Dinosaur Bear

A Blog about Stuff and Things

North to… the Westfjords?

by

Greetings,

This is the last post in the six-post mental backlog I had going on – and it’s definitely going to be the largest. After that, what  comes next? Who knows! Actually I already know, but I digress, after this post I’ll consider Dinosaur Bear to have been caught up – just so I can get behind again. 🙂

Anyways, enough bloggerly stuff. Last time around I had discussed the start of our life in Iceland. Aside from a brief puffin adventure our lives had mostly been confined to Reykjavík, since we uh, ya know, have no car. However, if there is one thing SB and I don’t like it’s sitting around in one place for too long. So while city adventures are great (and we still have lots we want to do in the city) we wanted to try to get out into the countryside before winter comes, which is early here, as if that is any surprise.

We’ve already decided on several things we want to do, which range in difficulty (and expense) quite a bit. Since logistics are awesome we’re also trying to figure out the best order in which to do these things and even which things can be combined into a single trip. One area we decided early on that we wanted to visit was the Westfjords (Vestfirðir) – and it turns out that that part of the country is just kind of difficult to include in other trips due to geography and time (read: money) constraints. So, rather than half-ass it during another trip, or even worse, cut it out all together – we decided to make the Westfjords our first “outside-the-city” adventure.

If you’re not familiar with Iceland (and why would you be outside of those 10,000 photos/selfies of the same three spots you see posted on Instagram?) you might be wondering where the Westfjords are. Well, “West” gives away part of the answer, but like most things in Iceland it’s not that simple. In our case we actually have to go north to get to the west fjords. Here’s a handy dandy map for reference. You can see Reykjavík clearly starred down there in the southwest of the island. Then that big area up in the northwest that I’ve placed a giant black circle around? Yep, those are the Westfjords!


What’s in the Westfjords? Well, fjords, and a few small towns (and one “large” town of about 2,600 people), waterfalls, mountains, 1 trillion sheep, geothermal vents, etc. – you know, just normal Icelandic stuff. Now, I realize that that map has no scale on it but you don’t really need a scale to realize that we mostly definitely weren’t getting up to the Westfjords without a car. So a few weeks before SB and I were going to depart we started looking into rental cars. We found a company that was a lot cheaper than the others and went with them. After booking the car I found literally hundreds of horror stories about this company, but thankfully our vehicle turned out to be just fine. So this isn’t going to turn into some Hatchet story about us getting lost in a fjord and me killing and eating SB. In fact the only issue was that they were late providing me with the car and they were late picking up the car from their own office – yeah, tell me about it.

Anyways, now that you know I didn’t die off the in boondocks of Iceland and that the past several posts weren’t automated HAL 9000 blog-self-awareness stuff, we can resume the story.

We’d decided to make a Thursday – Sunday trip of it, which was about the minimum amount of time recommended, but really that’s all we had to work with time-wise. SB was at work during the only time we could pick up the car so I skipped class (true shocker, I know /sarcasm) to walk over to the car rental place. Turns out it’s just up the street from the immigration office, and that location is seared into my brain for all eternity. It’s about a 20 minute walk without wind, which is to say it’s never a 20 minute walk, and more like a 25 minute walk. The good news is that we were having a rare day filled with sunshine!


As mentioned my car was late, but fortunately there were no issues with the car itself. We decided to name the car Sue! Sue was a boy. Yes that is the reference. After I got Sue home and some stuff packed up SB got off of work and we were on our way!

Here is the start of our road trip adventure, we were on the outskirts of Reykjavík and had just passed through LIKE 400 ROUNDABOUTS.


A bit outside of Reykjavík (going north) you come to Hvalfjörður – where you have two options. Drive around the whole thing, or pay 1000 ISK and go under it via the Hvalfjörður Tunnel which is 5,770 meters (18,930 ft) long and reaches a depth of 165 meters (541 ft) below sea level. On the way up we opted for the tunnel for time purposes.


Here’s shortly after we’ve come up on the other side.


And then as we started to make our way northward from the fjord.


Eventually we found ourselves in a massive lava field, complete with a teeny-tiny town right in the middle of it.


At this point in the trip we were still in “mainland” Iceland, so after we moved away from the direct coastline it was more “rolling” hills as opposed to sheer mountains.


Needless to say there isn’t much out there. It’s mostly just a few dotted farmhouses (though we’d later learn that this was actually a “populated” area in comparison to what we would see).


For awhile I thought we were going to get into a storm, but we either avoided it or its bark was worse than it’s bite.


Eventually we made our way off the “main” road and onto the road that would take us more directly north into the Westfjords. The geological change was pretty immediate.


Since we hadn’t gotten started until later in the afternoon due to our schedules we weren’t planning on actually getting into the Westfjords that first night, instead we had gotten a hotel just immediately to the south (Hotel Ljósaland). Here was our view from the parking lot.


And here’s the Boys and Sue!


As you can see it wasn’t a hopping place. We were at the very end of the season (something we’ve done before) and as such we were literally the only people at the hotel. Like, the next day the owners/staff weren’t even there. So that was kind of interesting. But it was nice and quiet and we got the entire common room to ourselves as a result! 🙂

The next day was to be our longest driving day, so we got to bed at a decent time and then got up and on our way early the next morning. Here you can see us getting ready to cross the land-bridge over into the Westfjords.


Shortly after you get into the Westfjords (going north) you are presented with the option of going left or right. To the left are small (read: very small) towns, gravel roads, dirt roads, roads that really aren’t roads, HUGE fjords, and 100 billion sheep. To the right is an actual road, one less-small town, a few smaller towns, big fjords, and 100 billion sheep. Since we were circumnavigating a good chunk of the Westfjords we took a turn to the left. Shortly after that the road turned into this.


Sue got oh so very muddy, but fortunately Sue was an AWD so Sue didn’t give no shits. By and large this area of the road was still in pretty good shape, it was just very windy and curvy in a few areas.


The nice thing about that route was that were was hardly anyone else on it, so it was mostly just us and the wilderness.


Every so often they have little pull-off/camping areas, which range from a few tables and porta-potties on the higher end, to a dirt area barely large enough for a car on the other end. Still, a lot of these roads have no real places to stop (unless you want to plummet over a cliff that is) so the little spots can be a welcome sight.


After we’d made our way along the dirt/gravel coastal road for awhile we started making our way up and over the landscape into the next fjord.


In fact that summed up that morning pretty well – up and down, up and down. At the top of each mountainous area it could get pretty dang cloudy and/or rainy.


Sheep, always sheep. Everywhere sheep.

This next photo gives you a good idea of what I’m talking about. Here we are getting ready to begin the “down” part of the process.


As is obvious this makes for some awesome views. Also some interesting driving, but mostly great views.

I guess there is also an “around” part that I should add to the “up” and “down.” Since really it’s “up-down-around-up-down-around.” It’s not like there are bridges over the vast majority of the fjords, so you have to route around each one. The result: A LOT of driving to get a short geographical distance, but some cool (or hot?) stuff to look at.


Here’s another good shot of the “around” portion of a fjord.


The larger fjords also have “up and downs” within their respective “up” or “down” portions. I think you get the drift at this point.


The weather was pretty decent in the “low” areas, it was cloudy and misty but nothing too bad. In fact it added to the ambience.


The weather changed a bit when we shot off on a side road (yep a side road to the side road) to make our way to Rauðisandur (or red sand beach).


It’s hard to capture weather from inside a car, but just trust me that it was nasty. 🙂

The good news is that Rauðisandur was pretty awesome – and massive. You don’t really anticipate how huge it is until you come over a mound and see it below you.


We made our way all the way down to it, which offered up some great coastal views. There is even a little village there that is so small I’m not even sure what the name of it is.


A lot of water (a lot) flows down from the hills, so the road is pretty rough along the coastline. Most of the streams sort of just meander their way along the massive beach and out to the ocean.


Once we were done at Rauðisandur we had to retrace our route back up into the mountains since the coastal road just ends. Once reunited with the “main” (i.e. secondary) road we started making our way towards the western extreme of the Westfjords.


Along the way we saw so many rainbows! Holy cow! While Iceland is known as the “Land of Fire and Ice” I’d posit that the “Land of Rainbows” might be just as accurate, if a little less mythical.


The road through those areas was pretty rough at parts, but when you look at the area it’s easy to understand why.


Still, ever resilient, there are a few communities out there. I’m hesitant to call them “towns” as that seems to imply that they have more than they actually do.


One such area, Hnjótur, even had what I think to be an old Douglas DC-3 from the U.S. Navy. I’d like to know the story behind that one.


After Hnjótur the road (and weather) got even worse, but Sue trudged on!


While the driving was kinda stressful in a few spots out there due to wind, it was absolutely gorgeous in spite of that.


Now, if you’re wondering why we were going way out into the boonies – well, then you probably don’t know us that well. 🙂

However, we did have a goal, Látrabjarg! Látrabjarg is a massive coastal cliff and is the westernmost point in Iceland. It’s also apparently the westernmost point in Europe if you exclude the Azores. Once you’ve finally made your way to the end of the road (literally) there is a small parking area, and then you continue on foot from there.


Once on top you get an AMAZING view of the cliffs and ocean. Pigsten Approved.™


Here’s a slightly pulled-back shot of SB getting some “looking down” photos.


And then here is a wide-angle shot from just a bit further along the cliff-face.


While SB and I were taking pictures (you know, boring human stuff) Pigsten was gathering a couple of Látrabjarg rocks for his collection.


After spending some time at Látrabjarg (including eating lunch in Sue – the wind made it nearly impossible to eat anyplace else) we started making our way back up the fjord.


After a bit the rain started to clear up.


And by the time we’d reached civilization (i.e. those 2 buildings and the truck you see) the sun was even trying to peak out!


Heck, we even got more spoiled when the road turn backed into a paved road!


Naturally the sun didn’t last long, but the smooth roads were a welcome site regardless.


There was one point where the only other “car” we saw for a long, long time was a tractor.


“Manries.”

In fact we ran into WAY more sheep traffic than we did car traffic. There were several points in which the sheepie-friends were taking up the entire road and didn’t really seem to care too much about us wanting to get through.


After that valley with the sheep we made our way along the coast for awhile.


This part of the road gave you a good look at some of the adjacent fjords.


From there we went “up” again which meant that the pavement disappeared as expected, however this time it was like we’d somehow teleported to an alien planet. It was a massive rock landscape with nothing but some kind of occasional fungus. It was basically Pigsten’s heaven.


After quite some time in the alien world we started making our way back down toward greener landscapes and also human civilization.


In fact in got quite green there for awhile!


While we obviously weren’t in a desert, this green little oasis was complete with a few houses and a nice waterfall.


Then, almost as if the whole thing had actually been a mirage – we went straight back up onto Mars.


Heck, in keeping with the Mars theme even the road turned red for awhile.


After a lot of Pigsten excitement and a lot of driving we started gradually making our way down and grass started slowly returning to the landscape.


The traffic picked up too, as in, from none to one. I was wondering why but it turned out that we were actually getting close to our next planned stop, Dynjandi!


Dynjandi is actually a series of (gorgeous) waterfalls which in total amount to about 100 meters (330 ft) of drop.


Pigsten thought the waterfalls felt like “dinosaur times.”


Here is a slightly pulled back shock to give you an idea of the layout – though it gets the scale all wrong.


I think Pigsten gives a better frame of reference for size.


In fact, it’s hard to tell it from still photos, but you have to do a decent jaunt up the mountainside to get to the higher tiers of the waterfalls.


This next photo gives you a better idea of the “tiers” I’m talking about – even though it cuts out most of the lower ones. Also, notice that awesome water-flow pattern in the rock!


Here’s another similar shot, just from a little higher up and a little more to the side.


Then here’s a shot of Pigsten fairly close to the highest (and largest) waterfall. “Fairly close” because we didn’t want Pigsten to go on a magical river adventure.


After spending some time at Dynjandi we got back on the road as the sun was getting pretty deep on the horizon. The plus side is that it made for some beautiful driving.


After driving along the coast for awhile we went “up” into muddy roads again, but we were actually pretty close to our destination for the second night – Þingeyri.


Nope those three scattered buildings are not Þingeyri, those are actually the bustling suburbs of Þingeyri. This is Þingeyri.


As you can see it’s a decent size, and during the busier months boasts a massive 260 person strong population. More importantly, it has a gas station, always a good thing.


As is obvious from the above photo Sue was in need of some TLC (betcha’ can’t guess which one is Sue!). Fortunately, not only did the gas station serve food (one of only two such places in the whole town still open in mid-September) but it also had a free car wash. Car wash might be a stretch as it was just a high powered hose and nothing else, but it did the trick with some elbow grease and extremely cold hands that didn’t regain feeling for about 10 minutes.


We were staying at the Hótel Sandafell, which is actually more of a guesthouse than a hotel – at least for us, we had a shared bathroom. However, like Hotel Ljósaland, Hótel Sandafell wasn’t exactly bumping. There were at least other people this time, but our shared bathroom turned out to just be shared between SB, the Boys, and I. There are benefits to traveling at the very end of the season! The hotel is right across the street from the fire station, and Tristen really liked the old firetrucks.


