My head still hurts, and it's late.  Lydia however has blogged about some of the great stuff we've been eating in Iceland since our arrival [fe].  I'd suggest heading over there for a blow-by-blow description of what we've been munching on during our trip.

Tomorrow is a long car ride as we head out on another driving tour.  I'm sore and stiff from my adventures on, and off, the horse so it's going to be a bit of a relief to sit still for most of the day.  That is if I can actually sit up by the morning.

This is Indiana Jones.  He's a horse.  An Icelandic horse, so he's actually quite small which is good because he threw me off his back and I landed on my head.  That might be why this post is slightly terse.  That and I wrote it out before, and then it got deleted when I tried to post it.  So the headache I have from landing on my noggin, and the fact that I don't feel like writing out the same thing again is making me take the agression that I should be directing towards Indiana Jones out on you.

I apologize.

Indiana Jones and I got off to a good start.  I was doing some novice level stuff like speeding him up, turning him and that kind of thing.  I was in control.  Well it would be more accurate to say that he was giving me the illusion of control, which he took away when he decided to toss me off his back.  The old adage about getting back on the horse is true, you do have to get back on it after being tossed off if only because in the middle of nowhere in Iceland it's the only way home.  

For the brief bit following the fall I was okay, but by that point the tour was behind schedule so the guide at the front of the pack would try to spur us on by speeding up and building a few minutes worth of a lead and then stopping while the stragglers caught up.  The trouble was that Indiana Jones wanted to be at the front, and there was no way I could slow him down so I went through periods where all of a sudden he would take off after the guide's horse whether I was ready or not.  Had there been any way to stop him I would have gotten off and walked home by the end of it, since I had stopped enjoying the tour some time ago.

Lydia wants to go out for lunch and then to a civic pool.  I want to stay in bed and see if it's true about falling asleep with a concussion.  I suppose I'll end up going for lunch and then to a pool.  

Before we left Lydia kept talking about how much rain we were going to have to be dealing with.  After two mostly dry, though slightly overcast, days spent in Reykjavik the sky finally opened up and let us have it right on our stupid heads.  Most of the day was spent driving in the rain as we did the Golden Circle, a tour of Iceland that includes "Þingvellir, the waterfall Gullfoss (meaning "golden falls"), and the geothermally active valley of Haukadalur, which contains the geysers Geysir and Strokkur" [wp].

Rain seemed to fit the theme of the day, as everything was wet, wet and more wet which is, if you're visiting the first geyser discovered by Europeans and a waterfall, to be expected.  We skipped going to Þingvellir because we couldn't figure out how to get there and one of the roads that we were meant to take was blocked off.  There's a lot of roads in Iceland that regular cars can't drive, and it might have been that we had planned to take one of those roads unknowingly and even had the road been open we wouldn't have been able to go.

Tomorrow it's tiny horses for ridding.  Remember to keep following us through my Flickr set [fkr], since I'm updating that as quickly as possible and it'll likely have stuff that I don't get a chance to write about.  Like our 3 am trip to the Vöffluvagninn.

After walking around downtown Reykjavik Lydia had a nap while I headed out to a pub called "The English Pub" where I caught the second half of the Arsenal v Hull City game.  It was a tight game, with Arsenal scoring a stoppage time goal to beat a ten men Hull side.  It wasn't the prettiest win, but I was relieved when Bendtner finally slotted the game winner in.

From the side of a building in Reykjavik.

I don't know what my title means. It's not good SEO (search engine optimization). I'll blog later, but I'm going to try to find a pub showing the Arsenal v. Hull City game.

The fact is, as I lay here trying to fall asleep at 7 in the evening here in Reykjavík (which is 11 pm back home in Vancouver), I probably won't get much blogging done over the next few days.  I'll post when I can, but I think sleep and exploration is the name of the game.  But I will be doing my best to keep uploading new pictures when they come in.  So if you want to keep track of what Lydia and I are doing check out my Flickr photo gallery for our Iceland trip [fkr].

Early Thursday morning Lydia and I left our apartment to head down to Seattle, where we caught a flight on Iceland Air which fly us across North America and then a large portion of the Atlantic Ocean.  We are now beyond tired, and thus I'm not going to go into any great detail at this point.  I'm currently operating on such low levels of sleep that I might actually be writing this in Klingon and not realize it.  

Did I ever learn Klingon?  Have I been speaking it all day?  That might explain why nobody seems to make any sense in Iceland.  Somewhere over the Atlantic a switch flipped in my brain and I'm now talking a made up science fiction language and because I've only had about two hours of sleep in the last 28 I just haven't noticed it.

I tried to sleep on the plane, and caught the previously mentioned two hours of sleep, but an angry Icelandic child in a cowboy hat kept me from sleeping any longer by continually kicking my chair as hard as he could.  I almost turned around and yelled at him, "Today is a good day to die!" but I wasn't sure if Iceland Air has special Icelandic air marshals that would have taseredme at that point.  So instead I just stared at the seat ahead of me and thought of murder.

Because of the time change it's 5:30 in the evening here, and 9:30 in the morning back home.  We've been trying to resist going to bed, to combat jet lag and to shock our systems into the correct time zone, but it's a losing battle.  I'm going to shower now, and if I don't fall asleep standing up in the stall, I'll probably manage to crawl onto the bed and pass out.  Barely.

 QaQ ram.*

* Klingon for "Good night".

I'll be in Iceland for the week. Don't run the country into the ground while I'm gone.

No question this is the movie of 2010 that I'm most looking forward to.