Author: Paul

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Holy crap times a-flying

Okay… so sometime early 2021 I promised myself I will continue writing about my Iceland trip back in 2016. Well, its February 2023 and I am just about to continue where I left off back then!

What happened in the meantime..

  • Corona craze

    We kind of survived that mostly fine. I remember the second year the doc said there was some blood in my urine, so I went to the urologist. That happened to be a (fairly attractive) woman. As I complained about a my corona blues, she paused, looked at me and said “Its kind of common now” and dismissed me straight away. I asked for a testosterone test, though, which was according to her then just fine.

    We didn’t vaccinate and endured some minor social pressure. The older ladies at the swimming pool reception looked at me and sighed very disapprovingly as I showed them test results and not the (socially approved) vaccination passport. And obviously I still cannot enter US for that very reason. But well.. Writing from early 2023, all that vaccination efforts seem to be.. superfluous? Everyone I know, whether vaccinated or not, got corona and it was more or less pretty similar to what I’ve got as an non-vaccinated.

    Because about Christmas 2021 a friend come from US though and stayed with us for a few days. He brought a lot of good presents with him, but more importantly for todays blog post also the latest Corona strain. So due to that the New Year Eve 2022 and most of January were pretty bad. All four of us were positive and paid a visit to our doc the moment they opened. With a weird buzzing in my head, lack of energy and a peculiar feeling of emptiness I felt pretty shitty most of the month.

    2 weeks in quarantine closed up with my boys – was kind of tough. We tried to do something useful – ramped up English lessons, Paul started to play piano, our neighbors brought groceries so all in all it was manageable.

    Neither of us got the long covid. But drive for sport I regained – partly – only a good part of the year later.

  • War in Ukraine (on-going)

    I remembered complaining to the pretty urologist back then about the alleged impact of Corona on my delicate psyche – and on my testosterone; well, had I just known …
  • We are moving to the mountains and lakes (yay!)

    No point to wait if the world is rolling to its end, I thought some day.
  • …And WordPress updated to some really counter-intuitive thing

    wtf they did that

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Even Dilberts not funny anymore

I think I stopped really following Scott Adams after he went all crazy with his new instagram “star” / neighbour girlfriend and Donald Trump preaching back then in 2016, but today I was bored so I checked out dilbert.com quickly..

YAWN..

All strips now have 4.5 to 5 star rating but boy the fun’s gone.

Ok, out of curiosity I look up the good ol’ ones.

- Dilbert by Scott Adams
(c) Scott Adams, dilbert.com of course

Love that stuff. Grass was definitely greener in 2014.

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80km April Round

When I was about a decade younger, in my mid 20s, I remember that I spent almost every weekend on a bicycle, exploring daily trails and treks around the hilly region where I live. Short 1-2hour trails, longer circular routes of about 90km in length and one way stretches of up to 150km-180km, multi-day tours, cross-country tours with a full-day return journey on a train, these things really filled me up with a sense of a time well spent and something wholesome to remember. In the due time I’ll write somethign about that.

The different bikes accumulated over the years: the old-boy Stevens xc, mid-level racing, fat-bike (which I bought on a fad and sold last summer) and a Canyon 28in carbon enduro as the latest addition.

This winter I felt very acutely how much less of an adventure this all has become. During the whole of the winter season I barely managed to get myself out. The process of pedalling , feeling the wind, my speed, speeding through places I’ve never been to, stopping for a quick bite somewhere nice – this has mostly lost its lustre. Did it become routine? Am I turning into an “adult”?

However it is, Im definitely “over the hill” on that front. Lets see if this stabilizes or speeds up downhill.

What I still do enjoy very much though is to bike with my children.

Anyways, this weekend a friend invited me for quick 80km/700hm asphalt ride that we did on ~27km/h pace. I felt really tired, nauseus by energy loss at the end of it (in fact we even had to cut it due to that) but I think its an okay-ish result for a start of the season.

What was really unusual, and why I actually decided to write about it, was the follow-up day.

Now I have to digress.

I have noticed a weird phenomenon lately – people write about it on Reddit too – an impossibly bad, dejected, out of spirits mood and morose head starting around 24hours from a physical exertion, and peaking at about 36h after. Doing some moderate sports, say, Saturday afternoon would literally ruin the Mondays for me. I would drag myself through the day abusing caffeine and carbs, and no amount of cold water or sleep would make it better (if only just a bit). On Tuesday evening it would start to go away, but guess what: Tuesday I’d do sports again and so destroy the Thursday.

Well, fingers crossed, I might have found a solution this time. After very strenous biking on Sunday I took 3x magnesium pills (3 times the usual dosage) and took a long warm bath with 4 cups of some off-the-shelf rosmarin oil-based additive, pretty cheap, and so far I’m really fine!

I would usually have massive soreness after stuff like this. Like for example a 45min Badminton game after a long pause, I’d be sore everywhere for a week! – with that weird dryness in the eyes and the nose, coupled with what would seem to be a mild depression and apathy. But nothing of that this time.