That evening we got to bed early after our long day of adventuring. The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel. Breakfast was actually late as the owner.. uh forgot to show up? Not really sure, but someone called and eventually it got sorted it. Turned out to be a really good breakfast too! Plus we had a nice, if not rainy, view of the fjord while we ate.


After getting our bellies full the Boys were ready to get back on the road!


And get back on the road  we did – complete with a fresh round of rain.


Still, as we made our way around the fjord the sun began to just barely burn its way through the morning mist.


From the coastline we made our way “up” again – except this time something a little different happened. Rather than going up to to the “top” we instead found ourselves facing a tunnel (Pig was pleased)!


Turns out that this tunnel, Vestfjarðagöng (Vestfirðir Tunnel), was even longer than Hvalfjörður and clocks in at 9,113 m (29,898 ft – 5.66 miles) long! I’ve always found it difficult to take photos of a dark tunnel from a moving vehicle, but SB got some decent ones.


We agreed that it felt like some underground lair from a spy movie. There were multiple routes in there and everything. It was pretty crazy.

Once you exit Vestfjarðagöng (and get re-acclimated to the surface world) you get a view of Ísafjörður, the”capital” of, and largest town in the Westfjords.


We made our way down into the town (passing a Bónus along the way – as Pig was quick to point out) and parked at the visitor’s center. Turns out it was no longer open on the day we were there – one of the downsides of being late in the season. However we didn’t let that stop us from walking around a bit!


We made our way to the town square, and while most of the stores had closed for the season there were still a few open.


With a population of about 2,600 Ísafjörður was by far the most substantial town we came across during our journey (outside of the capital area, obviously).


Once we’d walked around “downtown” a bit we made our way to the harbor area.


There were quite a few fishing vessels and other kinds of ships in port. The Boys enjoyed that.


As we crept along the coastline we made our way towards the Westfjords Heritage Museum, which was supposed to be open but like most things in Iceland the schedule is just a possibility, and it was in fact closed.


However, there is a restaurant right next to the museum (red building to the right in the above photo) which was open. The restaurant, Tjöruhúsið (fish house) turned out to be one of the most highly recommended places to eat in the entire country. In fact, some reviewers have said that it was the best fish they’d had in their entire lives. Unfortunately SB and I had eaten a large breakfast not that long ago and we were not hungry, a bummer, I know.

That said, despite not really being hungry, we did use Tjöruhúsið to seize a food-related opportunity: the quest for kæstur hákarl. Just what is kæstur hákarl you might ask? Well, it’s a national dish of Iceland, steeped in hundreds (and hundreds more) of years worth of history and is often served with another Icelandic signature, Brennivín (a 75/80 proof clear, unsweetened schnapps).

Oh and kæstur hákarl is also fermented shark meat. Yep, the meat comes from the Greenland Shark (or other sleeper shark), and apparently the meat is poisonous when fresh (always a good sign). However, after several months and a bunch of ammonia (seriously) it becomes “edible.”

In fact, I’m going to share the process for preparing kæstur hákarl, because it’s just that ehm… interesting.

“The traditional [preparation] method is by gutting and beheading a Greenland or sleeper shark and placing it in a shallow hole dug in gravelly sand, with the now cleaned cavity resting on a small mound of sand. The shark is then covered with sand and gravel, and stones are placed on top of the sand in order to press the shark. In this way the fluids are pressed out of the body. The shark ferments in this fashion for 6–12 weeks depending on the season. Following this curing period, the shark is then cut into strips and hung to dry for several months. During this drying period a brown crust will develop, which is removed prior to cutting the shark into small pieces and serving.”

Now, doesn’t THAT sound appetizing? Apparently it did, because SB and I were on the prowl for both kæstur hákarl and Brennivín. And, it just so happened, that Tjöruhúsið was offering both of them. So, despite not being hungry, we decided to just go for it – why not extend our geographic adventure into the culinary front?

Turns out Tjöruhúsið was out of Brennivín, however they did have kæstur hákarl. So, with vodka as a our Brennivín substitute, we prepared to dig in.


Now, I have to say here, if you know me you’ll know I will eat just about anything. On top of that, it’s very rare anymore that I find something I just despise. 99% of the time I will try what is presented (and 1/2 year old rotten shark should confirm this). So, I do not have a picky palate and am mostly on the “see food” diet (I see food and I eat it). Thus, what follows is the impression of someone who is most definitely not a picky eater.

It was ehm, not good. To get a feeling for what it’s like to eat, imagine that you have a piece of chewy fat. This fat has set out for months. You then take that fat and cut it up into little cubes. You then take those little cubes and stick them in a jar of ammonia or a house cleaning chemical of your choosing. You then eat said cube. Delicious.

I’d heard the smell was bad, to me the smell wasn’t really that bad. I mean yeah, it smelled like you were getting ready to eat formaldehyde (and I guess you sort of are) – but it wasn’t gag-inducing. Heck, when you first eat the little cube you get a fishy taste and your brain is like, “Hey this isn’t so bad!” Then about 3 seconds pass and suddenly Lucifer himself arises from the 7th circle of hell in your mouth.

Yes, as you chew something magical happens. That little bit of fish you just bit into suddenly becomes chewy, tough even, and it fills your mouth full of rancid acid piss. I mean, what the hell can you expect for 1/2 year old rotten flesh? But yeah, it’s pretty damn bad. It’s so bad in fact, that the vodka does nothing to get the taste out of your mouth. Indeed, I’d argue that the worst part about kæstur hákarl isn’t the immediate eating. It’s the fact that the taste and smell linger in your mouth for hours after you eat it. It’s like the haunted and tormented soul of Mr. Clean has decided to take up residence in your mouth and decorate the place with 10,000 year old floor cleaner. Despite SB and I’s best efforts to remove the taste with water, soda, and food – we really just had to let time run its course.

Would I eat it again? That’s a solid no. Should you try it? Yes. However you don’t need to go all the way to the boondocks of Iceland to try it. Just got soak a dish sponge in muriatic acid and eat it, same experience.

Once we were done eating the food equivalent of 7 tours in Nam’ I took some time to walk along the beach and ponder whether or not kæstur hákarl would survive the implosion of the sun. My guess is yes. Hopefully when we manage to find Brennivín it won’t be quite as traumatic of an experience.


The environment hid the torment of my ammonia-ridden soul.

Having poisoned ourselves, we decided to head out of Ísafjörður – though we did stop at Pig’s Bónus on the way out! Our next stop was the fishing village of Súðavík. More specifically we were headed to the Arctic Fox Research Center!


Now, if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you’ll know that SB and I will go way [way] out of our way to see naminal’ priends. This was no exception. We came to see the ambassador foxes and ended up not only getting to see them, but also a surprisingly good museum for its size as well.


If you were expecting them to be white, don’t be too surprised! They come in three different major color groups (white, brown, and “blue”) as well as variants thereof. Prior to our visit I didn’t really know much about the arctic fox – such as the the fact that it’s Iceland’s only native land mammal, meaning that those 1 trillion sheep are immigrants!

After spending some time with the foxes we got back on the road as SB and I were starting to get hungry (rotten shark notwithstanding).


As this is the highway that leads to Ísafjörður, it’s in good shape. However, it’s basically a long string of “around” the fjords, with a bit of “up” and “down” added in. So it’s somewhat slow going insofar as Point A to Point B goes, but it’s largely a very scenic drive, complete with a cool rock arch to drive through!


The weather followed a predictable pattern. On the “inlet” side of the fjord it would rain, and then near the “mouth” of the fjord it would be sunny.


Sheep were also a constant. Sometimes they were willing to share the road, other times they seemed quite cranky that you were in their personal space.


Speaking of sheep, it was right around in there that SB and I came across what we called “The King of Sheepies.”


It’s kind of hard to make out from that photo, but that sheep was HUGE and brown. Thus the King of Sheepies was so dubbed.

After passing the King of Sheepies we were actually getting close to our chosen lunch location. As you can see it’s not like we were really next to any civilization.


However, way out there, nestled along the coastline of Skötufjörður is Litlibær (Little Farm).


Litlibær – which we mistakenly assumed meant “Little Bear” – is a farmhouse which was built in 1895 and once housed two families consisting of 20 (yes 20) people. Today a lovely older couple lives there and runs a basic cafe out of the home. I say basic because the menu is coffee and waffles, that’s it. In fact, “coffee and waffles” seems to account for about 1/2 of the English they know, but that really didn’t matter because they were super nice, the price was extremely reasonable, and the waffles and coffee were awesome – as was Litlibær itself.

Litlibær isn’t really set up like a traditional cafe, this is part because it’s so small ~29 m² (~311 ft²), but also because it’s still more reminiscent of a farm house than a commercial cafe.


I don’t know how much, if any, of the items in the house were brought in for effect versus had always been on the property, but everything fit in really well.


The waffles were also really good, though I guess when the last thing you ate was rotten meat the bar is rather low. However I’d say that even absent the previous dish these waffles were awesome.


Our table was right next to a window so we were able to take in the view of Skötufjörður while we ate.


There wasn’t much in the way of traffic, unless you consider sheep traffic. In fact there were quite a few sheep that were wondering around right outside of Litlibær. SB decided to say hello to them, however the “lead sheepie” wasn’t having any of SB.


He’s the one just left of center in this next photo. He did not like SB being on “his” road.


After the lead sheepie had removed SB the flock made their way into Litlibær’s front yard to nom’ the grass there. We then left the sheep to their lunch and hit the road again.


Just a short way down the road from Litlibær there were a load of waterfalls and springs just right next to the highway.


Skötufjörður broke the pattern of inland rain, and we had pretty good views the whole way “around.”


There were a few dotted homes (and ruins) through there.


However there were definitely more sheep than people.


In fact, on the next fjord over – Mjóifjörður (which was massive) – I think there were more rainbows than people!


However, as we made our way inland the rainbows of Mjóifjörður gave way to lots of rain and fog.


That’s pretty much how it continued until we made our way to our destination for the third night, Hólmavík – a town of ~375 nestled along Steingrímsfjörður. However, we weren’t really staying in Hólmavík but instead we were staying in a bonafide farmhouse outside of town.


The farmhouse, known as Víðidalsá, has a few rooms that the owners (and their dog Lopa!) rent out – but make no mistake, this is an old farmhouse, not a hotel! That’s actually a big reason SB and I picked it, since how often do you get to say that you stayed at Víðidalsá in Vestfirðir!


Despite the seeming remoteness of Víðidalsá it’s really not that far from Hólmavík – you can see the town in the distance in the photograph below.


However one could get into the semantics of whether or not Hólmavík counts as non-remote or not. 🙂

After chatting with the owner for a bit, SB and I headed into town.


Aside from Víðidalsá and the geographic convenience of Hólmavík, a big reason we had came this way was Strandagaldur (The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft).


This small museum has quite a good reputation and it was also highly recommended by the owner of Víðidalsá as well. If you know me, you’ll know that I have slightly more than a passing knowledge of witchcraft and that it’s a topic of great interest to me. As such, I jumped at the opportunity to go to a museum all about that topic – especially in an topical area where I knew very little.

The museum itself was really interesting. The downstairs portion focuses a lot of specific spells, hexes, etc. and gives historical accounts of them being used – and, in some cases, the resulting bit of being burnt alive (you know, a minor detail that). The “necropants” (Nábrók) are of special note (yes I’m being serious). The downstairs had a bit of a comical tone, but overall it was mostly serious and was really approachable unless you don’t like reading more than 2 sentences. The upstairs was more focused on the genealogy of the people/clans involved, as well as in primary source documents and materials (grimoires, etc.). It was a bit more “museum-like” but equally enjoyable for me.


One neat piece on display was a stone which came from Goðdalur (dale of the gods), a remote valley in Bjarnarfjörður.


This stone is believe to have been a ritualistic blót (sacrifice) stone. There’s a good deal of historicity surrounding the stone, but the most noteworthy bit is that legitimate forensics testing has confirmed that there is blood residue within the pit of the stone. I’ll let your imagination do the rest. 🙂

After learning a lot about witchcraft in Iceland we had worked up an appetite. The good news is that the museum just so happens to have a place to eat – Restaurant Galdur – as well! If you’re anticipating that this is one of those “leaves a lot to be desired” food places that some museums, etc. have then you’ll be surprised. SB and I didn’t really know what to expect other than that it was a predominantly lamb and seafood based menu (e.g. most of Iceland). However, turns out the food was extremely good. SB went for the lamb steak whereas I had the seafood soup. Both were awesome.


After a yummy dinner and a couple of beers we made our way back out to the farmstead just as the sun was going down.


That night we pretty much just chilled in our room and looked through some of the photos we’d taken that day and the day before. Eventually everyone else was asleep, except for Lopa!


Believe it or not she can make her way up and down those steep farmhouse stairs like a pro!

It was really nice how quiet it was out there. Really the only noise you could hear was those noises which infallibly come from old farmhouses, various creeks and groans and the like. I slept really well, though at one point when I woke up I noticed that light was coming through the edges of our door. Gotta love old houses.


The next morning we awoke to the sun peaking in through the curtains.


Pigsten used the opportunity to take in some Vitamin D – dinosaurs need their sunlight after all!


As we were getting around Tristen attempted to find Narnia inside of the wardrobe.


