN A MOUNTAIN.  The kind where you can´t go faster than 20mph.  The kind where your kids are in the back of the car crying because their stomachs hurt so bad.  The kind where you can´t pull over and get a breather OR ELSE YOU´LL MISS YOUR PLANE. 

When we finally got to San Pedro, we had missed out on so much time that we were starting to worry about whether we´d make it to Alicante in time.  But hey, now we´re back to the Autovia (the freeway) and we can catch up on some lost time.  Right?  RIGHT?

WRONG.

The Autovia suddenly disappeared.  Lucky us!  We got to take the scenic route!  The scenic route that was TWISTING ROADS GOING ALONG A MOUNTAIN.  Where once again our kids were getting sick (don´t bother mentioning Sea Bands in your comments since we already had them!), we were getting near tears, the time was ticking away quickly, and we couldn´t stop for anything.

We finally made it to the Autovia and had serious doubts that we´d be able to make it to Alicante in time.  This is when B changed his never-changing tune about me driving too fast to, “Hey, can you drive a little faster?” 

And this is where Karyn channeled Matt Kenseth and turned their little blue Scion xA into a black and yellow speeding machine.

And this is also where Karyn stopped hating driving in Spain.

I pushed our little crappy car to its limits, driving an average of about 90mph for the next 4 hours.  B said I got up to 100mph once but when the car starts feeling like it´s going to start hydroplaning on a dry road, that´s when I back off just a weeee little bit.  Like to 95mph.

In the entire drive, we only saw one police car the whole time and that was someone in Marbella merging on just to merge back off.  And unbelievably, despite my record speed in my car, we still had a car here and there fly past us like I was a grandmother on a Sunday drive. 

As you can probably figure by now, we did make it to Alicante in time.  When we pulled into the airport, we still had to find our parking company so we were going to ask for directions at the departures terminal.  Our luckiest of lucky luck, the van from the company was at the terminal dropping the last of the people off just as we arrived and we unloaded, B took the car to park and I took the kids in the terminal and we got to our line at about 8:15pm.  The line took over an hour to get through, so as soon as we checked our luggage, we went to our gate, got through passport control, got on a bus, and got on our plane.

We made it.  And B will never talk smack about my driving again.