Iceland

We saw nine separate horsemen in the wild. Not like recreationally, like on a trail or something, but just out in the windswept mountains, looking like they were taking medicine to grandmother's house or something. Epic.

Chris said "That would be a nice place to sit in the summertime," and meant it sincerely, before realizing that we actually WERE there in the summertime, and it wasn't going to get any better.

Wild swans everywhere. Whooper swans, if you believe the internet. Gorgeous.

One of the towns where we stayed still publishes a phone book, which is amazing in itself, but the real kicker is that it was published by first names. Very cool, and definitely a sign of a small town.

We got pranked by Google Maps, that directed us to a spot called 'Geiser' with a 5 star rating for having a geyser that erupts every 5 minutes. After a long drive through spectacularly empty, remote landscape, we arrived to find...nothing. Whoever left the geyser review was smoking crack. We did find the every 5 minute geyser later in the trip, but our initial attempt was a wild geyser chase.

Reading signs in Iceland was NOT like reading signs in other European countries, where you can pretty much work out that 'Rijksmuseum' is the museum you're looking for. Our first little town was named Sautdarkrokur, and our second one was by a place named Uthlithdarvollur. Lucy said it felt like trying to read something in a dream, where you know the letters but they won't resolve into anything real.

We fell prey to puffin madness. Who wouldn't want to see a puffin? But the puffin tours were expensive and that seemed dumb. So we hiked out to some rocky outcropping near the sea that had rumors of puffin sightings, sure to be disappointed. And at first we were- I took some hopeful pictures of white bird poop in the distance thinking maybe? (No. Not a puffin.) But then, just as we were about to turn back, a little bird with a silly face flew in and landed on the rocks. A puffin! He didn't even stay long enough to get a picture of him, but we know what we saw. We know.

A baby puffin is called a puffling.

We went to a creamery where 1) after watching us tearing apart cheese with our bare hands, the nice Icelandic lady brought us a cutting board and a knife. "You need this."  and 2) when I went into the very unremarkable-looking bathroom, I was stunned to realize they had cut the back wall out so you could see directly into the barn, and hang out with the cows. A weird but kind of fun approach.

We tracked down lobster soup from Somebody Feed Phil and were not disappointed. We saw little elf houses, and suspected they might be tampering with our hot tub. We found an amazing sculpture museum, and Carrie took a nap in the history museum. We saw so many waterfalls and baby sheep. All in all, a great trip.