After that we headed downstairs for some conversation, coffee, and freshly picked blueberries!


We then went about getting cleaned up in the bathroom, which oddly enough looks like it froze in time in the in both the 1920s and 1960s.


Then we said goodbye to our comfy old beds and were back on the road again.


Lopa even followed us to say goodbye!


From there we started making our way back down the way we came.


We did have one bit where our gas got pretty low due to a miscalculation on distance, but fortunately Sue didn’t starve – plus the place where we stopped for gas had a restaurant that was yummy, despite being fairly isolated.


Once we were on our way again we saw a bunch of horses along the coast.


We then stayed on the same route until got back to the Hvalfjörður Tunnel. This time we opted to save the 1000 ISK and go around Hvalfjörður rather than under it. This turned out to be a good idea not only due to cost, but also because of the scenery you miss if you just take the tunnel.


We drove in and out of a few rain showers along the way, but it was a very pleasant drive.


Hvalfjörður followed the pattern of being rainy on the inner portion, but here is a nice shot of the coastline between rain showers.


As we made our way around the fjord the sun came out a little bit and gave us a good view of our surroundings. Here you can see the fjord itself, as well as the area we’d come from. Hvalfjörður Tunnel is somewhere beneath the water!


It was a worthwhile sidetrack, we got to see a lot of pretty landscape, a few little villages, some ruins, and even a few little waterfalls! Definitely worth it, even if it took way longer than the tunnel.

After that it was just two more “arounds” and then we were back in the Reykjavík area. We utilized Sue to do some shopping at Krónan, a nice opportunity since we don’t normally have access to a car and instead have to carry all our groceries. After that we made our way back home and then I took Sue back to his house (thanks for the trip Sue!).

Since it was Sunday we then spent the rest of the evening getting settled from our trip and preparing for the week ahead. Such is life after a mini-vacation!

All in all it was a great trip. Icelanders had told us that we probably shouldn’t do it in winter, and I definitely know why based on the condition of the some of the roads in September. We all really enjoyed it, and while having more time is always nice, I feel like we did a pretty good job of seeing as much of the Westfjords as possible within our limited schedule. I’m also really glad that we decided to the Westfjords as their own trip as opposed to trying to tack them onto another trip. They are fairly out of the way – all in all we drove Sue 1247.5 km (775.2 miles) – but it was definitely worth it!

I hope you enjoyed “riding along” with SB and I on our first trip outside of Reykjavík!

This post concludes my “Iceland Introduction” six-post series that I wrote in a big flurry of blogging. In a forthcoming and yet-to-be-written post I’ll probably write about some more mundane topics like school and just adjusting to life in a new country!

Until next time,
-Taco

To Iceland

by

[Editor’s Note: This is Dinosaur Bear’s 200th post – how crazy is that!? Who would have thought that I’d be posting about moving to Iceland for the 200th post of this blog! Life is indeed odd with its twists and turns. For a post that celebrates Dinosaur Bear’s history of “stuff and things” as well as its longtime relationship with the Nordic countries, click here.]

Greetings,

Last time I engaged in a tongue-in-cheek exposé of the bar exam, this time around I’m back to the chronological adventure of my life. When we last met I had started my voyage to Iceland and I had just arrived at O’Hare in Chicago. So that’s a fitting place to pick right back up. Despite hearing some horror stories we made it through international security at O’Hare much quicker than expected, which was nice because we were running behind schedule. I think these particular TSA agents might have been the biggest assholes I’ve encountered within the TSA, which is saying something, but we made it through with plenty of time. After that it was just getting settled in and waiting on our plane (we were flying Icelandair).


Eventually our plane made it in and we got boarded just a little behind schedule. What was nice about the layout of our plane is that it was 2-3-2 rather than the 2-4-2 (or 3-5-3) of the other international flights I’ve been on. So SB and I were able to secure a “2” for ourselves – and despite having 4 fat suitcases we were just backpack travelers on the plane itself, so despite the smaller-than-Murka’ overhead bins that European airlines have we had plenty of room for ourselves.

We had an overnight flight, which is common for a lot of international flights where you are going forward in time.


It was a pretty uneventful flight. Icelandair doesn’t provide much in the way of amenities, but we knew that in advance. As is normal I slept like crap, but I do think I at least slept for like 1 hour or something, which is more than I’ve been able to say in the past. As we got to closer to Iceland it was cloudy (this was not a surprise) but once we got through the cloud cover we got our first glimpse of our new home!


Once landed we began a.. let’s call it “eventful” stay at the Keflavík International Airport. First, one of our suitcases got one of the front pockets ripped off it. Fortunately I’ve learned to anticipate that the airline will destroy your luggage, so I pack them accordingly. So we had to go over to the desk and deal with that (and we are now down a suitcase). Oddly enough the suitcase that got damaged was the replacement for another suitcase that had gotten damaged.

From there we proceeded through customs, which was the bit of good news for the day, as customs was uh.. non-existent. You legitimately just walk down a hallway with green lights and that’s it. You have to opt-in to customs via pressing a red button. We did not press the button.

Things went south again after that, as Avis didn’t have our rental car that we’d uh, you know, reserved in advance. We ended up waiting like 2 hours for it, only to learn that the incompetent morons at the service counter were giving cars out to people out of order. So there were people who had been there for over 3 hours waiting on a car, only to have their car given away to someone who just showed up. It was a shit show. However, thanks to an justifiably aggressive SB we finally got our car (which had a huge dent in the roof). Sadly we forgot to name our car in all the craziness of the day! However, the silver lining of the delay was that we got to have some coffee and we were long overdue for coffee.

After that we finally made it out of the airport and we on our way to Reykjavik!


The sun even sort of came out for us, but then it started raining (a pattern which has continued to this day). The drive up from Keflavík to Reykjavík is about 50km [I just used metric, u mad my fellow amerifats?] and takes you through a massive-ass lava field (as well as near the famous Blue Lagoon), so it didn’t take us long to get into some very Icelandic landscapes.


Eventually we made our way into Reykjavík and found our way to the University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands). There we got bounced around a bit as we tried to figure out where the heck we were supposed to go to get our apartment keys, but we figured it out. Once we made it to our apartment one of the first things we noticed was that we had a big construction site right across the street from us. I wasn’t sure about that at first, but it turns out that the construction site has provided us with a lot of entertainment and hasn’t really bothered us. In fact I might make a post just about the construction site at some point in the future.


Also, if it wasn’t obvious – we didn’t have anything other than what was in our suitcases. So we basically had nothing insofar as apartment items go. However, we ended up getting really lucky when we did some exploration of our building. We quickly found a table, a chair, a smaller table, a floor table, and stool. We cabbaged onto all of them really quickly. [We later ended up finding a bathroom rack, another small table, some drawers, a colander, and patio chairs – I might be the only recent HLS grad who is now dumpster diving.]


We didn’t really know what we’d end up using any of that stuff for at that time, but it felt like we should take it. For reference this is what our bedroom looked like at the time – yep, no bed.


So in addition to all the other craziness (plus 1 hour of sleep) we had to go out into the world to find some stuff so we could, you know, actually live in our apartment. Fortunately SB had the foresight to keep our rental car for two days (yay SB!). So the very first place we went was none other than mah’ fukin’ IKEA.

Now, if you are an ameritard like me, you probably have no concept of just how FREAKING HUGE the IKEAs are over here. HOLY SHIT. A Super Walmart is like a bodega compared to the IKEA here. IKEA is literally a city of a housewares. Need a day-care for your kids while you shop? Check. Want to grab lunch while you shop? Check. Want to grab a beer before you decide what kind of toilet you want to install? IKEA has you covered. They also have little bitty bathrooms inside the larger bathrooms.


Actually the rooms-within-rooms seems to be a thing for bathrooms here. For instance this is one of the bathrooms at the school.


I could probably write a whole post about the bathrooms, but that would be kind of weird.

So, after eating lunch at IKEA (which was really good) we entered the gawd-dayum labyrinth of the store and eventually stumbled across ENTIRE HOUSES.


My mind was blown. There’s like.. houses, and houses within houses, and warehouses, and magical cart elevators. It’s a land of mystery and wonder and it’s also haunted by the souls of long-dead wallets.

After picking up as much as our car could hold (literally) we went and got some food to stick in the cracks since we didn’t have any of that either. The first place we went grocery shopping was a place called Víðir, though the next day we went to Nettó, before finally settling on Bónus – mostly because it’s the closest to us and cheap, but actually because their mascot is a pig.

Anyways, back to that first day, when we got home we realized that the people who live below us also have a dinosaur!


In our current apartment we have people below us, above us, and on both sides of us. I was not enthused about that to say the least. However, like seemingly all buildings in Iceland, our building is made almost entirely of concrete and steel. So the noise isn’t too bad – except on weekends, holy f*cking God the parties – but I’ll bitch about that at some point in the future, I promise.

One of the big things we got at IKEA that first day was a “bed.” I say “bed” because it was really just a mattress pad (which cost about what a mattress would in the U.S.) – but it was a nice mattress pad. So we were able to get a decent night’s sleep that first night after all! We were worried that we were going to end up sleeping on the damn concrete, but fortunately we avoided that. When we left Boston we had to sleep on our hardwood floor that last night, and that sucked.

The next day we woke up way later than planned, mostly because of jet lag – but also because of sheer exhaustion. The good news was that we still had our car until something like 16:00 and we were dropping it off at the domestic airport (which is like.. right next to us) as opposed to the international airport. So despite being behind schedule we made our way back to IKEA-opolis for more food and also more stuff. New acquisitions included more padding for the “bed” and also a desk chair for me, which Tristen insisted on putting together himself.


That is to say, Tristen sat in the box and gave orders.

It was that same day (I think) that Pigsten formally took control of the construction site. Like I said, we’ve been quite involved with the construction site.


After we parted ways with our car we had to switch over to on-foot mode. One thing we’ve realized about Iceland is that despite being “European” it’s a very car-centric country. We were not expecting that in Reykjavík, but it’s what we got. If it wasn’t obvious we can’t afford a car. In fact two of the Icelanders that SB got put in contact with told us that not having a car was “definitely committing to a certain way of life” in Iceland – and I have to say I agree with them. It’s definitely more difficult here than it was in Boston, which is odd. I was honestly expecting Copenhagen-tier public transit, but I think it was being a stupood ferner’ in my expectations.

Anyways, sans car you have your feet and you have the (comparatively expensive) buses (Strætó). We opted for our feetses – in fact as of my typing this I’ve yet to actually use Strætó, though SB has. The plus side to being a pedestrian is that you get a better sense of your surroundings during your exploration – and explore we did! We started with our new campus, which isn’t really that big or that spectacular, but is still worth exploring.


We then started plotting where we would be going for groceries, since you know, starving is bad. This led us to a nearby park and pond area, known as Tjörnin, which is gorgeous and very European.


The first day we cut across the middle, but we realized very quickly that the wind (o gawd the wind) was pretty extreme on that route. We also later found that we were going out of our way, so now we cross around the edges which is still windy as hell but a little more on the sixth-layer of hell side, rather than the seventh.


We made our way to Bónus which, as mentioned, has become our chief grocery store. Pig is a pretty big fan of Bónus, one can only wonder why.


Another interesting thing about Bónus is that it’s in a part of Reykjavík which has a ton of embassies (including the U.S.), so there’s lots of stuff like Mr. German Bear.


Another area that our explorations took us to during those first few days was Laugavegur, a street in downtown Reykjavík which has just about everything under the sun (except apparently beer huggies, much to my dismay). Laugavegur is also home to a ton of tourist stuff, including loads of shops decked to the brim with Puffins!


It’s an interesting and generally expensive street. It’s not someplace we’re likely to frequent, though I did end up getting my rain-jacket (a 110% must have) used in a thrift shop on Laugavegur after I realized that new jackets were like $500-600 here.


Those first few days were very busy. Not only as we scrambled to get settled into our apartment, but also as we scrambled to figure out things like Icelandic Social Security Numbers (kennitala), bank accounts, school accounts, how to pay rent, how to get internet, and so on and so forth. I’ll spare you all the details because the TL;DR is that all of that was a massive freaking headache that ended up taking over a month to get settled. Also, you really can’t do anything resident-oriented until you have your kennitala, so that was fun. So the first bit we were here was a bit of a blur as it seemed like we would wake up and then before we knew it the sun was going down.


And no, that wasn’t because we didn’t have much daylight. In fact at that time we were still rocking quite a bit of sunlight! Now – not so much (or sunshine in general, not much of that either).

However, one cool thing that we were able to participate in shortly after we arrived was the Reykjavík Culture Night. This culture festival is actually much more than a “night” – I’d say weekend is more accurate, and it’s also huge. Like, they essentially shut down the entire city center (and various other areas) for a massive festival that features all sorts of events, the vast majority of which are totally free!

Now, while SB and I did get to take in a lot of Icelandic culture, we started off by doing the most American thing possible – ignoring all that and going straight to the U.S. Embassy. Yes, the U.S. Embassy was holding it’s own free event for the public, which involved such things as country music (adeptly performed by an Icelandic cover band), Coca Cola, Fanta, Coffee, and.. Krispy Kreme donuts.


Literal mountains of donuts – God Bless America.

