360 Degrees Longitude (3 page)

September takes being prepared much more seriously than your average Boy Scout. I thought of our earthquake kit at home with the two 50-gallon barrels of water. If a wire embedded with teeth was going to make her feel secure, I was willing to give in; it was nothing compared to the electronic brain (“e.brain”) I relied upon for
my
security blanket.

We maneuvered our great heap of belongings to our rental car. Arriving at the appointed spot, we discovered a Toyota Yaris subcompact occupying the space. “This stuff will never fit,” I said.

“I didn't marry an engineer for nothing,” September countered.

September and I frequently challenge, test, and even play pranks on each other. While it may seem somewhat contrarian, this style has kept our relationship as fresh as the day we met. I accepted the challenge without a second thought. After a moment of luggage Tetris, I felt guilty having eight-year-old Jordan's face wedged between some luggage and the roof of the car, but it all fit. Pulling out of the parking lot I called, “Little Dude! You okay back there? Can you breathe like that?” Hitting one good pothole would stamp the likeness of Jordan's face permanently into the ceiling.

“Shur! Diz iz fun, Dad!” came his muffled reply. Everything is an adventure for a kid.

One of the few accommodations we pre-arranged before leaving California was at a hostel in Reykjavík simply because we would arrive in the afternoon on a red-eye flight and would need a place to sleep right away. With me acting as navigator, September maneuvered the Yaris straight to the hostel. I dislodged the kids and the luggage from the back of the car while September checked us in. A moment later the kids and I started bringing our luggage into the lobby of the well-kept hostel. September was picking up our keys from the manager.

“Any problems?” I asked.

“Nope,” September replied. “They were expecting us.”

“You were speaking to him in English,” Katrina noted. “I heard you. I thought you would have to speak Iceland.”

“The language here is Icelandic,” September corrected. “Iceland is part of Scandinavia, and the percentage of the population who speaks English is high throughout Scandinavia.”

“In fact,” I interjected, “many people here speak three languages, Icelandic, Danish, and English. Especially the younger generation, because all three are taught in school. What do you think of that?”

Katrina considered that question for a moment, and her response caught us off guard. “How come we don't do that back home?”

• • •

Our arrival in Iceland was just three weeks shy of the summer solstice. Even after the sun officially set, the sky would turn a silvery shade, never turning black. When we got to the room, it was 9:00 p.m. and still light out. I closed the windows, drew the shades, and hoped for sleep. Immediately, the temperature in the room spiked. “Uuuggghh! Let's keep the window open. It must be 90 degrees in here!” September moaned.

One of the things that endears September to me is her ability to keep me
somewhat
in line, but not
too
in line. The need to be kept in line comes with the territory of being clueless, but I had twenty pounds of jet lag and wasn't in the mood to be reprimanded. “You know I can't sleep unless it's dark,” I protested. “It's noonlike outside. We need to shut out some light so we can sleep.”

But the room
was
steaming. The root of this dilemma, we later found, is that Iceland has all the hot water it wants, compliments of geothermal activity. The hot water circulating through the radiators in our hostel seemed to have but one setting, calibrated for mid-January.

“We can't sleep in this oven—
please
open the window.”

We all have our little “thing” that we like to have a certain way, and mine is a dark room to sleep in. The simple fact was that the four of us were going to become well acquainted with one another's “things” in the next 52 weeks. As I tossed and turned in our not-dark-enough room, I reminded myself that September's special “thing” was her need to have a pristine bar of soap in the shower, whereas I like to optimize and conserve, so I'll take soap scraps and mold them together to form one piece.

The next morning before September went to take her shower I was feeling mischievously petty from the lack of sleep. I found a scrap of soap and molded it into another bar. “Katrina,” I said, “trade this for the bar in Mom's soap case.”

“No way, Dad. I know what you're up to.”

Katrina is encumbered with being the family's moral compass, but ever since Jordan was old enough to toddle, he has been fascinated with being just mischievous enough to elicit a reaction, but not enough to get in any real trouble. “I'll do it!” Jordan enthusiastically offered.

Jordan swapped the bars for me. As I made my way to the shower with the bar that had been in September's case, I smiled, knowing what her reaction would be. Luckily for me, September would know it was my way of being just mischievous enough to elicit a reaction, but not enough to get in any real trouble.

• • •

Ask any grade school student what they know about Iceland, and you will get the same answer.

“The Vikings named the country ‘Iceland' to confuse other would-be settlers. The Vikings wanted people to think the country was icy and cold so they could have the place to themselves. The Vikings named the really cold and desolate land they found ‘Greenland' to throw people off in the wrong direction.”

Rarely does lore seep so deeply into a culture. Being a devout contrarian, I'm highly skeptical of almost anything held as “common knowledge,” such as the playground folklore of a human's mouth having more germs than a dog's rear end.

