The horses are wearing metal shoes with studs, to keep them from slipping on the ice. But now they are here, underneath us, giving us their all, their strength, their courage, their loyalty-and we lower our heads against the wind and sleet, riding across refrozen streets toward the mountain. ![]() Those numbers in translation-20.1, gusting to 26.8-don’t sound as bad.) The horses stood in this wind all night, and in the accompanying sleet, snow, and rain that churned up out of the ocean one atmospheric wave at a time. ![]() (In Iceland, they measure the wind by meters per second. This morning is the third day of gale warnings in a row, the wind a steady 45 miles per hour, occasionally gusting to 60. The lettuce and tomatoes are specially labeled on menus and in grocery stores with the Icelandic flag, and are, in fact, delicious. Icelanders are very proud of their hothouse produce, grown in this valley, which sits an hour south and west of Reykjavík and gets significantly (and relatively) more sun. ![]() They also grow a lot of cherry tomatoes here, in geothermally heated greenhouses that glow a warm amber on the hillsides in the cold, dark January mornings when we first ride out with the horses. In Hveragerdi, Iceland, there are no cemeteries, because there is so much hydrothermal energy in the ground that the bodies would boil.
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