May 4: Day 7, Möðrudalur to Egilsstaðir
My weather app says it'll be -9 to -2 today, and feel like -16 with the wind chill. Which is fierce. But it's for Myvatn which is where I stayed yesterday; that's 300m above sea level… and the place I'm staying is high in the mountains, 560m up. So maybe those numbers are too optimistic?
I don’t have a thermometer. So I don’t know exactly how cold it is - but today was frosty.
I locked up my bike outside last night, and that may have been a mistake. The security chain didn't want to coil up this morning - probably part-frozen. And when I got moving, the front derailleur didn't want to work. Should be OK; the only steep climb is near the end and if it's still not working, I can walk up. The back brake doesn't want to move when I squeeze it, I brake hard and it works, but it doesn't want to release. The front brake is still OK, so I'll rely on that, and only use the back one if I really need to stop.
I'm retracing my route back to Route 1, the ring road. My route app suggested following the gravel road onwards, but there's a big sign saying "impassable". I had a chat to the owners and he thought it'd be perfectly passable for a bike, and he may well be right - but if something goes wrong, I'm not sure it'll be passable for a rescue vehicle. So I'm taking the safe option.
This means a slow haul upwind, into the snow. Flurries of snow are so thick and so regular I actually got a good video of it. It's not a good day to be out.
From left to right: bad numbers on the weather app. Lunch. This roadsign had been blown off its post, it was from the other side of the road. Snow flurries. Highwayman mode for cold days. The plateau.
I'm really hoping for a good tailwind once I hit the ring road, but it's a strong sidewind. It occasionally musters a Patagonia-level gust that pushes me further than I'd like, so I stay safely inside my lane, not right on the white line like normal. There's no traffic using that lane yet; it's two hours (150km) to Akureyri so it hasn't arrived yet.
The road gradually turns to the left, bringing the wind to the side. Snow flurries blow over the road, turning it white. (Photographs don't do it justice, sadly.) It's really cold. I've got my neckwarmer over my nose and mouth and ears, and I'm mostly warm - except for my hands.
I'm wearing winter cycling gloves and they're usually fine but they're not enough today, my hands are starting to get painfully cold. So when the wind isn't trying to push me over, I'll steer one-handed and push the other hand under my shirt to warm up. I also have a thick woolen gloves in my backpack, I'll pull them out if it gets worse.
The winter gloves have touchscreen pads on the thumbs, which is all I need to unlock the phone, to check the route, to restart the route app if it crashes, and even send a short text message. But they're not good for taking photos. I'll steer with the left hand, and swipe with my right thumb to bring up the camera app. Grab the phone righthanded, twist to free it, point and try to shoot by pressing one of the volume buttons.
But squeezing the button to take a picture often doesn't work. The gloves are thin, but I can't feel the button, so most likely I’m not pressing in the right place. So pictures are often poorly framed because when I squeeze harder to take the photo it twists. Also I can't really see the screen: partly because of the sunglasses, partly because of the light. So there's a lot of reasons the photos are a bit sub-par.
My phone also doesn't like the cold. It usually hits 20% charge in the early afternoon, but after an hour I notice it's on 1%! I don't like stopping (if I stop pedalling I start getting cold) but this is important, so I stop and connect it up and check it's charging. I need a live phone so I keep it connected all day, I can charge the battery tonight if the cold drained it.
Another thing that didn't like the cold? My water bottle. It iced up and wouldn't open when I tried to pop it to drink. I unscrewed the cap and found a lumpy layer of ice all around the top, and chunks of ice floating in the water. That is a first.
From left to right: Frozen water bottle. Snow everywhere. Spectacular clouds. A waterfall (from later in the day, off the plateau). The signs for this town were covered up, I’m interested to know why…
Lunch today was a problem. There's no supermarkets or cafes or anything along the route today, and since the breakfast buffet was too expensive for me, I couldn't liberate something from it. The hostel people didn't make or provide sandwiches, but they did kindly provide a baguette-sized piece of bread and a good chunk of cheese, for a very reasonable price.
At midday I passed an unattended petrol station, with what might have been a single small bare room where I could stop and eat. I gave it a good look but decided to keep going, planning to stop at the next piece of shelter I passed. There was nothing. Scattered trees that didn't look very dense, a few barns that were too far from the road, nothing else close to the road that would block the wind. So I ended up going all the way to Egilsstaðir, and ate lunch in the hostel/unattended guesthouse where I'm staying, at about 2pm.
Which was a late lunch. But it was a surprisingly early finish. I made really good time today: 5 hours for 100km, including stops. I must have been averaging well over 20km/h. One GPS point on the Garmin website says I was doing over 50km/h which I find a little hard to believe, but not so unbelievable that I'm going to not share.
The first half of the day was quite high: 500-600m, higher than passes I've been over recently - and it kept that height for 50km. That was a very cold section: serious drifts of long-term snow everywhere, solid opaque ice with blown snow embedded in it, epic peaks all around, no signs of life.
After the first 30 minutes I had a very helpful tailwind, which meant I made good time and also didn't have too much windchill to deal with. If the wind had been blowing the other way it would have been a lot harder - and I would have been a lot colder. I did have a few more layers available (the woolen gloves, balaclava, and a full merino underlayer) but it would have been a long, cold, hard push to get through it.
Instead I zipped along in a near-top gear only worrying about cellphone charge - and whether my photos were going to capture the spectacular snow-covered plateau. I think I've been quite lucky.