They also had some airlines there and you could enter contests to win a trip to the U.S. – SB and I did not enter for obvious reasons. It was also kind of funny, those Krispy Kremes went like wildfire and if it’s anything we Murkans’ know well it’s reckless natural resource mismanagement to the point of yearly record-breaking wildfires! Donuts are apparently the language of life. I find myself agreeing.

While I’d be lying if I said we really didn’t go for the free donuts, neither of us had actually been in an embassy before. We figured it might be a good idea to know where this one was anyways, so that was sort of our side excuse for going. Pigsten decided to come along for the adventure and ended up finding a garden/rock garden in the “backyard” of the embassy, which he really enjoyed as it seemed a lot like “dinosaur times.”


After we were done at the embassy SB led us to a flee-market which had advertised free waffles (because why settle for donuts when you can have donuts and waffles). It turned out that the flee-market wasn’t really much of a market (it was bitties) but they did deliver on the free waffles. It was here that we discovered that 1) Icelandic waffles are awesome and 2) Rhubarb jam on waffles is awesome.


We enjoyed our waffles in the shadow of the German Embassy, which is interestingly enough attached to the United Kingdom’s Embassy (I wonder how Brexit went down in that office).


After that we took off in search of more cultural events. This was the first time we just took to the streets and kind of wandered around aimlessly, which I’ve found is one of the best ways to discover a city.


We even encountered a few trolls on our adventures!


Eventually we found ourselves on Skólavörðustígur (such a nice simple street name) which leads up to one of Reykjavík’s more prominent attractions, Hallgrímskirkja.


Hallgrímskirkja, translated as “Church of Hallgrímur” is pretty awesome.


Even more awesome is that during the culture festival the Icelandic choir was doing free shows, complete with the accompaniment of the MASSIVE organ which is 15 meters (49 ft) tall and weighs 25 metric tons (no shit).


SB and I stayed for a bit and got to hear the choir, the organ, and then the organ + choir. We couldn’t the vast majority of the lyrics of course, though by the end we were picking out a few words and we were able to follow along in our hymn books.

After a bit we left the tranquility of the church and ventured of to slight more… violent.. past-times (much to Tristen’s pleasure).


Yes, sometime over the past day or so a viking village had sprung up near Tjörnin and it just so happened that we were there to see it. They had a few little stands set up where you could buy handmade stuff (which we quickly realized was way out of our price range) but even if you didn’t want to spend money you could always play with the swords and shields. Pigsten obliged.


We knew that there was going to be some sort of conflict – or at least that is what our really bad attempt at translating the festival’s program had told us. Turns out we were right. After we had spent some time in the village some viking warriors started gathering in the field right next to it.


Now, everything they were saying was in Icelandic – so we had no idea what was actually being said. However, the general plot was fairly easy to follow. There was some sort of dispute between two clans, and then a woman and her guard (?) showed up and things went to shit fast. Shortly after she arrived the talking stopped and then everyone started killing each other.


Just an ordinary day in 930 Iceland.


Eventually one side was victorious.


…and then they proceeded to kill the woman with an axe. Still not sure whose side she was actually on, but based on the fact that they took their time when executing her I’m guessing not the victors.


However, in a bit of twist (complete with some comedic effect that you needn’t know Icelandic to follow) the two final warriors betrayed each other and one of them killed the other. Of course everyone being dead was kind of boring, so he invoked a chant to Odin (that the audience got to participate in) to revive everyone. So then everyone came back to life, only to slaughter each other again. It was pretty funny.

Then at the end after their closing bows all the actors charged at the audience which generated a few funny results (SB might have ran away 😛 ).


I don’t think Tristen slept that night he was so jived up.

After the festival we started transitioning into “normal life” mode, which meant trying to figure out a bunch of stuff for the quickly approaching semester, as well as more mundane day-to-day life stuff, like how to recycle.


Look at how easy these instructions are!


Recycling isn’t single-stream here, which was a bit of a pain for SB and I as we had been hugely spoiled by our three years in Cambridge.

I don’t know if it was the stress of trying to do simple things like open a bank account or learn where the heck you were supposed to return your bottles for the deposit (too far away, turns out)  but one day we made a semi-spontaneous decision to hop on one of the very last Puffin tours of the year. While Puffins are more common elsewhere in Iceland (from late April until mid August) there are still a few Puffin islands out in Reykjavík’s harbor (Kollafjörður). Normally the Puffins would have been gone by the time we went on the tour, but some of them had apparently stayed a little later this year (they go out to sea from mid August until Spring, like literally they live out at sea). So we took advantage of the tardy Puffins and booked a last-minute tour. This was also our first time talking to the Old Harbor area in Reykjavík (a lot of tours depart from here).


Since it was very late in the season we got take one of the smaller boats as our group was quite small, maybe 10 people in total.


The nice thing about the smaller boat is that you can get closer to the Puffin islands, not only because of the draft but also because there is less noise and the Puffins aren’t as likely to fly away. There are two principal islands (Akurey and Lundey) that the Puffins in this area live on, and which one you go to is entirely dependent on the Puffins themselves as well as the ocean. For our trip we went to Akurey, which was actually the one I was hoping for. One the way out we got some awesome views of the surrounding area.


Before too long the Puffin kingdom was in sight.


Eventually we made our way right up to it and lo’ and behold, Puffins! 😀 😀 😀

However then something downright shitty happened. We found out – right there on the boat with Puffins in sight – that our zoom camera lens was broken. Yep. That was pretty freakin’ awesome. So we didn’t really get any good photos of the Puffins because we couldn’t zoom in on them, and Puffins are TINY. Actually I’d recommend going and reading this post so you can learn more about the most awesome birds in the universe.

So about the best I can offer is this.


Yes there are Puffins in that photo, and no they are not the first birds you see – those are seagulls. However, look closely and you will discover the awesome mini-fatness of the Puffins.

The only clear photo we got of a Puffin really wasn’t that clear, however it was a Puffin in flight and it had me and SB cracking up.


Yep that fat little blob in the corner is a Puffin. Interesting fact, Puffins flap their wings like CRAZY when they fly, probably because they are so awkward and fat. Also when they walk around with their stubby little legs they look like German soldiers.

The boat made its way around the whole Puffin island, so we got to see them doing different things: chillin’, flapping their wings, flying, diving, and floating. There weren’t a ton of them left (during the high season there are thousands spread around the harbor) but there were enough to satisfy me greatly.


Though Puffins generally despise living near humans, these particular islands really aren’t that far off from civilization – here you can see that Reykjavík is only about 3.1km in the distance.


After we’d made a complete revolution of the island we started making our way back to the harbor.


When we came into the harbor we got to pass a bunch of boats and ships of various sizes, Valentino enjoyed that almost almost as much as he enjoyed the Puffins.


And by enjoy I mean “eat,” as he ate one despite our best attempts to stop him. He is a Polar Bear after all I suppose.

Upon reentry we also got nice view of Harpa, which is Reykjavík’s famous concert hall and conference center. It’s also apparently a major tourist attraction but we haven’t been there yet. There is a conference coming up (or probably that already happened as of this getting posted) that SB and I might go to that is going to be in Harpa though.


The harbor (both in-port and further out) had a ton of jellyfish, some of them were huge! We got a pretty good picture of one who was chillaxin’ near the docks when we got off the boat.


After our exciting (but chilly!) Puffin adventure we decided to go get a snack and some coffee at a nearby cafe. I tried coffee with a lime in it, which sounded weird but turned out to be really yummy. Valentino was also a fan.


From there we headed to a different Bónus in the Grandi harbor area, which we soon found out was way too far away from our apartment to carry a bunch of heavy groceries, a mistake which we haven’t made since.

That evening, or somewhere around in there, was when Tristen decided that he liked to “bop” us with his “bopper” stick, which in actuality was the cardboard tube from the center of the rolled-up rug we had bought at IKEA.


Sadly the “bopper” has since been broken, but we got a lot of “bopping” out of it before it “bopped” itself.

Aside from the chronic bopping our apartment life has mostly assumed a fairly normal flow. The nice thing about that is that it gives us a chance to start planning some of our future adventures. One of the biggest reasons we came here was to do some exploring (arguably definitely even more so than school itself) so naturally we already have plans to get outside of the city. To help us visualize our potential Icelandic adventures SB even picked up an old-fashioned “Uppdráttr Íslands” or Icelandic map.


Right now it and a fishy clock are the only thing we’ve put up on our walls.


We’ve named all the fish after the Boys and plants.

The fact that the walls are concrete doesn’t make hanging things very easy and the little wooden strips they put up to hang things from are too high to be very useful.

We really don’t have a lot of “stuff” in general right now. A lot of that is intentional, but some of it is just because things are so expensive here. Case in point: 1 roll of duct-tape will run you about $19. Lest you think we should just order stuff online, well, heh that isn’t really an option and even where it is you then get to pay a ridiculous amount in custom fees (usually about 50% of what you paid) in addition to shipping. However, one little “hack” is to order stuff from China. Iceland and China have a free trade agreement (the first such agreement between China and a European country). This removes the fees from anything you order from China so long as it comes directly from China. We’ve capitalized on this by ordering several things from China on Ebay. I mean the drawback is that they will arrive sometime between 2 weeks and 2 months later (or never, as in the case of one item), but if you aren’t in a hurry you can literally get things for 1/8 or 1/10th the price of what they cost to buy domestically.

One downside beyond the shipping speed is the fact that you have to go to the Post Office (Íslandspóstur) to get your packages. The delivery system is.. odd here. Basically there is no de facto “home delivery” for packages – you need to pay extra for that. Also, if you get a package they leave you a slip – entirely in Icelandic – which tells you how to get said package. The first time we got a package was a bit of an adventure but we’ve got it figured out now. They also don’t operate on weekends, but that’s not surprising really as a lot of stuff has limited hours here on weekends.

The good news is that our closest Post Office isn’t that far – about a 20 minute walk. It’s also in a cool area of town. For instance the route goes along the western edge of Tjörnin – seen here on a much more typical day weather-wise.


It’s just around the corner from Austurvöllur, a public square which itself sits right out in front of Alþingi (Iceland’s parliament).


Then just south of that is Ráðhús Reykjavíkur (Reykjavík’s City Hall) which sits at the northern end of Tjörnin.


So all in all at least it’s a scenic walk, though the scenery doesn’t do a whole lot for you when the wind is blowing you around and it’s pouring rain. Yes I do believe the rain here will have to get its own post, or at least an extensive mention, at some point – it’s unlike anything I’ve experienced before and I’ve lived in some windy-ass places.

The good news about the wind, the rain, and the cold is that we have an awesome heating system that we can ACTUALLY CONTROL. We had essentially zero control over our heating in Cambridge which meant that sometimes it was roasting, but more often than not it was freaking cold. We have no A/C here, but you’d be pretty dumb to not realize why we don’t need it. Our heating is boss though. We’ve also found plenty of treats to keep us fat, such as some (surprisingly affordable) ice cream Pig found for us at Bónus.


We’ve also found our new favorite soda, which is Appelsín (and its Tappelsín variant) – an orange soda that is way better than normal orange soda.


It’s proven to be quite popular in the Taco household, probably too popular. That said, not everything has been a hit. For instance, licorice ice cream turned out to be a less exciting than it sounded.


It looked like I was eating black clay, and honestly I may well have been. Still glad I tried it though. SB’s far more normal and less exciting ice cream can be seen in the background.

In fact we’ve been trying loads of new stuff, which is half the fun of living in a new place! Our diet has MASSIVELY shifted from what it once was, largely due to simple availability of things, but also because of massive price differences. For example, chicken is worth its weight in gold, but eggs are affordable. Hamburger is expensive as shit, but fish is more affordable. Stuff like that. Hotdogs are also really big here and since they are cheap I’ve eaten more hotdogs since August than I had in the previous 5 years. The good news about that is their hotdogs are delicious and actually made of meat. All of our cereal has changed too, and while SB has gravitated towards her muesli, the Boys  are big fans of “Alpha Bites.”


Tristen because of the word “alpha” (i.e. manlies) and Valentino because they have a bear as their mascot (and as the box!). Pig and Pigsten I think like them for the actual eating. SB and I like them because they came with a bunch of magnets which we were able to put on our (small) refrigerator and make a story with!


SB and I like telling stories almost as much as we like collecting magnets – so that was a win-win situation (plus we got food).

Anyways, I think I’ve covered a good bit of what getting to Iceland was like as well as what living here has at least started like. If you noticed I left out pretty much everything about actually going to school and what that’s like (hint: very different), but I’ll make another post which covers some more day-to-day stuff at some point in the future. There’s also been quite a few things that have happened since this “intro” period was over, some of it frustrating, some of it exciting.

The next post in this six-post-blast I’ve been writing will focus on one of those exciting bits, which just so happens to be SB and I’s first trip outside of the city and into the Icelandic countryside!

Until next time,
-Taco

I Fought the Law

by


Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun
I fought the law and the law won
I needed money ’cause I had none
I fought the law and the law won.
~Sonny Curtis, 1958

I fought the law.

Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that the law and I engaged in standardized testing combat. I like the more generalized sound of fighting the law better, and anyone who has taken the modern bar exam is probably prone to agree that it’s certainly a fight by most definitions of the word.

