Weekend Plans Post: Driving a Stick in Iceland
My first car was a 1982 Subaru GL. It was maroon, the way that cars in 1982 were. I got it for One Dollar. I was being raised in a single-parent household and my widowed mother’s boss took pity on us and practically gave me the 10-11 year old car. I did not know how to drive a stick when I got it and, yeah, pretty much trashed the first transmission but the second one lasted until it was time to move on to another car (which also was a stick).
After I got married, we became an automatic transmission household but I always enjoyed the odd situation that put me behind the wheel of a stick again. A rental car here, a friend needing me to drive his truck there… it felt like a fun little skill that I learned in my youth but would never need as an adult. Sort of like cursive, I guess.
Well, I’m going to Iceland next week. I’m hoping to see the Northern Lights (never seen them before) but I will be content to eat whitefish cooked in butter, visit an old volcano, visit a glacier, and, this is my main goal, I would like to find a field of flowers. I would like to stand in the middle of it. For an hour.
I’m going with some friends who wanted a guide, of sorts, to help navigate and they said that they’d get my hotel if I’d get the car. So I jumped on that like an elf on a bowl of milk.
I rented the car and figured “hey, we only need a little one to help us drive around, right?” And we figured out that, well, it *COULD* be the tail end of Winter up there, certainly on the back roads or on the dirt roads most likely to lead to some fields of flowers. So I cancelled my rental of a nice little compact and put in an order for a Jeep or a Range Rover or something.
And they found one for me and, as it turns out, it’s a manual. My friends who are going with me are torn. On one level, well, the expectation was that I was going to be the one driving around in a weird and strange country. But, like, what if there’s an emergency? What something happens? So I’m going to see if I can’t get an automatic transmission. But, you know, if that’s something that we have to deal with… it might be nice to drive a stick in Iceland.
This weekend will be doing stuff like packing for a week in a strange and cold place but one with hot springs and glaciers and volcanos and, maybe, fields of flowers.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Resentment”. Photo taken by Maribou, about a minute after she settled back into the library after getting home safely.)
Ooooh, that sounds like fun.
I’ve got kid birthday on Saturday (not my kid), and on Sunday we’re going to the tulip festival in Skagit county.Report
There’s a very small quilt show in town, most likely will be going. This is the last weekend before the deluge of end-of-semester grading/exams/graduation* so I guess I am taking it off.
(*we’re not required to go, still unsure whether I will: don’t love the idea of being packed into an indoor arena with literally a couple thousand people from all over mere days before I go to visit my 85 year old mother)
I also have a fancy houseplant “castle” on its way to me, I will need to clean up my dining room and clear space in front of the window so I can assemble and set it up once it arrives, but my plants have lived too long on tv trays and they need a proper display spot.Report
Doctor’s appointment this afternoon. It’s just a physical and I’m in pretty good shape for a boy of my years so it shouldn’t be any big deal. A wedding to attend tomorrow, followed by gaming which I find myself slightly underprepared, but that’s cool. Over-preparedness is a trap when you’re running a TTRPG.
My first car was a truck. A little 1980-somthing Dodge D-50 with a manual 5-speed transmission. My Dad parked it in front of the house and told me he’d take me out and teach me how to drive it. Unfortunately, this was the beginning of Summer, and Summer is god-awful busy for a guy running an HVAC business, so finally I got impatient, called my buddy and told him to ride his bike over because we were going to learn how to drive this thing. We spent an hour or two hopping around the neighborhood until I felt like I had mastered it well enough to venture into downtown.
My youngest’s car is a stick. He HAAAAATED it when I brought him home and taught him how to drive it, but now he kind of likes it. Part of that liking it is knowing that his older brother and brother’s SO can’t borrow his car (based on being involved in teaching them both how to drive, there’s no way they’re up for learning to drive stick). I’ve since taught my SO as well, and it turns out that knowing how to ride a motorcycle translates nicely to a manual–she had it down in about 30 minutes.Report
Dude, You shouldn’t have trouble with a manual in Iceland this time of year. I was there around this time a few years ago and the roads were totally clear. They drive on the right IIRC, so it’s not like you’re driving in England or Ireland “reversed”. I don’t even recall any / many roundabouts.
One thing. Gas stations outside of the capital OFTEN are automatic with no one around, so you can’t use a credit card-cause someone has to interrupt the debit transaction and change it to CC. Get a local gas company refillable gas debit card whatever it’s called. It cost me 50 USD to fill up each time.
Enjoy.Report
Oh, *I* wouldn’t. It’s my dear friends who would.
I had an 82 Corolla, 5 speed, and the pattern was 1-2-3-4-5-RACE!!Report
’69 Corolla here, had a two-speed automatic. (Yes, really.) The mechanics always told me it was indestructible because there only about three moving parts.Report
See, I think the “millenial anti-theft device” thing is a category error. I’d bet you a hundred dollars that 90+ percent of the “millenials” who grew up in and around my rural home town can drive a stick, while 90+ percent of the “millenials” who grew up in Wichita or Topeka or Lawrence can’t. (no…er…politics?)Report
You don’t need to know how to drive a stick to steal a stick.
