A long time ago I read the biography about John Adams by David McCullough. When Adams left Boston in the deep freeze of February of 1775 on horse to get to the Congress in Philadelphia, it was a multi-month journey. Along the way, he and his fellow travelers had to stay at inns. In those days, you didn’t get hotel rooms to yourself like we do today. If there were beds, sometimes you had to share them with some other fellow traveler, and you may have had no idea who it was you slept next to.

So it is in the highland huts of Iceland. You can make reservations until all the bunks are full. Just because we were a travel group, there was no guarantee that we’d have the hut to ourselves.  In Hut 2 there were some teenagers who bunked in the loft upstairs. Hut 4 was called þverbrekknamúli.

Good luck pronouncing that name – I learned how to do it, but I can’t describe it here.

At þverbrekknamúli, as we were all getting ready to sleep, my wife and I had doubled up in one bunk. There were not enough bunks in the hut for everyone to have their own. Here we are, reading before going to sleep. Note how little head-room there is.

At about 10:00pm, there was some rumbling outside. Our guide  Jonas was just getting ready to crawl into his sleeping bag when the commotion started. He got up, went outside and found out  there were two men with backpacks who were also planning to stay the night – and worse – make dinner first. Since Jonas didn’t want all of us to be kept awake by cooking activities, and since we had leftover food from our meal, he offered it to the travelers. He joined them at the table and the three of them were whisper-chattering away in Icelandic until about 11. Jonas, who had the bunk next to us, gave up his for the two travelers, and pushed over our driver and double-bunked with him. I was still awake when the two newcomers climbed up into their sleeping bags next to our feet. And thus we had strange bedfellows whose heads spent the night not 8 inches away from my feet in my sleeping bag.

Morning came and we went about our routine. The visitors were friendly enough as we prepared breakfast and got ready for our departure. One of them actually took some group pictures for us, including the group shot, with Jonas in it:

We said our good-byes and went our way. Later, during a break in our hike, Jonas told us that one of the visitors was Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson, the Icelandic Cabinet Minister of Social Affairs and the Labour Market and head of the Left-Green Party. Before that, he was Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources. Jonas didn’t want to reveal his identity while we were there out of respect for his privacy.

It was good that he did, since I would have loved to have a chat with him and learn about environmental policy in Iceland.

As it goes, we were just strange bedfellows.

On language:

The character ð is pronounced like a very soft “th” in English, with a lot of air flowing through your teeth, like in the word teeth.

The character þ is pronounced like a very hard “th” in English, like in the Viking name Thor.