Ride to Blönduós
Goodbye and thank you Akureyri! It was great to spend a few days relaxing and resting. Our Airbnb worked out wonderfully. We were able to cook all of our meals there and let our gear air out, and we felt very at home. We hydrated like crazy: I think we drank 10 liters of juice, oat milk, and chocolate oat milk. That’s not counting the water we constantly drank. We also ate a lot. We spent about $150 at the grocery store and almost ate everything we bought. We enjoy cooking together, and given our restrictive diet, it works so well to be able to cook for ourselves. Plus, it costs less….
Because we were coming off two rest days and had decent weather/winds we pushed and completed 90 miles today with almost 4000 feet of climbing. The climbing came mostly in two sustained hills with grades around 6 percent peaking near 10 percent. We started the day with 3 big climbs left on our entire trip and completed two of them today. That is a good feeling. The last one comes on Wednesday.
We had misty rain on and off throughout day. By the time we rolled into our campsite we were soaked with rain and sweat. The temperature was a bit below 50 and we quickly got chilled. Luckily this site has hot showers, which we made great use of. It was a little late to hit the local pool.
Traffic was not horrible, but still busy. We actually had a rideable shoulder for some of the ride. We’ve rarely had that in Iceland. Our next two days will have difficult traffic with narrow shoulders.
As usual, the scenery was amazing: green river valleys, jagged mountain ranges, farmland – beautiful.
Today, more than usual, we saw several cyclists going the other way. We played leapfrog with one cyclist going our way and ended up sharing fries with him at a stop. He was from the Netherlands and headed to the interior.
We are staying in a campground in Blönduós. After long hot showers we cooked nice hot soup and ate chocolate almonds. Life is good.
