360 Degrees Longitude

by John Higham

  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.

  www.360degreeslongitude.com/concept3d/360degreeslongitude.kmz

  Behold the marketing genius that gets otherwise intelligent adults to willingly part with their cash to smear essence of Petri dish on their faces.

  2.

  Home Is Where Your Stuff Is

  June 4–June 22

  England

  The 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:

  September takes some of our bicycle panniers about twenty yards from point A toward a distant point B. I then carry two of the tandem cases the same distance while Katrina and Jordan stay behind to guard the remaining pile of tandem cases and panniers. I then leave the two tandem cases with September while I go back for another load. After ferrying stuff back and forth between September’s base and the kids’ base, I do it all over again and move another twenty yards toward our destination.

  In this fashion we made our way out of Heathrow International Airport to the London Underground, onto the train, through the long corridors of a connecting station, onto the train again, and then finally up to street level and to our hostel several blocks away. Getting four tandem cases, eight panniers, and a family of four off the London Underground during a twenty-second stop while a wall of human flesh is trying to carry all of you in opposing directions is a lot like being a goldfish in a blender.

  September had been to London before, but this was the first time the rest of the family had been outside of Heathrow, so we arranged to see the sights of London for a few days before making our way to David and Carolyn’s in Leighton Buzzard. On our first morning in London, Katrina was using the computer in the hostel lobby to e-mail her friends back home. I sat in a lounge chair waiting, reading a current Time magazine. At least that’s what it looked like to the casual observer. September walked over and asked, “Anything happen in the world in the last week?”

  “Well, we haven’t invaded Canada yet, if that’s what you mean,” I replied, hoping she would not investigate my reading material any further.

  As part of the plan for the kids’ education, we had brought with us a bunch of children’s books on British history. Mind you, it isn’t as though prepubescent literature targeted for double-X chromosomes is normally on my reading list, but the book I was reading was more interesting than current world events. I had Katrina’s copy of Beware, Princess Elizabeth stuffed inside the Time magazine, as I wasn’t about to be caught in public reading a book about a princess.

  The names “Bloody Mary” and “Elizabeth I” were familiar to me, but it wasn’t until I started reading Katrina’s preteen princess books that I learned that they were sisters, albeit in an “are-you-sure-what-you’re-eating-isn’t-poisoned” sort of way. All the underhanded cloak and dagger stuff caught my imagination.

  We went to Westminster Abbey full of anticipation. I wanted to see where archrivals Mary and Elizabeth were buried, side by side, no less. Plus, I had learned that Sir Isaac Newton’s final resting place was in Westminster Abbey and wanted to pay my respects to Mr. Gravity. If it weren’t for him, I’d be out of a job.

  As I stood in line at the abbey, I noted September’s eyes were fixed on a sign adjacent to a counter. “It’s almost a hundred dollars to get the four of us inside,” she said.

  “To visit a church? What if I have the urge to absolve myself of some naughtiness, and I’m short of funds? Do they have some sort of frequent sinner program, so we could use the same pass here and at some of the other sites we want to visit?”

  “No,” September replied. “For example, if we want to see where Anne Boleyn took her last steps on the way to the chopping block at the Tower of London, it will be another hundred.”

  Planning a yearlong trip around the world isn’t like planning a two-week vacation, where every activity for every day can be planned and budgeted well in advance. In the months before we left, we made plans only in the general sense. For example, we knew what regions of the world we wanted to see and in what season, so most of our intercontinental airfare was prepurchased. Conversely, all overland transportation and day-to-day activities were left completely open. As one person wisely summed up long-term travel, “Why plan anything? The first day something could happen which changes everything.” We were committed to our budget, but when standing outside Westminster Abbey the budget suddenly seemed just plain rude. It was immediately clear that if our funds were to last the entire fifty-two weeks of our trip, we couldn’t do everything we wanted to do.

  “According to our guidebook, the British museums are completely free,” September commented hopefully. “Even for Americans.”

  So that is where we spent our time in London. These vaunted institutions are fascinating resources to explore if you ever doubted the breadth and depth of how the British looted their colonies.

  • • •

  When I was a kid, the litmus test of whether or not your town had arrived in the Major Leagues was if there was a McDonald’s. When a McDonald’s opened in my hometown, it was qui
te an event. We boasted with pride, “Logan, Utah now has a McDonald’s!” Kids on the school playground would discuss in awed tones the fact that the sign in front of the McDonald’s had changed from “100 Million Served” to “200 Million” and ultimately “Billions and Billions.” It was big news.

  We hadn’t been in the U.K. very long before we learned they have a not-too-dissimilar litmus test. A city isn’t a city unless it has a university. We also learned that there are specific qualifications for whether a village is a town or a town is a village, but we could never remember what those qualifications were. I don’t know how many times we were corrected by a well-meaning local that the next town was actually a village, or the village we were in was in fact a town, thank you very much.

  After a few days in London it was time to make our way to David and Carolyn’s in the town of Leighton Buzzard. The towns (pardon me, did I say towns? I meant villages) in England have these terribly funny names. Leighton Buzzard is one of the more prosaic. How about Piccadilly Circus? Or there is Spital Tongues. Somewhere there must be a Toenail Fungus, England. I looked on a map but couldn’t find it. Someone a very long time ago had a great sense of humor.

  Leighton Buzzard is about 40 kilometers north of London, and its calm neighborhoods and well-trimmed hedges contrasted dramatically against the insanity of London. I was grateful to have quiet streets to start pedaling on. David and Carolyn were gracious hosts and accomplished cooks. They served superb meals for September, Katrina, and me, and humored Jordan with a mac and cheese food substitute from a box. We were going to have to work on Jordan’s picky eating habits, but that was a battle for another day.

  I assembled the tandems and we tested our ability to ride on the left-hand side of the road. David offered to keep the tandem cases at his house until such time and place that we sent for them. The night before we departed we stayed up much later than we should have, discussing world affairs, where we would find campgrounds in southern England, and most importantly, the merits and drawbacks of various types of fenders on touring bicycles.