Oh but today how the wind
was blowing atop Dyrholaey. Twas not a good day for seals to be coming ashore. Twas not fit out for man nor beast. Yet such a rush of adrenaline, to be in Iceland when Iceland is being what it is. The wind and the sideways rain are part of what Iceland is and we took joy in being blown about. Make no mistake, Iceland is a lovely island; and its harshness is part of that loveliness. If you don't like the world as it presents itself, you can go to Disneyland. I'll take the wind and the rain.
We drove back down the switchback of roadish notion from the top of the Dyrholaey cliff to the plain below, grateful that we didn't meet any traffic because we'd have had to pull over onto the outside edge of the road and there really wasn't much outside edge to pull onto.
Before we'd ascended the cliff, we'd seen several pairs of eiders and a couple pair of Mallards. When we came back past them, we saw that they'd moved into the lee of the cliff and had hunkered down.
Coming back out towards Highway 1, we passed a cluster of farms which included Dyrholar, home of Kari Silmundarson of Njals Saga. In Iceland, there's a story at every turn of the road, and some of them are famous stories indeed.
From Dyrholaey we could see the pillars at Reynisdranger, which is where we headed next, to the black sand beach along there, the surging, pounding ocean crashing angrily at it. I was hypnotized by the waves coming in. Mary had to forcibly lead me away. "Look," I'd say, "another one. Look, another one. And there's another one!" The cover of our Guide shows a girl and her puppy at the black sand beach with one of the pillars in the background. That's where we were. We also saw advertisements in Icelandic magazines and on television which use that beach and those pillars as background. We were there.
Along our way east from Dyrholaey and Reynisdranger we passed through Vik, a relatively-new community of about 300, where commerce wasn't established until 1890. Among the oldest buildings standing in Vik, according to the Guide, is a store that had been built
"in the Vestmann Islands in 1831 and subsequently moved to Vik in 1895 to serve as J.P.T. Bryde's general store. It is hard to find older timber houses elsewhere in the south of Iceland, except perhaps the old House ("Husid") at Eyrarbakki."
To be continued....
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