Yes, the time to discuss the bar exam has come. If this post is like any of the other posts in which I discuss some big exam then it’s probably going to get tons of traffic. Sorry visitors, if you’re looking for some in-depth statistical analysis, or a spirit voyage of metaphorical mountains and life paths, this post ain’t it. Instead I’m just going to talk about what the bar exam is, what it isn’t, and what my experience taking the damn thing was like. Mostly because I’ll probably have forgotten all of this crap in no time.

For starters, about me, I am not a shining example of the law student turned bar examinee. Go read through a lot of this blog under the “Law School” category and you’ll find that while I bitch and moan like the best of lil’ bitches, I’m pretty damn lackadaisical about the whole affair. That’s not to say I was always apathetic. Way back in the before times I took the LSAT and I went zerk’ over that shiny POS. Walked away with a 99.9th percentile score and said “Yep, screw that.” Then proceeded to be the most median of median law students to ever grace the hallowed halls of our pompous legal education system.

I’m more about the doing, not the circle-jerking in class and the dumb-ass exams. So I spent most of my time in law school doing and I accumulated a metric shitload of pro bono and client-facing hours, which was awesome and I enjoyed doing. However, the lack of my burning Crusade-tier enthusiasm for the RIGOROUS classroom environment extended to the bar exam when it came time to take that shit. In fact, I was so uninformed about the bar exam that I legitimately couldn’t have told you how they graded the damn thing. Seriously, raw scores, scaled scores? No idea what the hell that shit meant. I took Statistics and got an A+ in it… 6 years ago and have long since purged that information in favor of more important stuff like knowing when the best Steam sales are. To be ENTIRELY honest, I didn’t even know what score I needed to get to pass in my jurisdiction until like one week before the exam. It was that bad.

However, don’t think this is building up to some “I’m so gawd dayum awesome I didn’t even study for the bar because I’m just that kewl and I got a perfect score.” Ah.. no. In truth this apathy meant that I didn’t study as much as I should have, didn’t study as well as I should have, and ended up wasting a lot more time than I should have. In fairness to myself, I had a lot going on at the same time, but anyone can hide behind excuses. The fact of the matter is that I did study a lot, for me – but I basically threw the prep syllabus out the window on day one, ain’t no one gonna do 12 hours worth of shit a day, screw that. Well, lots of people do, but not Taco, he has some Witcher 3 to play since he delayed getting it for two damn years. This was, of course, all well and good until the dark specter of the bar exam got close enough that I could smell its ballsack (the bar exam has savage swamp ass). Once I realized that I’d somehow pissed away like 2 months of time working on unimportant things like preparing to move across the world (you know, totes meaningless stuff) and that the bar exam was only like 14 days away and was prepared to ravage my asshole.

That’s when I entered the “freak-the-fuck-out” stage, which I promptly answered by proceeding to not really change anything and to just ramp up the self-pity and emo darkness. But it sucked. I was scratching my hair out and shit.

I’d have avoided that massive bit of unpleasantness if I’d more proactively scheduled my time. So I’m not about to drop some massive-ass treatise on what to do for the bar exam, but I’ll say that – seriously – make a schedule that works for you. Don’t rely on someone else’s schedule. This isn’t like law school where you steal someone’s outline and pretend you made it because you added one case, make your own damn schedule, save your hair follicles.

This is all to say that going into the bar exam I was feeling a very odd mixture of “LOL DON’T CARE” and “I wonder which countries I can flee to to avoid my crushing student debt.” Maybe everyone feels that way, I dunno, but if so then I’ve been talking to the wrong people. On that note, when it came to talking to people about the bar exam I found myself more in the camp of “SHUT THE FUCK UP” and less on the whole “Let’s discuss estoppel by deed *fap* *fap* *fap*” side. This is why I have no friends and will die cold and alone.

But, it don’t matter how much you beg and plead, time keeps trudging along and before you know it it’s time to take the bar exam. While your exact venue will probably range from “shit” to “shit” you may soon find yourself standing before some massive room in a convention center or other suitable complex of misery, woe, and extremely unpleasant temperature extremes.


Inside you’ll see a variety of setups, but chances are it will consist of somewhere between 50 (Alaska) and 845,192,271 (New York) tables or desks.


My center was on the smaller side, but you get the general gist of it. It is among these wobbly tables and extension-cords-plugged-into-more-extension cords that you will take the bar exam.

But what is the bar exam? No, this isn’t some philosophical question that we shall debate long into the wee hours of the morn’ – it’s obviously a damn test. But like, what does it consist of, other than THE LAW.

Well. Not much. But it’s all about dat’ presentation. So here’s a plain English breakdown.

The bar exam varies depending on jurisdiction. Some states are what are called “Uniform Bar Exam” or S.H.I.T. states. For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to be talking about the UBE because that’s what I took. If you want to read about a non-UBE state then just search for “Mr. Hands” on Google and I’m sure you’ll find something.

The UBE consists of three portions, spread over two days. There is also a third day in some states that focuses on satisfying some state-specific component of bar admittance, I had such a state.

It’s the first three portions that I’m going to discuss.

***

The first portion is what’s called the “Multistate Essay Exam” or MEE, because it’s uh.. given in more than one state. The MEE consists of a bunch of essays which COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY replicate real life, wherein you’ll face a legal issue and be unable to consult anything but memory to answer the question. Because that’s how the world works, no one gets to reference anything, ever. Thus the MEE is a completely realistic and accurate method of testing your ability to be a lawyer. Essay questions cover topics such as “Conflict of Laws,” “Torts,” “Masturbation,” “Wills,” “Real Property,” “Thermodynamics,” “Contracts,” “Evidence,” “G.I. Joes,” “Constitutional Law,” “1980s Horror Movies,” “Trusts and Estates,” “Why are there 8 hot dogs and only 6 buns,” and “Memomics,” just to name a few. Indeed, the MEE requires a vast array of knowledge.

While specific states vary, in my jurisdiction we had 6 essays we needed to answer. You are given a set amount of time to answer all 6 six essays, and time isn’t called for each essay. Therefore you must manage your time to answer all 6 essays. This can require a bit of triage since you might feel really confident about the “Sex Doll Laws in Soviet Russia” question, but you’ll miss it if you spend too much time on that pesky “Restraints on Alienation” question that came before it. Different jurisdictions grade the essays on different scales, but their all flawed and subjective as hell. For instance I don’t think my grader appreciated all the penises I drew in the margins, and those were some damn fine penises. Regardless of the specific grading scale the jurisdiction uses the MEE counts as 30% of your overall bar exam grade.

The second portion is what’s called the “Multistate Performance Test,” and seriously, what kind of shitty-ass name is that? So like, what? The bar exam is such a shit proxy for actual performance that you have to make a portion of test called the PERFORMANCE test? What the flying fuck. So is the rest of the test just unrealistic, incomparable, improbable bullshit? Oh wait, yes it is. This portion, the MPT for short, is also written as opposed to being multiple choice. However, rather than being presented with some fact pattern and then writing a little essay about it as you do in the MEE, in the MPT you do get some bigger fact pattern and then write a memo or brief or something about it. The MPT is also “closed” in that you are given a bunch of files and stuff that you have to read through, and you needn’t rely on anything outside those files to prepare the memorandum. The MPT consists of two such problems, so it’s like 700 pages long. Since the MPT is “closed” there isn’t a whole lot you can do to prepare for it like you can with the MEE, where a purchase money mortgage question is a purchase money mortgage question. You’re supposed to do like 4 thousand practice MPTs, but no, just don’t. Oddly enough I actually enjoyed the MPT portion of the exam because it was the only portion that seemed to even moderately have a real life purpose, yes I should probably kill myself. The MPT tends to be scored the same was as the MEE on a per-jurisdiction basis and counts for 20% of your final bar exam grade.

The third is what’s fittingly called the “Multistate Bar Exam” or MBE – such an original name. If you haven’t realized by now, the people who make the bar exam have no souls and therefore they just were kinda like “Ya know what, fuck it, let’s just call this the bar exam, bar exam – because we can’t think of some cooler name like ‘Multiple Choice Questions to Render that JD Useless.'” The MBE consists of 75,000 multiple choice questions and lasts for 600 hours – or at least that’s what it feels like. Also like 5 minutes into the MBE someone will finish and you will at first ponder killing yourself, and then them, and then everyone. Each MBE question consists of a bunch of answers all of which might be right, some of which are just more right than others, because where’s the fun in having you know, actual answers. The MBE tests basically every topic under the sun, so I hope you’re well versed in Ancient Babylonian Sheep Herding Techniques, because that is definitely gonna be on the MBE. Also you should probably expect some stupid topic your prep materials told you totally only shows up once every 20 years, because you’ll get 80 damn questions in a row about it and proceed to piss your pants right there in the bar exam as a silent but disgusting protest against the man. The MBE, despite being standardized bologna, is worth an astounding 50 freaking percent of the entire bar exam. So you can do really well on “babby-fills-in-the-bubbles” and utter shit on the MPT, and still pass. Makes a fuck load of sense that does.

Then there is that variable state portion I talked about, which covers topics/subject areas more specific to that jurisdiction. For instance in Vermont there is an entire day about Ben & Jerry’s Law and the Legality of Shooting Leaf Peepers. I’m not going to talk about that day because it’s just too varied. Just know some random stuff like when your state was founded and then proceed to write 15,000 words about why your state is the best state and you will undoubtedly fail probably pass.

***

And that’s the bar exam©™®!

Easy as pie – if the pie is poisoned, on fire, and rigged with explosives.

Of  course the testing experience is just as much fun as the test itself! You probably have to travel, stay at an overpriced hotel, and then be at the exam center at 2:30am. On the way in you also need to donate a kidney to the bar examiners, but at least they let you pick which one (I’m pretty sure they eat them). Once in line and one organ lighter, you get to go through a variable level of security depending on your jurisdiction. Some places (*cough* Virginia *cough*) make you wear BUSINESS DRESS to this shit, because it’s not bad enough as is. But if you’re like most people and not taking the exam in such a fucking shithole fine example of statehood you’ll probably notice a couple of people wearing pajamas and then the rest will be decked out in paraphernalia for whatever law school they graduated from because vanity knows no bounds. I wore my finest. Which is to say I wore the only outfit I have. Seriously I wear the same jeans and shirt for a month at a time, ask SB.

You then stand in line from 2:35am until about 1:00pm and eventually you’ll make your way to a desk where some proctor whose soul died in World War I will make sure you’re not trying to smuggle some unholy contraband such as a GOD FORSAKEN PENCIL into the exam. There will inevitably be someone who didn’t follow the proper rules on Ziploc bag size and will be shot on site – be sure to step over the pooling blood and cranial fluid, it is oddly sticky. In my case there were uniformed police offers there too, because it’s not like there is anything better they could be doing with their time. Eventually after being stripped naked, anal probed, tazed, shaved, and given a burlap sack you’ll be able to enter the exam room which will either be -100 degrees or 200 degrees, either or. You may even be offered coffee, but that’s just to make you suffer more since you’re stuck in that room and can’t use the bathroom because this is the BAR EXAM and FUCK YOUR BIOLOGICAL NEEDS.

You then get to sit at your desk where you’ll spend the next 400 years. It will either be awkward silence as you don’t want to talk to anyone around you, or someone will try to talk to you and you’ll want to stab them in the face with the pen the armed SWAT team outside stole from you. You’ll sit waiting on everyone else to get signed into the exam room for anywhere from 30 minutes to 60 years. Eventually things will get started and the bar examiners will say a bunch of shit you don’t even care about. You didn’t come here today to listen to some 80 year old lawyer talk about the good ole days, you came to pretend you learned something in law school in order to give whatever institution you came from a brief boost of relevance in a dying world. THEN, after what you THOUGHT were the instructions, they will proceed to start reading you the actual instructions which will take another 5-6 hours and will cover such rigorous topics as “make your marks heavy and dark and don’t chew out your neighbor’s eyes.” However, just when you have figured out how to strangle yourself with that power cord from 1970 that has been strung across the floor with duct-tape, the exam will finally begin.

You’ll then feel a rush of adrenaline followed by alternating feelings of “FUCK YES I AM A LAWYER GOD” to “What if there was a grate at the end of the pipe and Andy Dufresne couldn’t get out?” Those latter thoughts are dangerous because they might cause you to ponder the philosophic question of why you are yourself covered in shit. Eventually time will be called and you’ll have answered somewhere between 0 and 1000 essays. However, since you started late due to the geriatric proctors you’ll have all of like 15 damn minutes to eat lunch. You’ll then be let loose into whatever convention-center type place you are taking the exam in and will see lots of happy smiling people.


Your fellow examinees will be happily chattering about the exam questions, which they know they aren’t supposed to do but they do anyways because they “cleverly” frame them in abstract and obtuse ways. Feel free to kill them if your character and fitness process is already over. If it’s not, just fuck them up real good but don’t kill them. Once you’ve inhaled your meager nutrition you’ll get to go stand in line again. Then you go inside and hear the instructions again. Then you repeat this for the rest of your life until you die.

