[Photos taken 17 – 23 August 2024, posted online 18 November 2024. The world has frozen over.]
We celebrated Finnur’s dad’s birthday as is customary. How time flies! I tried hiking around our extended backyard to test my sore heel, and deemed it not fit for purpose.
The rest of the week passed doing odd jobs, and ended with yet another volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula.
[Photos taken 12 – 13 August 2024, posted online 14 November 2024. Weather-whiplash incoming, going from 10C/50F to freezing starting tomorrow.]
Our last full day in Munich was predicted to be yet another excessively warm day (31 C / 88 F) in a city that isn’t really built for it, air conditioning wise.
I was therefore a little apprehensive about having booked a guided bike tour, but with a backpack full of water, a flat city, and the built in air-movement of biking, it went better than expected. In the evening we returned downtown to eat dinner in the town-hall cellar.
The day after that, we finished packing our bags, took the trains to the airport, waited in line for almost an hour to check in our bags (staff shortage still?), and then happily walked to the car park in Iceland in t-shirts in the glorious chilly breeze!
[Photos taken 11 August 2024, posted online 13 November 2024. It’s now fully dark in the mornings, but it’s been warm… we could do without the rain and wind though!]
On Sunday’s, most everything in Germany is closed. This day was predicted to be very warm, so I tried finding something that was a) open, and b) probably air conditioned. I ended up dragging everybody to the BMW Museum which fulfilled a) but failed spectacularly at b). It was so warm in there that one child wilted soon after entry, and another became nauseous half-way through.
After all but running through the BMW display rooms, we walked across the way to the newer BMW Welt / World which was nicer in air-temperature but didn’t have a lot of things for us to do.
Then we crossed another street into the Olympia park, where we finally found a respite from the heat inside a mostly subterranean aquarium.
Dinner was at the same place we’d eaten on our arrival day the Sunday prior. Why mess with perfection?
[Photos taken 09 – 10 August 2024, posted online 05 November 2024. It’s almost 10 C/50 F outside, rainy and windy. Also, US elections today.]
With the weather finally cooperating, we drove south for about 1.5 hours to the foothills of the Alps. There we found an ‘play-area’ at Blomberg, with two different toboggan rides, and a tree-climbing area. All of them were connected by a ski-lift!
This was one of the clear highlights of the trip, and comes highly recommended! At the end of the day we returned our rental car, and it was a relief to no longer have to read parking signage.
The following day was a designated ‘calm day’, which everybody but Anna and myself took to mean ‘watch screens all day’, while the two of us went downtown to attempt shopping again. My highlight was finding a shoe-store that sorted their offering by sizes, and they had a huuuuge section with shoes in EUR 43 and 44, and Anna’s was finding a store where she ended up buying multiple tops.
[Photos taken 06-08 August 2024, posted online 04 November 2024. It’s rainy and warm outside. In November.]
We got up early to arrive at Europa-Park when it opened at 9 in the morning. Our hotel was a 10-15 minute drive away, and when we arrived the traffic was thick but moving. I’d like to applaud the smart team that thought of installing multiple horizontal people-movers on the way from the parking lot to the entrance.
We split up along gender lines, us girls aiming to have lower-adrenaline thrills, while the boys wanted to visit the bigger roller coasters. Team Girls had a pretty good day, finding a small and near-empty roller-coaster that Emma had her eye on quickly and taking three trips in quick succession, while Team Boys got very unlucky and ended up stuck in the same line for 2 hours, which put a damper on the rest of their day.
By late afternoon our feet were very tired, and we got in the car to drive back to home base in Munich. The autobahn speed is so high that even though the car-battery could theoretically last the whole way, in practice it was not happening. Since you have to drain it sufficiently to get the high charging speeds, I waited until we were at the half-way point (2 hours away from Europa-Park) to locate an autobahn exit that looked promising (gas stations and fast food).
We made it back around 10 in the evening, and then Finnur and I spent close to an hour circling the neighborhood, trying to decipher parking signage, discovering after talking to locals that the first spot we’d found was for residential permits only, and then finally finding an apparently legal spot for non-residents, and paying using an app.