You only need to know how to drive a stick to make it cost effective over the long haul… and even then, well, we’ve all had defective clutches that were manufactured poorly, right?Report
Oh geez…my ’91 Geo Storm Gsi had a crap clutch, and I was a poor airman and had to borrow the money to get it fixed. That sucked a lot. And a handful of years later it failed again in similar fashion.Report
Me too, none of the clutches I ever owned truly appreciated my personal art of passive breaking – kept failing the same way no matter how hard I trained them.Report
Back when I played poker regularly, I’m thinking about the poker table and… I want to say that every single guy at that table knew how to drive a stick.
Saturday night, I have a gaming group. I will ask everybody at the table whether they can drive a stick.
And, from those two groups, I will generalize out to the rest of the country.Report
As a member of your sample group I protest your methodology.Report
Can you drive a stick?Report
Yes, but my protest is mainly the ages of the people in both of your samples. We’re all Gen-X. It’s not at all representative.Report
(Writes down that Fish can drive a stick too.)Report
Note: Everybody in the gaming group can drive a stick with the exception of the youngest member.Report
Local effect? Like cargo shorts signal “I could go hiking right this minute if I chose to do so,” only “I could drive whatever vehicle to haul things on an outdoors trip in the mountains right this minute if I needed to.”
Cargo shorts are something of an affectation until you have children and grandchildren. When a four-year-old tells you, “This is the most important pine cone in the world, the entire future depends on it being carried back to the car,” the pockets are nice.Report
Everybody in the group is GenX with the exception of the Millennial Falcon (someone born between the release date of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi).
So I’m going to call it a function of the whole generation thing.Report
I am seriously considering buying a older manual car after my current one dies for just such a reason 🙂Report
The last time I drove a stick was in Spain, when we went to visit our daughter who was there for a semester. I found it more stressful than fun, since it was one more thing to deal with along with all of the general foreignness. I declined the insurance for the rental because it was so expensive, and then I spent much of the week worrying about the car & driving instead of enjoying the trip.Report
I used to enjoy owning a car with a stick, because fewer people wanted to borrow it.Report
My friend says a manual transmission is the best anti-theft device you can have, and he’s probably right.Report
If you see the Northern Lights, you’ll have to tell us if they’re really that impressive. I’ve seen some amazing pictures, but people are using so many filters on their photos these days that a hot dog looks neon.
First time I drove a stick in 20 years was in the Alps. It took no time to feel comfortable at it.Report
When I was in high school, “Southern Cross” was still getting airplay on the local hippie station and one of our teachers mentioned that he did some work down in South America in his youth. We asked him if he saw the Southern Cross and he sort of made a pained face and said “Yes… but… it’s a constellation. If you find stuff like Orion breathtaking, you’ll probably really enjoy the Southern Cross. If you just see it as three stars in a line, you’ll probably not be that impressed with other constellations. The Southern Cross wasn’t a lifechanging experience for me.”
I am trying to adjust my expectations. I imagine that they’re more like a rippling flaky neon sign the size of the sky rather than something that will make me come up with myths about the gods from the lands of ice and snow. On top of that, if you’re going to see them, you’re a lot more likely to see them *BEFORE* the spring equinox rather than after. (Or after the autumn equinox than before.)
So I’m not going there in order to see them. It’d be nice! Don’t get me wrong! It’d be nice! But it’s not why I’m going.Report
Having spent 15 months in outback Australia, I can tell you that the Southern sky is so much more better than the Northern sky we can see from CONUS. We had super-dark skies in Woomera so the Magellanic Clouds were easily visible, as was our edge-on view of the rest of our own galaxy. I bet the dark skies in Iceland will be incredible, too.Report
I have never been to Australia, but the middle-of-nowhere desert from Texas to California has some pretty incredible star viewing. Depending on the time of year, you can get some incredible views the Milky Way.
In fact, I highly recommend that everyone puts on their bucket list a start party at the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis. It is a religious experience for people who like to look at stars: https://mcdonaldobservatory.org/visitors/programs/evening-programs.Report
Nearly a year and a half after she died, I was able to hold a memorial service for my wife. I had some friends play “Sweetness Follows” and “It is Well With My Soul” and they knocked them out of the park. The minister gave a great sermon (protip: be acquainted with the clergyman/woman who’ll say your funeral service), and everyone had a great time at the lunch afterwards. I couldn’t have asked for a better send off.
On top of all that, the community chorus I just joined had a couple of shows this weekend. The highlight was singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 4 part harmony,
I’m well and truly spent.Report
Wonderful. I’m sorry that this happened but, yeah, that sounds wonderful.
In a small bit of synchronicity, they sang “It Is Well” at the wedding I went to over the weekend.
The wheel turns.Report
It was always her favorite hymn, but I always found it to be a bit dirgey. My friend and his daughter chose a really light arrangement and it was like they were singing a different tune.Report