Up early today, about 0600 and off to the pool, 0630. Many more people than I'd expected. Loads of people exercising before work. We spent about an hour there. The rain continued on/off. We returned to the camp, cooked in the kitchen, planned our intended route and packed up our tents (wet).
Whilst breaking camp, we met an Alaskan who we'd seem at the festival. Apparently his job is training US marines survival skills (or something). He was also leaving and had some dehydrated meals that he offered us, can't beat free food!
Then we hit the road and were met with rain+++.
We had decided to ride North and visit the Geitland nature reserve, near the Eiriksjökull glacier. To get there we took the 36 out of Reykjavik, then onto the 550 and 551. roughly 24 km of Dirt and 6 into the Nature reserve. It was Awesome and well worth the ride, desolate, cold, snowy, elevation was about 800m. We couldn't actually ride onto the glacier but were excited to be there. We grabbed a drink (coffee for me) in the station/meeting point/cafe. Then after a bit of a break and a chat with those who were interested, we decided to head off. 6 km of dirt back to the 550, then we decided to head north to the 518, we figured that the road couldn't be any worse. We figured wrong. With about 2 km to go till we reached the 518 we hit a wet, muddy, slippery, sludgy patch in the road. I almost came off but somehow managed to safe it. Scott, however, didn't.
I saw in my mirror something that looked like him falling and pulled over as soon as I could, about 1 km along the road. He had come off. His bike lay in the middle of the road and he appeared to be ok. I spied a truck coming from behind, I was running toward him, waving my arms as a warning. Eventually, he understood and did the same. Lucky for us, the truck stopped and helped Scott right the bike and get it out of the middle of the road. It couldn't have gotten through otherwise.
By the time I had arrived, the truck had continued on its way. We removed the gear and panniers from the bike and once we managed to get it into Neutral we got it off the road and to a safe place. I then retrieved my bike, almost coming off in the process.
Upon inspection: he had smashed the other indicator (L), mirror back, dented the tank, but worse than that, the Switch/lever assembly had twisted in the fall and I had to dismantle the unit to repair this. I discovered that as it had twisted the wiring loom had been partially cut through, 3 wires were cut. To add to this, there was no clutch...Bugger!
Things did not look too good and I wondered what we would do and how we would recover the bike. After disassembly, I discovered that the banjo union near the hydraulic reservoir had loosened and was leaking. Once I tightened this we, once again, had a clutch.
I spent about 3 hours the cold (freezing), and rain repairing the bike, but it was rideable BUT no Left indicator, horn and unfortunately no ABS.
Finally, done with the rain and cold, we continued along the 550 to the 518/519, 52 to Thingvellir and then the 37 to the great Geysir. We camped here, at the wrong camp (4 km out) but were too exhausted to change, we arrived at 2145. We set up camp then went looking for something to eat, we had to ride to the other camp where they had a restaurant/bar. We feasted on pizza and beer. We took a couple of "carry-out's" to the tent and slept very well.
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| Glacier Man |
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| My workshop |
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| Perfect Icelandic road |
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| ready to roll |
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| dinner stop |
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| camp after a long day |
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