That is legitimately the bar exam. It’s NOT some super magical awesome right-of-passage “muh fraternity” bullshit. It’s a test that doesn’t really test your abilities in a realistic manner. It’s just some artificial barrier to admission that costs a shit ton of money to take and is tacked onto an already problem-ridden legal education system. I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s not. Pass rates aren’t going to shit for no reason. But it’s NOT some metaphysical religious experience that tries your heart and soul on your passage to be the SWORD OF JUSTICE. Nah, it’s just a stupid test. If someone tries to argue otherwise, Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A is the answer.

Once the bar exam is over they inform you that it will take sometime between 2 and 4000 months to get your grade back to you, and that they’ll post a pass-list on the internet so that all your friends and family can easily check to see if you failed. Then, sometime after all that, you’ll have to go be sworn in. Depending on your state this will range from really easy, to gawd damn stupidly difficult – because magic words and mythical traditions are important and necessary after all.

In the meantime don’t worry about checking the online portal though, within 3 seconds of the names going live you’ll see all your law school acquaintances that passed posting “Annoying-bitch-of-a-Friend’s Name, Esq.” as their Facebook status. This way people know that they passed the bar exam and are definitely not insecure and dead on the inside and get by only through momentary flashes of pixels which equate to social validation on the internet.

If you’re fortunate like me you’ll have family and friends who leave you the fuck alone and let you tell them if you passed or not. But if you’re unfortunate they’ll be up your ass like wildfire, especially if they are too stupid to realize it’s all be plastered across the entire damn internet already thanks to the board of bar examiners. There is literally a “LOL UR KID DIDN’T PASS” website, thanks family.

However, you might also be fortunate like me and pass. If you did, I offer my sincere congratulations. Since states have different minimum passing scores, “passing” is different depending on the person. I did well enough that I surpassed the minimum score for every single state, that was cool. However, had I passed my jurisdiction by even 1 point, I’d still be happy. Truth is I don’t intend to bop around taking a bunch of bar exams, because holy shit I’d rather be reborn as a 8 year old on one of those ships that sank in the Children’s Crusade. The passing all jurisdictions bit just enlarges my wee-wee and is otherwise worthless.

If you did not pass, then I’m not going to offer my condolences, I’m going to congratulate you for putting up with that shit in the first place. Whether you decide to retake this dumb-ass exam, or move on with your life, I wish you the best either way. For those of you who stumble across this post while waiting on scores, for what it’s worth I thought I was going to fail for the entire waiting period. However, I was going to write the same post regardless. So please don’t feel like this facetious bit of word vomit is just because I passed, it’s not. It’s because this whole affair is stupid as shit and is part of an education system which is even more idiotic. I don’t think it’s really worth a super intensive post without incredulous overtones. So, if you failed, congrats on making it to the other side, even if it isn’t with the result you wanted. You gave it a shot, and that’s worth a fuck-load more than the person who doesn’t have any idea what you went through trying to give you some pep talk about failure (or even better, the lawyer who took the bar in 1947 and totally understands where you are coming from because nothing has changed in 70 damn years, nope). Fuck that. Congrats on what you did accomplish. Now either get back in the saddle or move on to something else, life’s too short to worry about some 200 year old proctor (who is probably a vampire, come to think of it) lecturing you about your damn cough-drops being in wrappers.

Regardless of pass or fail, the final answer is always the same:


Beer.

And that, dear friends, is all I have to say about the bar exam. My apologies if this post wasn’t what you were expecting, but I kind of like the way it turned out. If you need me I’ll soon be doing whatever it is lawyers do.

But for now, I’ll just relish the fact that I fought the law.

And I won.

 

Until next time,
-Taco

P.S. – If you’re curious as to which version of “I Fought the Law” is my favorite, it’s without a doubt the Bobby Fuller Four’s cover.

Midwestern Pit Stop

by

Greetings – and Happy Friday the 13th!

It’s time for another “move” story, this one is more of a pit stop than a true move (no, not that kind of pit stop). So gather round the fire, or Himalayan salt lamp, either or – and prepare for a story!


After graduation, a lot of last-minute Boston adventures, and a bar exam trip to Albuquerque, SB and I’s time in Beantown had come to a close. Now, in an ideal world I would have had a little more time to decompress after the bar exam, but alas, this is not an ideal world. So I ended up only having one day between the end of the most important exam in recent memory and needing to GTFO of my dwelling. As such, while most of my former classmates were now gallivanting off around the world on 1+ month long bar trips, I went home and got started on this.


Actually, now that I look at it, that was the start of it. It got much worse from there. As someone who has moved several times in their life I find that you always have way more crap than you realize when it comes time to move. Even for the relativity small amount of stuff that SB and I own it really adds up – and we even spent like 1.5 months selling stuff! The good news is that even though we felt like we had a lot for us – we didn’t really have that much in comparison to some people. So, in a very familiar series of events we found ourselves renting another box truck to retrace our steps back to the homeland. The good news there is that we got really lucky insofar as weather was concerned on the day we went and picked up our Penske – it was neither raining nor overly hot, two common things in summertime Boston.


Though we had stuck with Penske we were using a different location this time around, so rather than having to get up to Medford we only had to cross the Charles down into Allston. There, after some paperwork, we met Lucy!


Lucy was the exact same kind of Penske as Lillian was and she also had Indiana plates! This lead SB and I to go on a knowledge adventure to figure out why so many Penske trucks have Indiana plates. The answer is fairly straightforward though easy to overlook.

After picking up Lillian, SB – yes SB – drove us back up to our apartment. In a sort of “full circle” moment we crossed over the same bridge entering Cambridge as we had three years ago.


We then got Lucy all settled in front of our apartment in one of the spaces we had paid for. Yep, you have to pay to reserve a space for a moving truck, but its so so worth it.


From there it was getting down to the bloody business of the day – literally for Little Friend. Sadly Little Friend is just so dang big that he won’t vertically fit into the back of a moving truck. However, last time with Lillian I had made the mistake of putting Little Friend near the back which meant he also had to be under the rear door. That in turn required him to be even shorter, so this time I put him all the way in the front of the back of the truck which meant I didn’t have to chop off quite as much.


Despite looking rather stylish with his new hair cut he was not pleased with me. We’ve been through this a few times now, so while I’m getting better at not getting the ever-loving shit poked out of me, Little Friend still got in a few good jabs. After getting him all cropped down I had to carry him down 4 floors to the street, which was honestly one of the more difficult parts of the entire move. He is feckin’ heavy and also really tall and awkward. However, we prevailed and eventually he found his way to the front of Lucy’s bed – which at the very least he seemed to enjoy as he caused no further issues for the entire trip.


Little Friend was actually the third thing we had loaded, fourth if you count the box springs and mattress as two different things – which for the purposes of being carrying down cramped stairways they most certainly are. Our stairs were ehm… not really suited for moving. In fact when we last did this – that time the direction was up – we vowed never to do it again. I guess we sort of kept our word because we weren’t technically moving anything up – which would have cost us $500 for help 3 years ago. However, even though the direction was down it was still a lot of work. The good news is that we had sold a lot of our stuff, namely behemoth objects like Philip, so while those were difficult to get down they were at least done individually over the course of 1.5 months, rather than all in one day. HOWEVER, as mentioned, you always have more than you think you will, so what we anticipated as being an easy move ended up being much more stressful and rushed than expected.

If you’ve moved with tight deadlines before you’ll probably know that “oh my god the apartment must be spontaneously generating objects” feeling that comes when the rooms just seem to refuse to empty and you were supposed to have left an hour ago. We had that moment, for sure. As a dig to SB I blame her for inadequate preparation because I was taking the bar exam. 😛

Still, we managed, as we always do in one way or another and despite being like 1.5 hours behind schedule it was soon time for me to take the final walk through.


I always think it’s kind of interesting how different your home looks once it’s empty. It’s like you get so used to seeing it with all your stuff in it that by the time you strip everything out it doesn’t even really feel like the same place you’ve spent the past few (or many) years. In the case of our Cambridge apartment I had also forgotten just how much things echoed without the rug (which had been with us for 7 years) and all the furniture.

Traditionally I’m always the one to do the last walk-through of SB and I’s apartments. We’ve had 5 apartments so far and I think I’ve been the one to close the door on all of them. Not sure there is really any reason for that other than that if we’ve missed some minor detail that I’d probably be the one to notice it. It’s always kind of a somber experience – even when you’re most definitely ready to move on. I’ve had places I was very glad to leave, yet that final “goodbye” always feels kind of discontenting. I suppose it’s just the classic specter of change rearing its ominous head.


After heading down the stairs one last time – I joined SB and everyone else in Lucy. One thing we were doing differently this time around was that SB actually started the trip in the Captain’s chair! I started off as the assistant co-pilot to get us out of the city. I say “assistant” because the primary co-pilot was naturally a certain dinosaur (who happened to sit on the snacks in order to ration them as he saw fit).


Once we were out of the metro area and into Connecticut we stopped for gas and I took over as pilot. Earlier I said we were “retracing” our steps and I meant that more metaphorically than literally. Not only was out route more “south” this time, we weren’t even going to the same destination. However, the general state-to-state route was the same, though this time we managed to avoid a lot of the tolls we had hit previously. We had worried that we were going to get hit with a bunch of electronic polls on the Massachusetts Turnpike (which had recently been totally converted to e-polls) but fortunately that didn’t happen.


The start of our trip had clear blue skies and the Boys (and SB) were well-behaved.


Lucy also did her part, I think she was ready to get back to her home-state!


The first night we were treated to a really nice sunset as we neared our destination.


Our stop? Alaska! No, not that Alaska – Alaska, Pennsylvania. Yes, it exists. The hotel we stayed at happened to be right next to a McDonalds, so we had McDonalds for a late dinner and then the next morning the Boys creepered out the window at all the McDonald’s people (to their dismay we ate crappy hotel breakfast food, because it was free).


After that we were back on the road.


This time around we were doing the trip with only one overnight stop, whereas last time we did two. A lot of that had to do with logistics. On our way out we knew we had to unload and return Lillian all in the same day, so we stopped just outside of the Boston metro on the second day so that we could get into town earlier in the morning. On this “return” trip we knew we could just unload and park Lucy at FIL and MIL’s house, which meant a later arrival wasn’t a big deal. Now, that said we still had some Boys who were anxious to burn up the road.


While Tristen liking truck travel isn’t a surprise, Pig and Valentino are fans as well.


The Boys move around the cab a lot. They tend to alternate between the dashboard, SB’s lap, my lap – or, most frequently – right on top of all the food. Animal instincts and all that.


The trip went really well until we got to Indiana. Once we got to Indiana it started pouring rain, I found out I didn’t get a job, and traffic got backed up. Fortunately thanks to SB’s phone (Hail Google) we were able to pass up the worst of the traffic, though even our Google Overlords couldn’t do much about issues 1 and 2. Still, by the time we actually got to our destination the skies had mostly cleared up. It was also extremely humid and after a stint in New Mexico I was feeling that humidity hard. Lucy, however, was ready to take a load off (literally) so we ended up using the fact that we had made good time to our advantage and got everything unloaded that first night!


Little did we know that unloading Lucy would be the easiest part of the whole affair. The worst part was yet to come and involved organizing our entire life over the next week – a job which SB and I agree probably amounted to at least 40-50 hours (and it’s not like that is all we were doing). Of course not all was busy-work, one of the best parts about being “home” is getting to see family! The Boys made quick work of that!


The only person missing at first was Meem, as she had went straight from New Mexico out to California for work, but she caught up with us eventually!

We did have to part ways with Lucy, which like Lillian was kind of a bummer but I always like when we are actually bringing them home (kind of like Beckett!) and Lucy had a lot of brothers and sisters waiting for her!


Also, in case you were wondering – all of our plant buddies (Little Friend, Three Amigos, Rosita, Bonsai Buddy Jr.) made the trip just fine. Some of them had some “post-move depression” but MIL moved them to a sunnier spot and now they are fine! Little Friend for his part was a trooper as usual, considering we’d chopped off parts of his body and all. As a reward all of his buddies got cleaned for the first time in ages.


One does not simply mess with Little Friend’s friends.

But yes, despite the craziness of unpacking, organizing, downsizing, moving, and repacking all of our worldly possessions we found plenty of time to see family. We got to spend time with Meem, Daryl 1, DBH, FIL, MIL, BIL, my Dad, Stepmom, and Daryl 2 – as well as some extended family. I also got to see the only two non-family friends I really have anymore. That was pretty awesome since I hadn’t got to see them in over 1.5 years (largely due to a very late train). We went and saw Spider-Man: Homecoming, which was better than expected. Meem, Daryl 1, and I also went to see the Dark Tower later on, and it was eh.. not better than expected.

In addition to food, movies, and booze we did get to spend some time in the great outdoors with my Dad, Stepmom, and Daryl 2. One nice day we all headed to Spring Mill State Park – staple of many an Indiana elementary school field-trip. By my (probably wrong) calculations it had been at least 15 years since I’d been there, possibly longer.


It was a great day to visit. It was busy but really the only spot that was “crowded” was the store which sells candy (go figure).


For those of you who have no idea what Spring Mill’s schtick is (and I’m not sure why you would), it’s basically a recreated settler village (using authentic but mostly relocated structures) which has been built around an authentic and not-relocated watermill.Like most settler villages it also has reenactments complete with actors and various things up for purchase, to make yourself, or watch being made. When I was younger I was a big fan of the blacksmith, I always liked the smell.


