Most people who know me know we lived in Iceland back in the early 1970's, pre-kids. Many have heard my stories. Nobody has seen the pictures, unless they were willing to sit through slide shows back then. I digitized some of these slides and am going to tell the story of the Iceland Years. LOL. Here is where we first lived.
I know you can't read the scrapbook page on this blog, so :
This was our first “house” in Iceland. More of a hut..it was half of a duplex attached to a quonset hut that was the third apartment. Halfway through the winter, the front door blew off and we only had our inside door; the front entrance stayed full of snow. We used duct tape around the door jamb to keep the snow out of the living room. The horses were our garbage system...Keflavik would not pick up the garbage because we could not keep the local “neighbors” from rooting about and tossing away what they did not want, decorating the hillside. We had paneled walls, and a very tiny kitchen with pegboard cabinet doors, a plywood counter covered with woodgrained contact paper. This “apartment complex” had been built for the American crew that built the military base, and we did have a large American style fridge that ran off of a huge transformer. That was a bonus. We lived on top of a hill, overlooking the town of Keflavik, the harbor, and a glacier. It was certainly quiet up there! And a never to be forgotten experience
The backstory on why we lived in such a strange looking place: This was during the Draft and pretty much everybody our age had to do military service. Larry got really lucky (?) and was sent to Iceland. If I wanted to join him, he had to find a place off base. Those places were at a premium, and were all weird. One place he looked at was three apartments in a row, and you walked through each one to get to the next. Like train cars. We knew a couple who had a one room place with a hot plate, a twin bed, and a bathroom down the hall, in a converted warehouse. My friend, Bette, lived in a pretty nice apartment above a dentist's office, but her bathroom was on the outside landing, her fridge was the balcony off the kitchen, and her "sink" was her bathtub. Other families got lucky with better accomodations, but there was very little on offer in Keflavik and nobody made much money.
Larry found this place, I got on an airplane for the first time, and we moved in on a day that snowed, sleeted, hailed, rained, and the sun shone....prepping me for the weather over the next two years in one fell swoop. Awful though the little hut was, I remember it the most of anywhere we have lived, sort of fondly. And am constantly grateful we moved on base after one year.