[Both previous days, however, and I almost forgot about that, I took an anti-histamine pill against pollen allergy in the morning. Could that have helped?!]

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Uncut Gems

I swear this guy was a copy of an ex-colleague of mine. Same more-than-life zest for more-than-life things, totally engrossing. Literally the definition of a love/hate character for me

Since I cannot muster much energy to write about Iceland, I’ll capture this until it disappears in my darkening memory.

I came over Uncut Gems by accident, and then watched it on Netflix, twice, and some episodes (yes – I admit – those with Julia) more than that.
The movie perfectly captured the essense of “jewness” for me: Limitless Passion, so reprehensible in its disregard and yet so endearing.

Half of me is really jealous. Another isn’t.

Phenomenal chemistry between lead man and woman. But may be its just me: just another ex-colleague of mine looked like Julia, and – what’s worse – she had the same smooth and slightly vulgar way to hold herself which was very, very attractive. But we don’t work together anymore.

…

And then it happened.
The next day Spotify suggested this.
OMG

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Iceland 2016, Day 1 – Skogar – (somewhere unknown)

Skogar Waterfall at 7:59:59 on 5th August 2016 – the camp was still, the waterfall cold and loud

25.03.21: Nostalgia took over me as I researched the map and sorted photos.. Will continue tomorrow.

06.02.23: The tomorrow has finally come.

That day was a very long one. I woke up about 07:00 and was already 08:30 at the top of Skogar waterfall going up the stairs to the right of the camp.

21.04.24

And so here we are: its year 2024, I broke my clavicula four weeks ago rather stupidly (as my children say in German by now, “papa fährt ski sehr schnell aber schlecht“), it sort of almost healed by itself in about 3 weeks from then, but for more elegance in line and for more classic shoulder form without ungainly bone protrusions I went for a ‘small routine operation’ that for now keeps me mostly home-bound and mostly on painkillers. They gave me a ton at the hospital, also some heavier prescription-only stuff I’ve never tried before;)

I can type though..

Skogar upstream:
typical icelandic patina and bizarre lava relief – as I was walking past that stream, alone, in a cold morning mist, I thought I am on some other planet


The path first went uphill along the impressive Skogar gorge raising almost a kilometer (from 0m altitude a the Skogar camp to 1000m at the to the Magni/Modi pass with the Eyafjallajokul glacier on the left). Back then I was pretty young (and headstrong) so 1000m with a 20kg rucksack — i think i didnt even notice that much.

Still, by about midday on that day I was walking in complete solitude. Some dude overcame me jogging though at some point. He didnt even have a bottle of water on him, to say nothing of the backpack. I never seen him running back so I reckon he’s been jogging over to the Þórsmörk. Must have been an amazing jog, that route.

As I passed Eyjafjallajokull on the right, the glacier felt like a menace, I tried to pass it quickly. In 2010, as I was blissfully not being aware of whats happening in the world, but the eruption of that volcano make huge news back then – I remember that somehow, it was in the late spring and the volcano dust grounded the airplanes for a few days with business people charting taxis to go from DE back to UK and so.

Its funny though that that particular eruption was nowhere near what the volcanos can do (and did in the past) in terms of dust produced. It was rather benign. Enjoy air travel while you can…

Anyways, about 13:00 I started to descend toward Þórsmörk over the black snow and magma fields, being quite under the awe of that particular place of Icelands nature.

Whats interesting, despite snow, ash and whatever, the path was still clearly visible and even marked at times. My fears that I will get myself lost in Iceland did not materialise
Ash plains, exposed glaciers, poison-green patches and snow fields – I think I’ve never seen so much landscape variety at the same time
The weather matched my mood and my expectations perfectly: it was grim, no-nonsense

About 14:00 suddenly many people appeared, most of them walking towards me (duh!). What I didnt consider, is that the descent to the Þórsmörk is for the most part without water access as it follows a dry rock ridge downwards. I didnt know that of course so I struggled a bit with empty bottles until I was almost at the bottom.

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Iceland 2016, Day 1 – Camp at Skogar

2016 was a pretty rich year for me: I was about to finish my posh MBA degree (urgh), got accidentally hired by Microsoft in the spring ’16 and also our 6month-old son was growing up quickly.

To use up the rest of the vacation and to have some ‘me’ time away from nappies I planned something I wanted to do since a long, long time: that is, a hiking trip to Iceland.

Now, Iceland fascinated me since I was a teenager.

The Icelandic names alone! All those æ’s and ð’s! 

I think I was totally engrossed in an Œuvre of one particular high-fantasy author who, as I learned only later, ‘borrowed’ most of the content from Icelandic mythology and sprinked it with some random sex in the process (definitely helping its popularity among high school-level audience). I remember I was totally thrilled.

Anyways, in Aug’16 I packed my 20kg Penguin, booked a one-way bus ticket to Skogar for 6000ISK and got on a WOW air (RIP WOWair :/) flight to Reykjavik for the price of 315EUR.

I had two weeks to enjoy myself in Iceland with complete hiking gear and provisions for 1 week.

My plan was simple and ambitious:

Week 1: Start from Skogar, finish at Geysir. The first third of the way I’d follow the famous Landmannalaugar trail and then improvise
Week 2: no idea. May be Eastern Iceland. But i’d have to come back to Reykjavik to restock.

In retrospect, Week 1 worked out as a charm. I made the 160km trek in 6 days and returned to Reykjavik almost in good shape (but more of that later). Week 2 I kind of botched 😀

…..

On 4th August 2016 I boarded the plane to Reykjavik, filled with a sense of adventure and an expectation of something mystical to happenen. And oh boy so it did!

On the plane I was seated with a young lady who, suprisingly, was visiting for Reykjavik as an intermediate stop for a layover to USA. That’d be cheaper, and she’d have a few days in Reykjavik to party. Her husband worked for Microsoft too, what a coincidence. But I partying wasn’t on my todo list this time! I had to disembark quickly to catch the Reykjavik Excursions bus to Skogar, where I would make the camp for the night and early next morning start over the Landmannalaugar.

Well, first thing that went awry was this: I spent an hour waiting for my rucksack to appear (the two Icelandic ladies working the baggage told me this is now normal: so many tourists are coming over they are barely managing) and I missed the connecting bus. No problem: for a meagre fee of ca. 15000 ISK (100EUR?) the taxi brought me to the gas station outside Reykjavik where I was picked by the bus to Skogar.

It was an amazing, mild and sunny afternoon in Iceland.

The bus to Skogar took about 4 hours, I think, but it did stop at various sightseeing-worthy places for long enough to enjoy them.

The one stop that forever will be in my memory was Seljalandsfoss at about 8pm that day.

Magic begins. Seljalandsfoss on the evening of 4th Aug’16
I went around the rainbowy waterfall, as all the others that day, something that I will very possibly never be able to do again

About 9pm I was at the full, but still surprisingly quiet Skogar camp, put my tent, ate, went quickly to the chilly waterfall nearby, returned and fell soundly asleep. Tomorrow I’d start off early: I didn’t have much time.

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Iceland, 2016 – Intro

Of course this ultimately burned the shoe. Don’t do this.

Executing on the blog’s purpose, I really liked re-reading what I wrote about my travels. You’re so vain, Carly. But it does bring me back so completely. Almost as if I relive it ✨

It takes me almost a day of effort, I think, to write and edit a day’s report. But this starts to pay off!

So, without further ado, with this post I endeavor to describe my trip to Iceland in (counting the years) the Year 2016.

I estimate to be done by June 2021.

So, headphones on, Fleetwood Mac rollin.

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How often do you debate the reasons for your own existence with yourself?

Rustin Cohle on Twitter: "I only came here to drink beer and kick ass. Looks like I'm about out of beer. http://t.co/8oG1sAS04t"

I keep coming back to thinking about this.

Do people in general have internal, in-one’s-head monologues about that? Weighting pros and cons? Is it like, typical at all? For what part of population? Is it age-related? And what are the outcomes?

There must be a subset of population that never even gets to ask this, or that isn’t interested in exploring it in the first place.

I think some lucky people carry the implicit assurance of their own worthiness in themselves, never doubted, the brilliance of a purpose never fading, the hard question never asked.

I think I was like that too in my early twenties. This warm, optimistic and empowering feeling of something big, world-changing, pre-arranged for you, but forever unknown, ahead of you along the road of life, something to justify and fulfil. [What a dick isnt it] Even now, in my late 30s, this feeling comes back sometimes, but instead of basking in its generous light whenever I want, now I have to search for it with a flashlight. It must be buried at the end of this dark corridor, I tell myself, but sometimes there its just darkness.

The big thing never arrived. [Obligatory True Detective cue]

Or has it?

Actually, lately my experience have pointed to the fact that I am a rather average – or slightly above – person toward my talents, ways to think and also physical traits, and, putting it methaphorically, the veil of self-uniqueness has slowly fallen from my eyes, so I assume that this is a totally common problem for both men and women my age.

This realization makes it a bit easier already – but, as with any problem that is met by sufficiently large group of people, mustn’t there be best practices or patterns? Or should I outsource this internal debate to religion? Well, that would definitely look like a cheat to me.

— update next day
OMG that’s so profound. I must have overdone myself on that one. Put it all to wine .
I think I’m just bored.

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Corona Blues

A glass of red wine made me write this.

I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being ‘General disinclination to do work of any kind’

I was playing around with this Jerome K. Jerome quote since forever.

This year, I think, I truly felt it.

‘Rest and a complete change,’ said George. ‘The overstrain upon our brains has produced a general depression throughout the system. Change of scene, and absence of the necessity for thought will restore the mental equilibrium.

I think I need to follow George’s advice.

A bit problematic changing the scenery though, with Corona restrictions still all over the place.

A friend of mine went to Tenerife, WFH. Not gonna meet a customer physically for foreseeable time anyways.

Where will this lead us all to? Caves of Steel?

Anyways, as I write these lines I already feel better.

True to this blog’s original purpose, putting one’s thoughts to paper actually does help.