If you look at the little blue buildings in the next photo, the one on right is where the candy is. It was swarming with people when we first got there and by the time we made it inside the candy was slim-pickings, though make no mistake I still got candy. 😀


A short drive away from the village is a cave (Donaldson Cave) that I’m pretty sure I’ve never been to – or if I have I definitely don’t remember it.


I really wanted to explore a bit, but as the cave is wet I most definitely did not have the right kind of shoes. I like my Sauconys (even if I have to put guerilla tape in them to get my big toe from busting through them) but they are in no way shape or form good wet environment shoes. They can handle long hikes in dry weather just fine, but wetness? No so much.

On our way back from Spring Mill we passed a Sinclair gas station, something I didn’t even know existed in Indiana! I have a special affinity for Sinclair stations.


In fact, so strong was that affinity that we picked up a special friend for Meem! But we’ll introduce him in a moment.

The next stop on the agenda was another thing I hadn’t been to in a long time – and something to which SB had never been to – a demolition derby! Yep, I’m busting out the Wikipedia article on that one because there are people I’ve met who have no idea what a demo is, so perhaps someone reading this blog with benefit from some dango’ knowledge.


The demo was, as expected, a lot of fun. We all really enjoyed ourselves – and I’m not just saying that because of the festival food. One thing I had forgotten about demos – or maybe I was too young to fully register it before – is how funny they are. Yes, I get how it can be frustrating for the drivers themselves, but for a totally unaffiliated audience member such as myself some of the shit that went down was outright hilarious. SB and I were especially fond of the purple and white car on the right in the photo below.


While he sadly did not win, you gotta give the dude props as he was the third from last left standing and as you can see there was essentially nothing left of his car by the time it was over.

That night we ended up staying out pretty late due to the demo so we weren’t able to give Meem her new friend right away. However, to be totally honest I think Tristen was totally ok with that because the new friend was Sinclair, the Brontosaurus!


While Tristen has a quite “manries” exterior, those who know him will not be surprised that he was very worried about Sinclair being stuck in the bag and had to make sure that he could breathe. Sinclair came through just fine, dinosaurs are tough after all! Meem got to meet Sinclair the next day and everyone took to Sinclair right away. It’s not often that we introduce new “friends” to our family and we are very picky about our company, but Sinclair fit in just fine!


Pigsten got to share some rock stories with Grandma Meem and swap some rocks for their collections. Pigsten and Grandma “Reem” are big fans of rocks and minerals.


Pigsten has a rock collection that literally spans 5,500 miles – and that’s just in a straight line, I could only imagine what his coverage would be if you calculated the square miles.

On the topic of friends, Sinclair wasn’t the only “new” friend we made, however I put “new” in scare quotes because the two other additions weren’t really new at all. In fact, they were quite old!


One of the many things we did while we were “home” was to consolidate a bunch of our stuff – which meant traveling to the different houses and going through things. During this massive excavation I uncovered a bunch of old stuffed animals and of all of them we were drawn to two little itty-bitty bears, a polar bear from Meem’s and a brown bear from my Dad’s. I think choosing the smallest things was the compromise between baby Taco not wanting to get rid of his stuffed animals and adult Taco who realizes they have no more space. So our silly few increased by two! Hey that rhymes, neato.

Towards the end of our time at “home” we went out to eat with a bunch of the family, which turned into SB and I drinking way too much both there and later at the local bar. SB got it much worse than I did and so the next day she spent pretty much the whole day recovering. 🙂

I felt pretty much fine the next day after getting some water in me, so I got to go spend some time with my Dad and see his cabin. It’s a luxurious cabin mansion set on a 3,000 acre estate, inclusive of a large swath of top-tier riverfront property. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it’s still a cabin and I still like it. Plus it’s nice to get out an see some of the areas that I don’t really get to see anymore.


That it was such a nice day made it all the more pleasant.

That evening, which was our last in town, we spent the majority of our time at Meem’s house and we all made dinner with Tristen carefully watching over the ricken’ to make sure it was to his standards (things must be perfect for Grandma Reem after all).


All the Boys played with my (and later Daryl 1’s) old car mat, which has seen some shit in its day.


It was one of the many things we re-discovered when we were going through the (literal) piles of stuff we had gathered to sort/discard/etc.

When it was getting close to bedtime we headed down to FIL and MIL’s since they were the wants trudging us all the way up to Chicago the next day since flights were far more affordable out of there. At that point Valentino formally named our two newest buddies, they are “Roland” and “Jake” which will make sense to you if you’ve read one of the best book series of all time (just forget about the movie, pretend it doesn’t exist). Roland and Jake did not come to Iceland with us, they stayed behind with all our other buddies (Old Bear Buddies, Squirrel Buddies, Sebastian & Serendipity, Pig Buddies, etc.) because they needed a bit of stability after emerging from like 2+ decades worth of hibernation. Valentino made sure they were all snuggled up before we left.


Pigsten photo-bomb with the new friends!

The next day was pretty much defined by the car ride up to Chicago. It was a full car, between FIL, MIL, SB, Me, the Boys and four suitcases plus an assortment of backpacks. Lest you judge me over being a fat Murkan traveler, those suitcases were our entire life for the year to come. We didn’t even up shipping anything except for a desktop computer (and just that, no monitor or accessories) because shipping + customs was so expensive. Basically it was WAY cheaper to pay extra for luggage then suffer moving it all around for a day or so than it was to use other methods. Believe it or not Iceland is not easy to get stuff too.. who would’a thunk’ it?

Anyways, the arrival in Chicago is a good starting point for next post, whereas it’s a good ending point for this post.

All in all, SB and I really enjoyed our trip home and our time home. Yes, it was hectic – and yes, it was stressful at times, but on the whole it was mostly nice to get a chance to see the family (and finally some friends!). I’m also thankful that Lucy gave us zero issues whatsoever (Penske 4 lyfe) and that FIL and MIL are allowing us to store most of our stuff at their house while we are going, something which saved us an undetermined number of months worth of storage fees!

In hindsight I wish that the bar exam + move + move (again) hadn’t been so scrunched together, but we managed it like troopers – all with a little help from our friends.

What’s kind of crazy is that despite how busy all that seems, it was actually a “pit stop” for us in the sense that it came between two very big events, with the Bar Exam + Leaving Boston on one side, and the whole Move to Iceland bit on the other.

Just what did that next step look like? Well, that’s a post for another day. 🙂

Until next time,
-Taco

The ABQ Adventure

by

Greetings!

This is the first substantive post for quite some time here on ole’ Dinosaur Bear, and despite my current residence in Reykjavík I’m actually going to be talking about Albuquerque, New Mexico. See, in order to get to Iceland I need to share a few other stories. The first of which was when Meem, Valentino, and I went on an adventure to Albuquerque – henceforth ABQ because who wants to spell that name over and over.

This story takes us back to July, when I needed to go out to ABQ to take the dreaded bar exam. However, this post is not about the bar exam. So if you weren’t looking forward to that, then you can rest easy (conversely if you’re a neurotic fellow examinee looking for commiseration, come back later when I will devote an entire post to the bar exam). No, this post is just about having fun out in the ABQ sunshine.

For starters you might be wondering why Valentino came with me rather than Tristen. Well, it’s true that Tristen is the law student whereas Valentino is the forestry student. However, we have a bit of a “[D]Rad Rotation” that happens when I go on adventures. This time it was Valentino’s turn to go on a bit of an adventure, as the last time I’d done something with Valentino was my trip to Washington D.C.  So when the time came to fly out to New Mexico Valentino quickly wedged himself down into my backpack, which is one of his most favorite things about traveling.


As far as flying goes things went pretty smoothly on the way out to New Mexico (at least for me, Meem had some delays). One nice thing about the trip was that we had booked a hotel right next to where I’d be taking the bar exam.They were even doing some filming right next to the hotel for a forthcoming TV show called “The Brave” – or I guess it isn’t forthcoming anymore. Despite it literally being in the middle of a public forum they told me I wasn’t supposed to take pictures, but fuck you I’m a bus.


The bad news is that the hotel was going through some substantial renovations, though it didn’t end up being that big of a deal in the end. I did find the state of the elevators to be quite funny though. The part of my brain that had engulfed itself with negligence claims and torts had a heyday with the elevators.


You might be wondering why Meem came. Meem wasn’t taking the bar exam, she just came because she plubs me. I invited her, and it just so happened that she needed to go to California for work anyways, so it was good timing. But that is why Meem was there. Speaking of which, when Meem finally made it to our hotel she brought some donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. Valentino was pretty happy.


In fact Valentino was the first to test out the little coffee maker in our room – a machine which got quite a few uses over the next 3 days.


After Meem had a chance to get settled we went and had dinner downstairs in the hotel restaurant since we weren’t wanting to wander too far that first evening. Just a quick trip down the death traps and we were there.


After dinner it was mostly just chilling in our room since I had to get up early and we were all tired from out travel. We did have a good view to take in though (as we marveled at how little traffic ABQ has – it’s crazy really).


After some last minute reviewing on my part we all got tucked into bed right before 10pm, which is nothing short of a miracle considering that Meem and I have been known to feed off each other’s night-owliness and talk until 4am. Valentino is a responsible bear though, so he probably helped keep us in line.


While the bar exam on the whole is a shitty magical fun experience, one nice thing was that since my hotel room was literally like 6 minutes from the bar exam room. Like, seriously, there was a tunnel from our hotel to the convention center where I took the exam (though I didn’t find it until the second day).


Of course there was a legitimately haunted door down in the tunnel that just kept opening and closing itself, over and over – for three damn days. It was made even more creepy because I never saw anyone else in that tunnel and by all accounts there should have been someone in that tunnel as it lead to a parking garage, hotel, and convention center.


Of course besides the haunted tunnel the proximity also meant that I had plenty of time to come back to the hotel room for lunch. So that’s what I did each day. Valentino was always waiting for me, and Meem usually was though sometimes she was off on her own adventures!


Normally “lunch” entailed leftovers from the night before, but that was fine as I generally wasn’t especially hungry. Sometimes I’d have coffee too since they kept it subzero in the exam room. Mostly I’d just use my brief lunch break to look out the window and decompress a bit.


Then in the evenings Meem took me out for yummy viddles and we had an AWESOME vodka drink that I can’t even remember the name of. In fact I don’t even remember if it was vodka. Meem plz halp.

At the place were had the best version of that mystery drink they had some signs in the bathroom that I really liked, especially the bits about “Life’s a bitch, some days it has puppies” and “It goes on” (as does the world).


I think it was that evening that we realized the ice machine on our floor was broken. One of the hotel employees noticed Meem trying to get ice and said he would bring us some ice. Bring ice he most assuredly did. He brought a huge bucket of ice, I think one of those fancy buckets they put champagne in. Valentino approved.


Each day was early for me (and generally Meem too) but one morning when we awoke we got quite a surprise, hot air balloons!


You might have to make it bigger to see them, but they are there! I think there were 4 or 5 in the sky that morning, so nowhere near ABQ’s massive International Balloon Fiesta, which takes place in October and has over 500 balloons each year (making it the largest such festival in the world). Still, for us simple Midwestern folk it was a good way to wake up. Meem sprang forth from bed like a spring chicken.

After the exciting morning it was back to bar exam things, and during lunch Valentino was dutifully waiting for me at my little “Good Mojo” shrine.


The items on the desk deserve a little bit of explaining. Valentino he is pretty obvious, he’s your friendly neighborhood polar bear! The paper also isn’t really anything special, it’s just some instructions for bringing your ticket to the bar exam. I just placed it on my “Good Mojo” table so I didn’t lose it. It’s the dice and pencils which have some interesting backstories. I’ll go in chronological order starting with the Dixon Ticonderoga Black™ pencil on the right. Yes, that is the type of pencil, and yes – pencils are serious. freaking. business.

Now, I didn’t even get to use my pencils on the bar exam. They don’t trust you to bring in your own pencils since you might, you know, scratch the entire 926 pages of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts on your pencil or something. However, pencils are still serious business, and that Dixon is a Gawd Damned War Hero. Its term of service goes way back to the LSAT days (yes, the test that seems impossibly bad until you realize how much worse the bar is). The Dixon has survived several deployments, and I don’t mean pansy-pushing desk work, I’m talking no-man’s-land-10,000-lives-per-yard-trench-warfare of standardized testing. If Pencils could suffer PTSD, that Dixon would have been the star of Apocalypse Now. So, despite being retired like 5 times over, the Dixon came out of retirement to lend moral support to me on the bar exam.

The pencil on the left is an OOLY Ninja Black Wood Pencil™. You’ll notice that the OOLY hasn’t been used. That’s because it’s a ninja. Whereas the Dixon is a morphine infused beach storming sword wielding bad-ass, the OOLY is the tactical assassin who marks bubbles, without even being sharpened. That’s because a true ninja kills not with their lead, but their heart.

Combined, my pencils unleash a hell onto standardized tests that would leave even Lucifer crying like the bitch he is.

Seriously, those pencils are undefeated.