The following day was a designated “calm-day” so I got the brilliant idea to take the kids on a quick shopping trip to a nearby mall, as two of us needed closed toed shoes for tree-climbing, and we also needed to recharge the car for its next adventure. Let’s just say that energies were not up to the task!
The day after that was rainy, so we swapped out a trip to the hills for a trip to the Deutsches Museum.
[Photos taken 05 August 2024, posted online 02 November 2024. Time is flying by, mornings are dark already.]
Before our departure for Germany, I ended up chatting to an acquaintance at the gym. When she heard we were headed for Munich, she strongly recommended making the trip to visit Europa-Park. After some mulling, we decided to give it a go, in spite of it being very high-season.
Finnur and I therefore went to pick up a rental car on our first whole day in Germany. As our apartment was located in a “low emissions zone” we opted for an all-electric rental car, which turned out to be both good and not-great.
It handled well on the autobahns but I ran into a lot of trouble downloading the required apps for the various charging stations, because the “app was not available in my country” (as in “Iceland”, where my phone lives). It caused a some delays, but it all worked out.
As it’s a about a 4-hour-drive between Munich and Europa-Park, we decided to drive there, stay overnight at a nearby hotel, then arrive when the park opened at 9 in the morning, and drive back in the late afternoon. En route there we checked in with Finnur’s niece, and found that they live basically on the way to the park, and we were kindly invited to dinner!
[Photos taken 01 – 04 August 2024, posted online 28 October 2024. Rainy days still, with intermittent frosty days here and there.]
The day of Bjarki’s behind-the-wheel driving exam arrived, and he passed! He downloaded his official electronic driver’s license, and went for a drive with his big sister. How they grow!
We went frisbee golfing (folfing) after Anna finished her summer employment, I finally attacked the weeds in the backyard, before we all headed to Munich, Germany for our “formal” summer vacation.
Our first afternoon there was spent searching for an open grocery store, going out for dinner, and walking around the English Garden to where the surfers hang out (Eisbachwelle on the river Isar).
[Photos taken 25 – 31 July 2024, posted online 14 October 2024. It’s chilly but beautiful out there.]
One day, Emma noted that she’d never slept in a tent, and we decided that was something we should probably fix. A few days later, we lucked out in getting invited to join some friends at a campsite by the waterfall Faxi.
We arrived just as the most recent rain-storm was passing, stayed for a couple of nights, and managed to pack up the tent just before the next rain-storm arrived. We tried Frisbee golfing (folfing) for the first time, and it was a resounding success for all.
We returned home in the rain, caught out breaths for a few moments before attending a multi-Christening/Confirmation, and then it was Finnur’s 50th birthday!
[Photos taken 21 – 24 July 2024, posted online 11 October 2024. A busload of Italians has invaded the coffee house again!]
I was in a hiking mood, so I contacted a couple of lady-friends who I knew were staying close to our summer house, and they kindly let me join them for a day out and about. We fed them dinner in return!
Then the weather turned windy and rainy, so we mostly just hunkered indoors for a few days, but did make it out to fancy dinner with friends.
[Photos taken 15 – 20 July 2024, posted online 10 October 2024. This morning we woke up to snow on the ground for the first time this season.]
Nice weather followed the abysmal weather, as it usually does. I decided it was high time to go prune all the dead branches from the hedge by our house, of which there were many. This task ended up taking multiple days, especially as the weather refused to settle, and kept swinging between extremes.
Bjarki’s e-sport camp summer job came to a close, as he only has a set number of weeks he could work via the town’s “work school” program. He therefore had all the time in the world to keep working on getting his driver’s license, which he did, finishing driving school #3, and his written exam.
I kept gymming, and slowly started attending actual gym-classes after my bad back-sprain at the end of May. Aside from all the occupational therapy inherent in cutting dead branches, I also did a stint of ironing for mom. I found it to be mind-numbingly boring, but the results were good, so I figured that was more important. Last but not least, I purchased a new TV for the living room, as our old one had gotten the thumbs down from Anna’s friends, and Finnur held an impromptu tire-changing lesson.
