Enter onto the scene: Judith, from France.
The day itself wasn’t much to speak of, we had two tours, and Sabira and I amused ourselves mostly in the coffee house talking about “homeless snails” (slugs) and laughing at how you can slide back and forth on the bench if you hold onto the top cushion. The amount of coffee we got through in the coffee house while waiting either for customers or the boss to call it day is truly astonishing. The girls have really taken to adding Swiss miss into their coffee--I'm not entirely on board yet. We really finished the day early and bumbled to the grocery store for what was supposed to be a full week-restock ordeal.
Woohoo moment of appreciation for our new bug nets!!
I knew we’d be 4 eventually, and have no clue why I thought we’d have an advance notice that the 4th member of our gang was arriving since when has there been any organization here ever, but as we were doing our shopping Elisa received a call from our manager that she needed to drive to Reykjavik in an hour to pick up Judith. I knew immediately what was going down as her eyes got wider, and she started to laugh in between words, and had already told Sabira we had to CLEAN the house while she was gone.
We raced home, postponing our errands for Judith (because obviously she’ll have to do shopping and such so we’ll be back anyway) and madly went to cleaning before Elisa had to drive. It was so funny, as I’m scrubbing the sink and stove all I hear is Elisa yelling “SaBIraaaaa did YOU clean the Bathroom?” “Yeeees, of course,” “Well this corner is DisGUSTing I can’t BeLIEve you think this is clean.” Maybe it was the accents that did it, or the fact that not two personalities less alike than Sabira and Elisa had I ever witnessed in a situation like this before, but it took me a solid 5 minutes to compose myself after that. Whatever the spectrum is, Elisa and Sabira will always be on polar opposite ends. When Elisa had to go, we figured we had about 2 hours before she got back (50m to the BSI, 50m back, and then time to load the car and such) so Sabira and I set our little hearts and hands to work on overdrive. We ended up getting it all done and doing a truthfully, pretty damn good job, all the while talking about what we thought the new girl would be like, what she would look like, and what horses we think she'd like. At that point in the day we had only been told her name and that she was possibly from France, Germany, or the Netherlands. Elisa voted France, I voted Germany, and Sabira voted Netherlands--Elisa definitely ended up being right.
Judith was very quiet to start, but obviously so was I. We went to get ice cream first, an obvious first step in Ölfus life indoctrination, and sat by the river to enjoy it while explaining a little about ourselves to her and asking about France and her family, then headed to Kronan. Apparently she brought a lot of groceries from France with her (? A little confused how that works, but ya know I don’t doubt its easier than bringing stuff from the U.S.) so we didn’t spend too much time before heading home to go ride. I hadn’t taken Gáski on a proper hack yet, so matched Judith with Mbrun and tacked up Gaski for a remix-ed 2hr tour with Judith. It started out calm, but then as we got on to the mountain side of the trail, Elisa decided it was time to take things *off road*. Within seconds we scattered, tolting our horses up the cliffside and between rocks and lumps of stuck grass. Turns out Gaski is actually a super good climber, and even in some of the sketchier parts that I probably knew better than to trek with him on, he bounded over effortlessly. We did some galloping back on the mountain trail and decided to hike the back of the ölfus cliff. We took the horses halfway before giving them a break and doing the rest on foot—the view was stunning. It was a whole new perspective to the valley and the hills that swallowed up the road to Reykjavik. I could’ve sat up there for hours but it was getting close to midnight, and we still had to get home. Gaski and I got down the mountain first as I sang Down-By-The-Bay to him in a manic state ( but seriously I’m telling you, he’s hella a climber!) and when we got back with the group we galloped home—I think Judith was very pleased with her first ride and views. I can’t wait to learn more about her and watch her become comfortable with the group and just as wacky as us.
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