Iceland: A Stormy Motorcycle Adventure

Sherrie McCarthy

Iceland: A Stormy Motorcycle Adventure

Copyright © 2018 by Sherrie McCarthy

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First edition

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

Find out more at reedsy.com

For

mom and dad,

who always told me I should write a book,

and for

Patrick,

who never gave up until I did.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

1. Hitting The Highway...Sort Of

2. The Ferry

3. The Arrival

4. Into The Wild Unknown

5. Accidents Happen

6. Myvatin Bound

7. Trolls & Bathing Outside the Arctic Circle

8. A Quest For A Hot Pot That Leads To A Land Of Lost Souls

9. Reykjavik The City Of Parties

10. Iceland’s Golden Circle

11. Routes Through The Interior

12. The Holy Grail Of The Trip: Askja

13. Is This Road Doomed?

14. Iceland Spits Us Back Out

15. Would we go back?

A Note From Sherrie

Motorcycle Videos, Maps Oh My!

Other Books By Sherrie

About the Author

Foreword

Although Iceland was not the first country we rode together it was the first book I wrote. The Unleash Your Motorcycle Adventure series was orginally laid out in the order I wrote them rather than experienced them. I think each book is better than the one before it, because I learned with each how to be a better writer. So if by the end of the book you don’t hate me, thank you! I really appreciate it! (Also thank you to the reviewer who kept his personal opinions about me to himself. Also appreciated!)

I want to write books that inspire you to get out and see the world for yourself, but for me that can mean riding Mongolia or learning how to cook in your own kitchen. Transformation and change is scary, it involves going through a part you are unsure about, and it involves being a newbie whereas before you were pro. Maybe not the happiest pro, but you knew what to expect at least!

Media (social and traditional) likes to present transformation as instant. But fears and life long conditioning means that life is a series of cycles where we take turns being a caterpillar, a dissolved goo cocoon phase and a butterfly. The sad part is that everyone glosses or skips the dissolved goo phase! It’s scary and awkward and so not sexy. But it’s where the real work is done and the lessons learned that will cause that door to swing open!

Travel takes the security away from you. It also helps show you there is almost always a safety net waiting for you. One thing I have loved the most is how people come together to help you on a trip, never leaving you stranded.

My books are about the journey more so than the destination, I try to share with you my emotions to let you know that you are not alone in the intense up and downs that are life and travel in particular. This is not a hero’s journey but rather the heroine’s, as in the inner journey is more important than the glory of the adventure.

Too often we see an insta perfect picture from others (be it on the road or in everyday life) and we wonder what we are missing, why we can’t have the same thing.

But you can. That picture is a little snapshot of what they experienced.

I dont want to present larger-than-life description of what my trip was. I don’t want to say that I am special for doing this but to let you know that if I can do this, so can you! I want to be that person cheering you on from the sidelines telling you to keep going, yelling at you you’ve got this and that your dream is worth it to keep pushing through, no matter what the outside seems to say.

You can find the maps that were in the original editions of this book here;

https://cagebusteracademy.vipmembervault.com/products/courses/view/1016052

Along with videos from Iceland (river crossings!) and other journeys. For free of course!

Preface

Since leaving Newfoundland to work abroad, we have established Sunday evenings as the time I receive a phone call from home. We go over our week, the family gossip, and we also discuss any planned (or recently completed) trips. When I returned from Iceland, I was looking forward to the call.

My parents were latecomers to the 21st century. It was not until November 2010 that they installed an internet connection in the house. My mother at least had access at work. My father on the other hand works outside and until the very recent past viewed a keyboard with abject horror. The summer I was in Iceland, I had very little contact with my father.

My mother printed off my emails, blog entries and the pictures I posted, so the man was not completely in the dark. I, however, had no contact with him at all, and I was looking forward to speaking with him for the first time in almost two months.

My first evening at home was a Sunday. I answered the phone not to amazement over the images I had posted online but to my father declaring that Iceland looked an awful lot like Newfoundland.

Sure bye, if you wanted volcanoes you could’ve saved your money or used it to come home. I would’ve built a fire in the backyard and thrown hot rocks at ya! (This is the same man that when I first began to travel said that if it was excitement that I was looking for, he could shoot at me while I ran around in the backyard.)

Not that my father does not believe in travel. Whenever he visits me in Germany, we spend more time in the surrounding countries than not. But he has firm beliefs on the importance of the safety of his children and he feels it is much better we stay at home while he does the traveling.

He was not too far off when he said Iceland looked a lot like Newfoundland. There were times on this trip I positively ached with homesickness. At times, I was surrounded by scenery that reminded me of home, only there was no comfort food to indulge in or family to be around. Having said that, the interior of Iceland is like nothing I have ever seen before, and perhaps that is partially why I loved it so much. Iceland’s interior was an adventure, and why I travel by motorcycle, to be so deep in the scenery as to be part of it, without a window or metal cage locking me inside and forcing me to look out.

Of course, my mother would argue that metal cage is also protecting me from those elements and although we take all necessary precautions (full protective gear even when it is boiling hot out, yearly training courses, etc), motorcycle travel is not without its dangers. But the rewards are such that we accept the dangers and do our best to avoid and minimize them. The risks are worth it for us, as we never feel more alive than when we are on the bike, or setting up camp after a day of riding, sitting there eating supper, looking back over our day and feeling like we are the luckiest people in the world.

It is a feeling not quite of peace because there is still a tinge of excitement lying in there. It is more a feeling of being alive. That everything is worth it. That despite risks (and there will always be risks) you will face them just to see this corner of the world like this. This is not just a feeling of being in nature. It is also that you have escaped a fate that was slowly killing you back home. You don’t have to wake up in the morning and have your boss whine because you were 10 minutes late. Regular time constraints no longer apply.

Travel for me is like decadent desserts. You can live without them, but do you really want to?

1

Hitting The Highway...Sort Of

The ferry to Iceland leaves from Hanstholm and returns to Esbjerg. We factored in 5 days to get to Iceland from Stuttgart. You know what they say about how to make motorcycle gods laugh, you make a plan.

Iceland: land of fire and ice, trolls and elves and killer sheep. All of which are as much a reality today as they were thousands of years ago. Just ask any road worker standing next to a broke down backhoe, who will bequeath the information that the machines have probably been tampered with by the elves, who do not want their homes destroyed by road construction. (Naturally).

Perhaps after years of isolation, the sheep now entertain themselves with