you are out in this vast, cold and barren, mountainous landscape. In Reykjavik, some of the roads are two or three lanes in each direction, but with the city behind us, the Ring Road is two lanes and that’s pretty much as wide as it gets 99 percent of the time. On the first day, we headed for Tingvellir, the national park where two tec- tonic plates met, decided they weren’t com- patible, and now eye each other suspiciously across a trench 50 feet wide. Mother Nature puts on a quite a display of her power for all to see. After that, it was off the main road into the back country on asphalt barely two lanes wide, filled with twisties. What a great start to the day! The asphalt ended, and the road became
hard-packed dirt and then gravel about a foot deep. Fun and games as we plowed through it, my bike (and everyone else’s)
wanting to drift to the opposite side of the road while I wanted it to stay in the right lane. Slither right, slither left, just stay upright! I was on the pegs for about 45 min- utes, a good warm-up for the days ahead. Each day brought more incredible visu-
als, as the treeless mountains continually altered their look due to the ever-changing light and shadows. The sky in Iceland is so blue, the clouds so large and white, the sea such a deep blue-gray and the cultivated green fields so acid green that the contrasts are sometimes overwhelming. The ever- present mountains were not mountains with a gradual ascent skyward; they rose from the flat plain almost straight up, the layers of volcanic strata clearly visible yet softened by the moss that clung to the cliffs. There were endless fjords with sometimes just a few homes at the very end and other
times only a small, solitary church facing the elements. The changing lava fields were at times a plain of jagged black rock or a sea of soft, undulating mounds slowly being covered by some sort of green growth. On Day Three we rode across the heart of
Iceland from north to south. A single-lane dirt road with a myriad of surfaces kept us on the pegs. Huge glaciers in the distance provided an amazing sight. I think I saw one or two four-wheel drive vehicles as we made our way south. It was just Iceland and us! Sun one minute, threatening gray clouds the next, and temperatures all over the place. Day Four is permanently etched in my
mind. The day that John Jesson described as “potentially challenging” arrived. The road was designated F-26, but by the end of the day I referred to it as the FU-26 because
March 2017 BMW OWNERS NEWS
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