Month: February 2020

We had a delayed start today due to an issue with the car (low tire pressure, and all the air hoses at the four gas stations in the nearby town were frozen solid!). However, our intrepid guide Ingólfr got us on the road in plenty of time to make it to all of our destinations. Waiting in the hotel restaurant for the start of our day We drove north along a river to Þingvellir (pronounced THING-vet-leer) National Park. This amazing place was the site of Iceland’s first national assembly in 930 CE. The park straddles the Mid-Atlantic Rift, where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates are pulling apart by about an inch every year. You can walk through the rift, and it’s quite a strange feeling to do so. One of our group refused to enter the rift, as she said it just didn’t feel safe for her to do so. The only thing that didn’t feel quite safe to us...

Today saw us taking Highway 1 along the south coast of Iceland. Fog and low clouds covered much of the landscape, but thankfully they burned off as we headed east toward our first stop, the Lava Centre. Hekla, Iceland’s most active volcano The Lava Centre opened about three years ago to educate the public on Iceland’s volcanic past and present. Interactive exhibits, creative use of multimedia, and real-time data made for a very informative visit. You could see the location and magnitude of the dozens(!) of earthquakes in Iceland in the past 48 hours, including graphs of how many millimeters the crust has risen or fallen in the past several years at various places around the island. One room contained a large hemisphere with a projected view of the area where Iceland now exists. Everyone stood around in a circle and collectively rotated a giant ring, which advanced the time from hundreds of millions of years ago to the present and...

“Pristine Iceland - February 24, 2020” During our Viking ocean cruise in 2018, Jane and I booked another trip, “In Search of the Northern Lights” for this month and into March. We also booked a short pre-cruise extension with Viking, “Pristine Iceland,” which highlights some of the natural wonders of the southwest side of the island. A year an a half later, and it was finally time for us to make the trip! We left Greensboro yesterday and flew into Reykjavik this afternoon (Iceland time), just short of 24 hours since we left home. I watched out the window during our final approach to Keflavik Airport, and saw this massive rectangular mountain plateau just east of Reykjavik. I learned from our driver that it is Ingólfsfjall, named after Ingólfr Arnarson, the first documented settler of Iceland, who legend has it is also buried on the mountain. The weather was cold but not bitterly so, at right around freezing. We drove through a few snow...