Anyways, as for the dice – those are actually Valentino’s! They come from the HLS Public Interest Auction, specifically the one from my 2L year (which I guess was the last one since they don’t do it anymore for some dumb reason). Now, they weren’t really giving the dice away. This was more of a “Valentino sees dice, Valentino wants dice, dice are now Valentino’s.” Despite being small, Valentino is still a polar bear, and you don’t mess with polar bears (seriously they are huge). So Valentino took the dice. I didn’t really feel bad considering they were dice, there were tons of them, and I had paid $150,000 to be there. So the dice are more of a Valentino talisman. Whereas the pencils are my lucky objects, the Boys use the dice as their lucky objects. So Valentino was adding his lucky to my lucky for some ultimate luckiness.

The bar exam didn’t stand a chance.

Another fun thing about Valentino is that he tended to stay in the hotel during the day, even when Meem and I were both gone. Normally he is an adventurer, but I think ABQ was just a little too hot for him in July and since we were only there for a few days he didn’t feel like trying to acclimate to the weather (can’t say I blame him). So he sometimes got a bit restless when I was out, and by the time I got back for lunch he would end up in weird places.


I seriously have no idea how he got up there, or how he managed to stay up there once he was there.


Speaking of weather, we got really lucky during our ABQ Adventure. We had warm sunny days with amazing sunsets.


One night we got to watch a heck of storm roll in across the desert, which resulted in Meem and I trying to get awesome lightning shots. We failed, though Meem was ultimately much more tenacious than I was about it.


The next day was the last day of the bar exam, so Valentino and I started off with some yummy yogurt from the hotel’s cafe. It was kind of dumb, the cafe didn’t start serving anything beyond basics until like.. way after it opened, then it proceeded to close right after lunch. So breakfast often consisted of yogurt left over from the day before, but I’m not going to complain too much, it was yummy and it was cheap.


Plus, as mentioned, I normally had much more enticing leftovers to look forward to for lunch.


By the end of the three day exam period I think Valentino was ready to spend some more time with Rad and Grandma Reem.


So that evening we had another yummy dinner, and while it seemed like it was going to blow in a storm (I can’t remember if it ever did) we didn’t get rained on during our outdoor feast, and we even got to see a mini rainbow! [There’s a rainbow outside my windows as I write this too, yay! – Iceland gets tons of rainbows]


I really like eating outside, but I’m super picky about it. I don’t like cold, or heat, or humidity, or precipitation. Basically I’m a scrub. However, this was good weather (until the end, when it got windy) and good food.


There was even a family next to us where the girl had a stuffed bunny rabbit with her. Out of respect for their privacy I won’t post them here, but Valentino made a bunny friend.

The next day we got to sleep in, FINALLY! 😀


But not too much. I had a clerkship interview to get to. So I had to Suit Up® and head to the federal courthouse. I realized really quick that my Midwest/New England suit was not well suited to New Mexico summer heat. Fortunately the courthouse was like a 10 minute walk from the hotel, so I was only half dead by the time I got there. I didn’t even up getting the job though, so maybe I hallucinated the entire interview and in reality I was running screaming naked  around the courthouse from a dehydrated delirium until I got tazed. Who knows.

After the interview Meem and I decided to have some fun, so we headed out to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center which is a REALLY cool center owned by the 19 Indian Pueblos of New Mexico.


Meem and I had a delicious lunch there before checking out the really interesting museum. We then got to watch a traditional dance, which was one of the big reasons we decided to visit.


During the second dance Meem got a call, or text, or pigeon, something, from the owner of a certain Breaking Bad RV Tour Company. The message? Spots had opened up on the afternoon tour. Meem and Taco Excitement to Overdrive.

We’d originally had tickets to the afternoon tour, but due to the clerkship interview we had to cancel them. Well, then the clerkship time and location got changed anyways, but by that point the tour was sold out. So while I had made peace with not getting to follow in the footsteps of my favorite meth lord I was super ecstatic to get to go after all. So we packed up our stuff, stopped through the Cultural Center’s gift shop for some goodies (Meem got an awesome bracelet) and then headed off to the Breaking Bad tour since we didn’t have much time before it started.


The tour started right near the spot we had eaten dinner at the night before so we were at least conceptually familiar with the area. We got briefly lost but then literally ran into the owner of the tour company as he was walking out of a store and Meem was on the phone with him. Ah destiny! We were meant to be on that tour.

—SPOILER ALERT—

I’m going to take a moment to stop here and say that what follows is a brief recounting of the Breaking Bad RV Tour. If you know me, you’ll know that I LOATHE spoilers with the fury of 1000 dying suns. Legitimately, I abhor spoilers to an unnatural level. As such, I sincerely try to avoid spoiling anything as much as is humanly possible. So I want to warn you that if you haven’t watched Breaking Bad (BB) and/or Better Call Saul (BCS), first, go watch them. Second, I’m going to be as non-detailed as possible with the tour, but by its very nature there are going to be some spoilers. So I’d suggest not reading what follows if you want a 100% pristine take on BB/BCS. Again, I’ll go light on the details, but the photos in and of themselves will sort of spoil something.

Anyways, back on track.

As soon as we walked around the corner, boom, there she was – a 1986 Fleetwood Bounder recreation vehicle and motor home, with signature yellow and orange stripes. The same kind as featured on BB.


Now it’s not the RV from the show, that one is owned by Sony and is actually going to be in the Smithsonian! Yes BB is that good, fight me brah. However, this is literally the same model, so it’s as close as you can get. Plus, other BB tours take you around in a shuttle bus or something, why do that when you can use an RV which replicates the one from the show in exacting detail?


I’m talking, autismo level detail (and I know such details as an autismo myself). Heck, they even got things right that a lot of BB fans forgot about – case in point the crossbow bolt from Season 5 Episode 1.


Meem and I were he first ones to arrive. The owner had asked us to show up early since we hadn’t actually paid and he was just holding our spots on a good faith basis. That was fine, it gave us more time to explore the RV before the rest of the group showed up!


Now, when I say they really paid attention to the details on the RV, I mean that – and not just on the outside, they even recreated the interior!


Yes, there were a lot of props/memorabilia from the show that they had placed inside that obviously weren’t in the show, plus the required stuff like, you know, seats. But on the whole it was a very faithful recreation of the infamous mobile meth lab.


We took the seats that are second from the front on the left side.


Another little detail that the RV had that another tour wouldn’t have dared recreate was a lack of A/C. Yep, just like in the show. In fairness the RV was supposed to have A/C, but they were having secondary generator issues that day. So we got to cruise around ABQ in the summer heat in a 1986 RV. Truth be told, it didn’t bother me in the least. If you were super heat sensitive it probably would have sucked, but when they were moving and we had the windows open it wasn’t that bad. Plus I found the prospect of trudging around New Mexico sans A/C just like Walt and Jesse to be kind of a cool, or rather, neat – cool not so much.

After getting everyone one board we were on our way!


Joining us was none other than the pink bear from Wayfarer 515.


One thing that I really liked about the tour was not only that you got to see almost all the super famous and recognizable places from both BB and BCS, but also some lesser known locales, such as this area which was converted into a Winter-time Philadelphia for Mike to “break bad” in.


Other areas were easier to place in the context of the show, but more difficult to visually match with their in-series counterpart. For instance, I immediately recognized the junk yard, but struggled to think of which angles and areas we actually saw in the show.


Then of course there were those areas which are so iconic that it’s hard to imagine them not being part of the BB/BCS universe and instead as their real-life counterpart.


Yep, mah’ cluckin’ Los Pollos Hermanos.


Los Pollos Hermanos, or Twisters in the Matrix, former dominion of a one Gustavo Fring. We actually got to eat here as part of the tour and that was pretty bad-ass. Twisters is a burger and burrito place, and we had burritos.

In the interest of time you don’t stop at every spot on the tour, some you just drive by such as Wendy’s hotel.


As well as Jesse and Jane’s house.


Other locations you don’t stop at because the owners get pissy and don’t want you there. I guess I can see it from their perspective, but at the same time I find myself having little sympathy – especially for the BCS locations when they already knew that it was going to be a hugely popular.

However, other locations have completely capitalized on their BB/BCS fame. One such example is the car wash from BB.


They have an entire gift shop inside the car wash devoted to BB/BCS stuff. They also tell you to have an “A1 Day” which is pretty neat.

Right across from the car wash is the billboard they used for the first “Better Call Saul” advertisement you see in the series.


I have a special affinity to James McGill, for obvious reasons.

The penultimate stop on the tour was the famous White household. So famous in fact that a quick Google search will yield countless results about visits to the house which range from people raging about the owners being assholes, to throwing pizzas on the roof, to the owners being portrayed as decent people after all.


Since we were with a tour – and the tour operators (who were extras in the series!) seemed to know the homeowners – we didn’t have any issues. It was really awesome to see the actual house, though at the end of the day it’s a privately owned house, so I’m not sure it’s anything I would have went out of my way to see. However, to see in as part of a BB tour is a must, and to do it in an appropriate RV is even better. And no, we didn’t throw a pizza on the roof – that’s a serious waste of pizza.

The last stop on the trip was the Super-Meth-Lab/industrial laundry, which looked pretty damn much exactly like it did in the show, minus you know, the whole super meth lab in the basement (there is no basement).


After that we headed back towards downtown ABQ.


On the way we had a hilarious interaction with another car which requires a bit of story time.

So if you’re familiar with BB at all, you know that blue crystal meth is a huge plot element. Well, ABQ denizens being industrious as they are have created a blue rock candy which they distribute in little bags – and it looks pretty much exactly like the crystal meth in the show (so much so that the TSA has confiscated it from people). They offer these on the tour, you can either buy them or win them via trivia that takes place on the tour (I won a Heisenberg sticker!). So, basically there is this big bag full of smaller drug bags of crystal meth look-alike candy on a ghetto 1986 RV in ABQ.

I noticed as we were driving around that drivers were largely reacting positively to our presence, my guess is that they either know the owners or were glad for the commerce BB/BCS brought to the city. Either way, one car that was next to us honked and there was a little girl in the back seat who was waving at us. So our driver was waving back, but when we pulled up at a stop light he signaled to the other car to roll down their window. After they did he proceeded to throw a bunch of crystal meth bags into their car for the little girl. It was really funny, because it looked 100% legit like a drug deal, complete with the old junker car and the old junker RV. To make matters even better, some of the bags fell on the ground, so they were picking up all this crystal meth candy off the road. The little girl got a kick out of it, plus its yummy candy. Just your friendly neighborhood meth dealers getting 8 year old children addicted to crystal.

In addition to the crystal meth they also had some BB t-shirts for sale and I really wanted one, but they didn’t have any in my size. So Meem and I bought some drugs candy. In the end they ended up giving us some of the bags as well, I think because the A/C was broken and they were worried about Trip Advisor reviews. Have no fears dear tour people, it was an awesome tour even without the A/C.

I give it 11/10 – would have breakfast again.


There were a lot of places we went to that I didn’t share pictures of here just because I tend to type 5000 words about everything and I need to actually do schoolwork at some point. 🙂

—END SPOILER ALERT—

After the tour was over we were dropped off in Old Town ABQ.


There was some sort of festival going on in the square with live music, so we got to hear that while Meem enjoyed some ice cream in this plaza area.


I used the opportunity to go snag an ABQ magnet for our collection.

After that we had some dinner and then made our way back to hotel. I had to get up at freaking 3am to make my flight. Since I wasn’t sure what to expect with my crystal meth I let Valentino carry those since nobody fucks with a polar bear.


Valentino takes his guard duties quite seriously.

I ended up having plenty of time as there were all of like 5 people in the entire ABQ airport (also featured in BB, by the way). However, the TSA in all their boundless genius had 8 employees working on the Pre-Check Line which had no people in it, whereas they had one person for the entire regular line. So while there wasn’t hardly anyone there, the normal line was being processed so slowly you could have measured it in geologic time. I’m not a social person, especially not at 4:30am. But me and my fellow travelers had a lot of self-depreciating laughs at how the TSA had divided up their employees.

The trip home was pretty straightforward. I had a pretty long layover on the way back, but fortunately there were only minimal delays on top of that. Southwest freaked me out at first because their system made some sort of error and displayed a 5 minute delay as five hours for about 20 minutes. It ended up being more than 5 minutes, but nowhere near 5 hours, thank freaking god. Despite having just taken you know, the bar exam – as well as interviewed with a federal judge – I had to get home so I could pack.

Yeah, I had 1 full day between the bar exam and needing to pack to leave my apartment in Boston – no rest for the wicked I suppose. However, that is a story for next time! 🙂

So that was Meem, Valentino, and I’s ABQ Adventure. Meem had some adventures of her own (including a train up to Santa Fe) while I was getting bar exam’d, but she can make her own blog about that. 😛

I had a lot of fun with them, and it was great to be with Meem during her first NM experience! It’s no real secret that SB and I intend to make our way to New Mexico (someday) so it was fun to get to experience it with family! Having Meem and Valentino there made taking the bar exam much more bear-able. 😀

The next post will focus on what happened between the end of the ABQ Adventure and all of us leaving for Iceland, which was an (very busy) adventure in and of itself!

Until next time,
-Taco

Disclaimer:

All content on this blog is © unless otherwise noted. Any reliance on the information presented herein is at your sole discretion and liability.

Subscribe

Subcribe for automatic post updates!