We didn't touch our tandems during our stay in Iceland; with only three days in the country, there was little point in doing anything with them. We took our rental car out to the countryside, more or less looking for evidence of a tree or patch of green. We headed for Pingvellir National Park, where we learned from the visitors' center that the legend behind the name “Iceland” is, in fact, true.

Pingvellir is a giant gash in the ground in the midst of a barren, rocky plain. What makes it special is that on one side of the gash is the Eurasian continental plate, and on the other is the North American plate. It's also roughly the Icelandic equivalent of Plymouth Rock; the original Scandinavian settlers gathered here in 930 A.D., conspiring to call their new home “Iceland” and the
really
bleak place “Greenland.”

There are no trees in Pingvellir, but there are a lot of rocks. We decided to walk on the wild side and took the nature trail into the rift between the two continents. A well-worn trail, wide enough for a small car, leads down into a gash in the earth. As the trail descended, jagged granite walls rose on either side; in places it seemed narrow enough to touch both sides with outstretched arms. Ever since the upper deck of the Bay Bridge collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake back home in the San Francisco Bay Area, I hadn't been able to look at a bridge in exactly the same way. Whenever traffic slows near one, I make darn sure that if I have to stop, it is not
under
the bridge. So forgive me if walking between two continental plates gave me the same queasy feeling as stopping under a bridge. But I always say if you're going to tempt fate, you may as well do it in a way that will get you a flashy epitaph on your tombstone. I called out to Katrina, “Come here. Put one hand here, and the other there. Then push with all your might.”

“This is a trick, isn't it?”

“No! I just want to get your picture!”

She wouldn't do it. So I stretched out my arms and placed my right hand on Europe and my left on North America and pushed with all my might. I am confident that somewhere, someone felt the Earth move. It was me.

All of the literature we read before we arrived described Iceland as a land of “fire and ice” due to the occasional volcano and the ubiquitous glaciers and geothermal activity. We visited icy waterfalls and hot geysers but found that the best way to appreciate the geothermal activity in Iceland is to visit the Blue Lagoon, about a forty-five-minute drive from the capital of Reykjavík.

Adjacent to a massive geothermal power plant used to generate electricity, the Blue Lagoon is one of the “must-see” attractions of Iceland. After the steam is used to power the generators, the effluent is collected in an enormous pool. Naturally occurring minerals in the effluent give the water a milky color and texture, and algae give it an unnatural bluish tint. Stated in another way, the famous Blue Lagoon is a basin full of industrial waste water.

Yet people flock to the Blue Lagoon from around the globe to soak in the warm water, experience its legendary healing powers, and to scrape the muck up off of the bottom and smear it on their faces. Fortunately, the muck is just a mix of minerals and biological sludge that probably won't kill them. I do have a suspicion, however, that if you put it under a microscope, it wouldn't look terribly different from what you would find on your average barn floor. You can even buy the stuff at the gift shop in dainty bottles.

• • •

After a few 24-hour cycles of constant daylight, it was time to haul our mountain of equipment back to the airport and head for London. Iceland happened so fast it almost shouldn't count as a stop. But the purpose of our brief layover was more to take advantage of an Icelandair special and to ease us into the Brits' time zone than it was to see the country. The reality was, however, that September and I sported rings under our eyes, while Katrina and Jordan proved immune to jet lag and capable of sleeping under a sun lamp. Still, we were excited to start the real first leg of our journey—cycling from London to Istanbul.

June 4–June 22
England

T
he surest way to put me in a good mood is to get me on a bike. There's nothing quite like pedaling across the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny day with a cool sea breeze to get me doing my Julie Andrews impression from the opening scene of
The Sound of Music
. Not that we would be crossing the Golden Gate in England, but we were going to ride. And in not too many weeks we'd be passing the same mountain in Austria that had inspired that famous scene. I was in a good mood.

But to get started we first needed to get to the starting gate. That would be at the home of some dear friends, whom we had never met, in Leighton Buzzard, a suburb somewhat north of London.

A few months before our departure, September went on a business trip and met a gentleman named Wayne on the plane. Unlike me, September makes friends instantly. I wasn't even there but I know exactly what happened. Before the plane even left the tarmac, Wayne knew our life story and knew about our upcoming trip and our plans to cycle across Europe on tandems with our children.

Small world that it is, Wayne had friends in England who have been cycling across Europe on their tandems with their kids for years. Wayne introduced us to his friends, David and Carolyn, via e-mail. In no time David and Carolyn became our lifeline. They were generous beyond imagination and offered a fountain of cycling information. Plus, they offered us, complete strangers, their home as a starting point.

You have to be extremely dedicated to cycling on a tandem to schlep one of them around the world. You must be certifiable to schlep two. This wasn't the first time we had taken the tandems out of the country, but we had yet to discover any method of moving two disassembled tandems from point A to point B other than brute force and awkwardness. Lucky me, I am the only one in the family strong enough to pick up one of the tandem cases—of which there are four. The Great Tandem Schlep goes something like this: