Today was my day to be in charge, so I fussed over a bunch of options. This area is pretty, so I wanted to do something  outside. I finally stumbled across a hike up a small mountain at the Carl Sandburg Home National Park that looked good. A hike up a mountain at the home of an important literary figure in the US? I get to hike, AND Meredith gets to see a book-related sight. Sign me up.

The park is about forty minutes away, so after breakfast at a local diner, we headed south. The walk from the parking lot is impressive – it looks across a pretty pond and up a hill at a white farmhouse, which is in a field surrounded by trees. We read some of the information about Carl (who was viewed as “the poet of the common people”) and his wife, Lilian, who was famous as an award-winning goat breeder, as well as having a master’s degree in literature.

We walked up the hill to the house, which is sadly closed right now because of Covid. We were able to walk around it, and then over to the goat barn, where not only did we get to see some of the descendants of goats that Lilian raised, but we also got to see two kitties, one of whom was friendly enough to come over and let us pet him. Good kitty.

Then, it was up the hill trail that would take us to the top of Glassy Mountain, a little over a mile away. It was a pleasant walk though a pine forest that had rhododendrons scattered about as well. The trail itself was not difficult, although it did climb steadily up, and the weather was quite warm (in the fifties). The trail leveled out at what looked to be the top, which was surrounded on all sides by trees. Dubbs and Mer had joked that if Mer was making the effort to climb all this way and didn’t get to see a view, I might not make it back down the trail. Happily for me, the trail continued on the ridge until it came to a bald area of rock where we had solid views of several layers of hills and mountains. Meredith, in honor of such a literary great as Sandburg, composed a haiku for the occasion:

Uphill’s a challenge,
but mountain layers are lovely.
Matt’s allowed to live.

The living Matt and crew made our way back down the mountain after a thirty-minute stay at the top.

We drove back into downtown Asheville after that, getting there a little after 3:00, to go to the (closed) Thomas Wolfe House, which is the museum and house where the American author Thomas Wolfe was raised. The museum very thoughtfully put out a QR code, which, when scanned, led us to seven different places around the grounds where it talked about Wolfe, the house, and his literature, all for free. We would have loved to see inside the house, but the audio guide was well done.

That wrapped up touring for the day. We walked a couple of blocks over to the art museum area, where we found an open Italian restaurant. After an excellent early (4:00) meal there, we headed home so we could have a mellow and restful Christmas Eve evening, maybe with streaming some services.

That will wrap up this tour of Asheville. The town did very well for itself, being a lively and walkable space with much to do. Tomorrow, we’ll close the book on the Asheville chapter and start in on the Charleston one.  Nicely done, Asheville!

Dubbs let us sleep in this morning before we headed out around 9:45 for breakfast at a diner. After that, we headed back into downtown Asheville, to go to the Asheville Art Museum, which is a small but pretty museum. It has four floors and a rooftop cafe area that has decent views of the mountains.

The museum mostly focused on the twentieth century, and featured regional artists. One section was dedicated to self-taught artists of varying quality, which I found interesting. Usually museums I have been to feature top-notch work from unusually talented self-taught artists, but some of the work here was what ordinary people who were dedicated could produce. The museum still treated that art seriously, which was refreshing to see.

I enjoyed the museum very much, but can’t describe too many of the works – being modern, many were abstract. One that I do remember was one for which an artist fed flies sugar water with dye in it and let the flies poop on a canvas. It was actually an interesting piece, but I’m not sure how much credit the artist gets in that work (except as maybe “found” art?). Ewwwwww.

The museum also had a painting by Zelda Fitzgerald, who was married to the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was quite good – it looks to me that she had talent and some training.

After our high-brow encounter with art, we swung by a chocolate store and then Ben and Jerry’s for “lunch,” and proceeded back to the Pinball Museum, where we successfully got into the building today. It was a fun couple of hours, although I did verify my long-held feeling that I am much better at video games than I am at pinball. I stank it up at pinball today. Mer had some good rounds of pinball and played some video games, including Burger Time, which she loved as a preteen on an Intellivision gaming system that her grandparents had for the grandchildren. I was most successful at playing the original Star Wars game. That was a good time. Dubbs floated around both pinball and video games, seeming to do well at both.

We were about a block away from the Basilica of St. Lawrence, which we wanted to tour. Unfortunately for us, the basilica was closed today, except for the mass schedule, because of Christmas week. So we’ll have to check that out next time.

We headed back to the car after a detour through a small art “mall,” where many styles of art were for sale. I loved the stained glass, but there were interesting pieces in decorative metal, photography, paint, and more. Once back at the car, we went home so Dubbs could grab a nap before supper.

Supper was at a barbeque place in Biltmore Village, around 7:00. Biltmore Village is the small village next to the Biltmore estate, and is now mostly a shopping area. We strolled around the streets looking at the Christmas lights, and even detoured into a Christmas shop that was open. Afterwards, we headed home for the evening.

So we covered modern high art, modern video game art, and consumer art. I guess we artfully dodged about today. Asheville continues to be a fun place to be, and the weather was beautiful again. Here is to tomorrow and the plans I have to make tonight!

While Ye Olde Blog is usually saved for international travel, Covid has changed the vacation landscape enough that even domestic trips are exciting now. Plus, Aunt Mary asked to “travel along with us” this time, so away we go.

Mer and I didn’t go anywhere at Thanksgiving this year because of Covid concerns – we weren’t sure what Europe was going to do, and so we didn’t want to buy tickets too far ahead, which then turned into not buying tickets at all. So we decided to get away with our usual Thanksgiving travel companion, Dubbs, but at Christmastime instead.

We wanted somewhere new (to us) and warm, so we picked Asheville, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina. After an uneventful travel day yesterday, we had a full day of touring today, with Meredith being in charge.

We had breakfast at a Waffle House near our morning destination, the North Carolina Arboretum. An arboretum in winter may seem a bit of an odd choice since nothing would be in bloom, but we find winter hiking a good change of pace – with the leaves down from the trees, you can see more in the woods. In this case, that meant often getting to see some of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

We spent a couple of happy hours there, and it wasn’t too cold unless you got caught in the active wind. Since most of our time was in the woods, in a valley, or both, the cold was manageable. We wandered around the garden area, which was decorated for Christmas. That helped make up for the lack of flowers. Mer even decided to get tickets to come back at night to see the gardens all decorated with lights.

We followed various trails around to get a flavor of the area. My favorite was the rhododendron garden. The plants were still green and in leaf, the trail sometimes went though rhododendron tunnels, the paths were freshly mulched, and it was all next to a very clear stream. Lovely.

After the arboretum, we drove over to downtown Asheville, where we got a late lunch at a Mexican place. Dubbs wanted to make sure we could still get tickets for the local art museum, so we walked over there. After being assured we could get into the museum tomorrow, we went back to an ice cream shop after Dubbs may have dropped a hint or two.

We then walked five or six blocks, passing several hardy buskers along the way. Asheville has about ninety thousand people, putting it between Canton and Akron in size, but it was much more happening than either of those downtowns, even with this being a work day in December. We ended up at the Asheville Pinball Museum, which is a lofty name for a place where you can pay to play seventy pinball and arcade games from our youth. Sadly (and wisely), the folks who run the museum limit numbers, and so had a two-and-a-half-hour wait time. But they also ran the next-door Movie Poster Museum (free, with the hope that you would buy a poster or two), or you could pay a dollar to see the Lunchbox Museum. We did both, which were fun strolls down memory lane.

We went back home to rest a bit before heading out around 7:15 to go back to the arboretum to see the lights. The wait and the drive were worth it. The garden area is small, but was filled to the brim with lights, including a huge “tree” made of a cone of lights that could change colors and make shapes up and down the tree in the lights. We, of course, saw the entire thing. They had an extensive miniature train set with two running trains, which included a “river” of blue lights and white “rapids.” There was a quilt made of lights that were synched to music. There were multiple arches of lights, illuminated trees, wrapped trees, and even a lit-up unicorn. I accidently happened to get a shot of the unicorn barfing up a rainbow. I was delighted by the mistake.

It took us a bit over an hour to see all of the lights, and then we headed back home for the night. Tomorrow is Dubbs’ day to be in charge, so we shall see what shall come of that. So far, Asheville has lived up to the hype.

Shockingly, we got to our gate almost three hours early, so I have a chance to jot down some random thoughts about the trip.

Iceland is amazingly beautiful. Meredith really did keep talking about “Iceland 360” – that whatever you were looking at, odds were excellent that if you turned around, the new view would be grand as well. To cram lava fields, volcanoes, waterfalls everywhere, glaciers, many different kinds of mountains, fjords, seascapes, rivers and streams, rolling hills, cute towns and villages, and more into a country the size of Maine makes for a remarkable trip.

Roads here can be very bad. You can read that the roads are bad. You can understand that the roads will be bad. But it can still be a shock when you drive on, some days, dozens of miles of unpaved roads. Experience is quite the teacher. To be fair, the paved roads were all excellent. Some unpaved roads were excellent. Some were not. Almost no roads had guardrails. I suspect that to put guardrails everywhere they are needed would bankrupt the country.

Sheep are everywhere. Somehow, there are fences along almost all the roads. I think it is to keep the sheep from getting into the verdant fields of grass and keep them pinned to the side of the road. The car and I had three close encounters of the sheep kind in two weeks.

I never had a bad interaction with an Icelander. They seem a laid-back and helpful people, and everyone spoke at least some English. Which is good, because I’ve not quite managed “pakka per fyrir” (thank you) yet.

Long hours of daylight are a blessing, but confusing. I kept being surprised that it was 11:00 pm when the sun “told” me it was 8:00.

Iceland tries hard to protect the environment, and rightly so. It does have some amusing aspects, though. On many trails, there was a clothesline-style rope (thin) strung at shin height to remind people not to walk off the trail and to keep the fragile plant life in good health. But, since many of the trails involved heights, it also gave the illusion that these were the safety barriers to keep you from falling. At shin height. Where you can trip. My best guess is that it was the safety railing for the secret people (elves).

I know we are a product of our cultures, but I can’t get used to the sight of cold herring for breakfast. I went for ham and cheese (early on) or toast (later on). I get a pass on cultural eating because I tried preserved shark.

I ended up driving about 2,800 miles in fifteen days. That’s a lot. But, if you want to see sights all around the country, you have to drive to see them. I wouldn’t want all vacations to involve about four hours in the car every day, but it worked for this one. I wouldn’t have wanted to cut anything out from what we did (although the three-hour canyon detour was rough).

We didn’t get to do everything we wanted to do. The next Iceland trip needs to include whale watching, getting onto a glacier, going into the central highlands, riding an Icelandic pony, doing more Reykjavik exploration, seeing an active eruption (if one was going on), taking more scenic hikes, exploring the Eastfjords more, and other things. There is much to do here!

Icelandic ponies are handsome horses. They are larger that what we thought ponies generally were, but shorter than normal horses. They really do have a funny trot that you can see (they raise their legs higher than normal, I think, and they curl their front legs up on each stride). They have long, beautiful manes and tails.

We only ever saw two or three boats out on the ocean. That seemed odd for an island country. The harbors always had boats and ships in them. Maybe they only went out after we went to bed.

We never saw any crops growing. All the fields were grass, which we saw being harvested all over the country. Either wheat does not grow in Iceland, or the marauding bands of sheep get it all.

I love all the hot water. Not only does it make for bubbling pools in the ground, but it allowed me to take long, guilt-free showers. The cold water was great too – we had great, clean, cold tap water everywhere we went. Restaurants and cafes had it out just for the taking. That is not always the case in Europe, so we appreciated that.

I’m sure I’ll think of many other things over the next few weeks. It was a full and wonderful time in Iceland.

All cold things must come to an end, and so today was our last full touring day in Iceland, with our exploring the capital city, Reykjavik. Weather was again an issue today, with misting rain in the late morning turning to steady rain by early afternoon. And in the late afternoon and evening, when the rain had stopped, we were met with twenty-five-mile-an-hour winds which cut through my three layers of clothing enough to make me uncomfortable. Still, the touring must go on, for we have no touring tomorrow!

Meredith is a big fan of Rick Steves’ tour books, and for major cities, he usually has what we term a “Rick Walk.” Rick starts you somewhere in the city and walks you along interesting streets to see the major sights that are within walking distance of each other. There was one of those for Reykjavik, so that was how we spent the late morning and early afternoon.

The walk started down by the old harbor in a small square where people think the first settler of Iceland built his farm about eleven hundred years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence of a farm near that area dating from the right period, so it seems a good guess. From there we wandered through a back alley of a residential area. Reykjavik has about 130,000 people, so it’s a little smaller than Akron (at 190,000). It’s hard to imagine being in the main downtown part of Akron and wandering one block away to find cute little houses, but I guess that is what happens when you take one thousand years to grow to a city.

We got to see city hall, situated on a small, pretty pond; given the wind and the rain, we passed on the mile-long walk around the pond. We went on to the Alpingi parliament building where the sixty-three members meet. There is a very lovely park with flowers just outside the building where it would be pleasant to sit on nice days. The chairs were empty today, but the space was still nice.

When we got to the start of the modern main street around 11:30, we headed back to the car. Meredith wanted to go somewhere else, and as the precipitation was now a full and steady rain, I was happy to oblige. We both knew that the forecast had the weather clearing up around 3:00, so we could come back later.

We didn’t have a GPS (ours won’t download the Iceland map because the format changed), and we don’t have functional cell phones to use as a GPS, so this whole trip has been old-school – maps, sometimes supplemented by Google directions. Mer had looked up where we were going on Google, so even though it was off all of our maps, we headed out.  On trips, we take turns being in charge on different days, and we generally don’t tell the other person what we’ve planned; because this was Mer’s day, I wasn’t sure what our destination would be, but Mer said it wouldn’t be too far away.

After driving for awhile, we saw an exit with a name that might have been an abbreviation of the road we were looking for. We drove on for a bit, and then decided to turn around. This is never easy in Iceland. I think Icelanders have designed roads for traffic flow at the cost of all other considerations. This means that if you see, say, a gas station off of a main road, there will rarely be access to the gas station from said main road. You are expected to know on which side road to get off to get to the entrance. Making turning around even harder is the fact that many main roads dump onto other main roads which dump onto other main roads which have no left turns into the only driveway on the west coast.

We eventually did manage to turn around and went back the other way looking for the exit. We never saw it. So we had to manage another turnaround. The exit turned out to be only on one side of the main road. Fair enough. We got off on the new road, which didn’t look right, since it dumped us into a rotary and the real road was supposed to be a merge instead. We saw a gas station, so we thought we would ask there. I turned into the driveway of the gas station, only to be directed on a one-way street back onto the highway.

We turned around again and repeated the process, this time finding the elusive way in. The clerk behind the counter was very helpful and drew us a map. Off we went. Another challenge to driving in Reykjavik is that you have to decide which turn lane to be in well before you can see any street signs. We got the right street, going the wrong way. Execute difficult turnaround procedure. We got to the next right street, going the wrong way. Execute difficult turnaround procedure. We finally got to our destination, which was a block of apartment buildings. I admit that I was stumped.

Meredith had found a house church to go to. It’s a church plant, but the “plant” part of the church was interrupted by Covid, so they have been meeting virtually and as a small group, waiting for when they can actually open a building. The church pastor and his wife are both Americans who felt that God was calling them to minister in Iceland, and so the service was in English. There were fourteen of us – mostly Americans, with a couple of Germans, an Icelander, and one or two people whose nationality I didn’t catch.

It was a good service, and it was good to be back in a church gathering again after two weeks on the road. The pastor spoke on Psalm 96 and how worship is a lifestyle and not just what we do on Sundays, and also a call to mission activity to those around us. We sang two hymns and said the Apostles’ Creed and took communion. Meredith and I hung around after the service for about thirty minutes, chatting mostly with the pastor.

After church, it was back into the city, where the rain had stopped. We started with going to a donut shop the pastor had recommended. It was a good recommendation. We then walked back to pick up the Rick Walk from where we had left off.

It basically took us up the main shopping drag/tourist gauntlet, up the hill to the city’s iconic church. The church façade is designed to look like basalt columns, which works well. The inside of the church is unadorned – clear glass windows and no decoration of any kind (other than one corner chapel where there is a painting of the Madonna and child, which was surprising to me to find in a Lutheran church). The interior’s simplicity is harmonious and makes for a reverent atmosphere. Which was broken by a man shouting, “We are closing!” It was 5:00, and so we had just made it into the church with only about ten minutes to spare.

From the church, we went down a side street into a sculpture garden. An Icelandic artist had made a deal with the Alpingi that if they built him a house and studio, he would leave all future work to the people. They did, and he did, so there are about twenty or thirty sculptures from around 1910 to 1950 in the garden, drawing on Icelandic myths and sagas and also bringing in aspects of Christianity. Most of the sculptures focused on only two or three figures, and so felt very intimate. It was in a walled-off garden, so not only was it peaceful, but it shielded us from the wind as well. I loved it.

From the garden, we walked down to the harbor to see the famous sculpture Sun Voyager. That was within easy walking distance of the opera house, which was finished about 2010 and critically well-received, even if some locals were critical of the cost. We got back to the general area of the car, which coincidently was parked next to the city’s Icelandic Phallological Museum; thus I was able to point it out to an older lady who was asking people for directions to it. I wasn’t going to judge her for going as long as she didn’t ask me how I knew so quickly where it was.

Mer decided to extend the walk a bit by going back to look at the pond at city hall now that the rain had stopped. When we got there, we both laughed at how the small pond had actual one-foot waves on it from the gusting wind. We took that as a sign to go get dinner back by the hotel. The restaurant Meredith wanted to go to was closed for the owner being on vacation, so we settled for the very un-Icelandic solution of Subway instead. At least Meredith was able to try corn on her sandwich, and so it felt a little exotic.

And so closed the Iceland touring. Back in the hotel, we repacked everything and got as ready for tomorrow as we could. We will aim to be up by 5:30 to be at the airport at 8:00 to return the car – if you go over even a little on another day, you get charged the full $120 for the extra time. Our flight leaves at 11:20, and we get back to Newark around 1:30 local time. It will be good to get home and see family, friends, and kitties, as well as get back to a routine. Touring Europe is exciting and tiring at the same time. Home is where the purr is.

One thing that Iceland teaches is that rock can split when enough pressure is applied. Meredith wanted to see the area near Reykjavik called the Golden Circle, which has several popular sights along the somewhat circular route. The first place we stopped today was Pingvellir, a national park. Pingvellir is known for two things – it is where the North American plate and the European plates are diverging, leaving the Pingvellir valley between the two cliff faces of the continental plates. Pingvellir was also the home of the Alpingi, Iceland’s first parliament, which started meeting in the 900s.

On the way to Pingvellir, we drove through misting rain, heavy rain, no rain, spots of sun, and back into rain again. When we actually got to Pingvellir, it was misting some, but we plowed on. The mist wasn’t enough to keep away the Icelandic midges, which came out in force, so we resorted back to putting our insect netting over our hats (to the positive comments of several people). We walked down a ravine right next to North America, and turned into a small viewing area, which is where it happened. We started getting real rain. And my touristic rock, Meredith, started to crack. She looked sad, and when I asked her about it, she said she had hoped the rain would hold off, and she was discouraged. Rain. Midges. Continents drifting. It can be too much.

Happily, she hung in there, because in a few minutes, the rain stopped, and much later the sun even came out occasionally. The midges would disappear if you walked into the wind, and otherwise, the netting handled them, so that was good. The continents were still drifting, but Meredith overcame that one.

We wandered all over the paths of the valley, visiting two waterfalls on the river that falls into the valley. We walked next to the cliff face and visited the best-guess site of the Alpingi. We peered into windows of the small parish church and looked around the headstones of the graveyard.

The only downside to the morning was steps – after all the climbing we have done, we were tripped up on rock steps in the park. Meredith actually skinned one knee, and I just managed to catch myself when I tripped later. Constant vigilance is required in Iceland!

After a quick stop for a novel thing called “lunch,” at which we actually ate food not at breakfast or at supper, we drove on to Gullfoss, a huge waterfall at the far end of the Golden Circle, and from which the drive gets its name (Gullfoss means “Golden Waterfall”). Gullfoss is an impressive waterfall, even to people who have seen many waterfalls over the last two weeks. It’s a two-stage waterfall, with a thirty-five-foot upper drop down an angled rock face, before a seventy-foot drop into a canyon below, which is at an unusual ninety-degree angle to the falls (like an “L”). Most canyons just extend straight off the falls.

The area is well developed for tourists, with boardwalks for much of the area, and an upper and a lower viewing deck. You can also walk out past the boardwalk to stand on rocks looking right at the upper falls and right down into the lower falls. You do get soaked from the lower spray when you do this, but that almost didn’t matter today, as the rain came back for us at this stop. By the time we did both platforms and walked out to the rocky area, my pants were soaked, and I was getting cold from the eighteen-mph winds. Don’t get me wrong – Gullfoss is an amazing sight, and we stayed for some time, but by the time I got back to the car, I decided it was better to dig in the trunk for a pair of pants that I had already worn and retired for the trip than to try to get the pair I was wearing dry.

The rain again more or less stopped at our final sight of the day – the Geysir geothermal field. This is an area of boiling or near-boiling water that actually forms scalding-hot streams. That was new to me. It also houses Geysir, the original… geyser. It is no longer very active, but it was the first geyser that Europeans became aware of. Now, the geyser nearby, Strokkur, gets all the tourist love as it erupts in a spray of water every ten minutes or so.

It is a very bizarre thing  to see stunningly clear water that your experience tells you is cool and refreshing, while your eyes and brain are screaming at you to stay away from the steaming cauldron. To drive the point home, the “welcome” sign to the park reminds you the nearest hospital is sixty-two kilometers away.

We looked around at all the pools, and then took a path up to an overlook. Along the way, we passed a perfectly still pool with no steam, but labeled as 80-100 degrees Celsius. The spring next to it was actually boiling actively. As we crested the rise of the path, we were greeted with a view of a large green valley with a small river and multiple horses grazing. It was lovely, and unexpected, since the area we had just walked through mostly only supported grass away from the water pools. We got to the main lookout area, and enjoyed the view in all directions for as long as we could take the strong and cold wind.

We finished our visit to the geothermal park by standing with a group of other tourists to see Strokkur go off. It obliged nicely, with a huge bubble forming on the surface before exploding a large amount of water into the air. I think we all paused for a second when it looked as if the plume might drift our way, but the wind drove it back.

There are other things that can be done on the Golden Circle, but it was 5:30, so we headed back to our hotel area to grab some food and settle in for the night. Food and rest often act as a good cement for all of our touristic cracks.

WARNING: The following blog contains middle-aged people in rain ponchos. This material is not suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.

While we’ve not had great weather days much in Iceland (only four days out of thirteen so far with no rain), we’ve had great luck with the rain either being light or stopping whenever we stopped to see something. That streak ended today, as we had light to steady rain until after 5:00 in the evening. But, as the Meredith says, the tour must go on!

So, rain or no, we headed back to Skogar, this time to see Skogafoss, the waterfall that is on many bus tour stops. We saw why – it is a large waterfall of about two hundred feet, with good water volume, and it is framed by green cliffs that it cascades over. It’s a classic waterfall, falling straight down into a pool, and of course, it’s only two hours from Reykjavik, making it a good tour stop.

As a bonus, there are five hundred steps or so that take you to the top of the falls to a viewing platform, where we went. To my surprise, there was a trail there. So we walked along it for a half mile or so, finding a lovely second falls that I really loved – it was small and wide and had interesting features – an island, rapids, steps, and such. I thought about going on and then saw a sign that said the bridge was three miles away and some other important point was fifteen miles away. I thought the steps were for tourists, but they are also there for hikers. Because of the steady rain, we turned around. On a nice day, I would have been tempted by the six-mile round-trip bridge hike. I looked on Google Maps, and there are about a dozen named waterfalls on the hike. Next time.

We headed up Route 1 to another famous waterfall, Seljalandsfoss. This is a smaller waterfall in volume, looking a bit puny compared to Skogafoss. But the real draw here is that you can walk behind the waterfall. We planned on doing that, and had been warned that we would get wet, so we donned the very sexy matching ponchos we had brought along and followed the trail up into the mist. It wasn’t very bad – it was similar to many misty rains we have had on this trip already. Our normal jackets that are water resistant probably would have been okay, but I didn’t mind staying dry.

The view from the back was fun, especially when I looked up at where the waterfall seemed to be ejected from the top of the cliff face. It was an odd and unfamiliar view to be under the arc of a falls like that. But Meredith and I both also really enjoyed the waterfall from profile. You could watch water fall the entire two hundred feet down into the pool, and the falls seemed to come in waves or clumps of water that you could trace through the air.

We got back in the car, again grateful for heated seats in late July, and drove on north to the Lava Center in the town of Hvolsvollur. The Lava Center tells the story of Iceland and the volcanic activity over the history of the island. It is interactive and highly up to date, even including the current eruption that has been going on since spring.

The museum greets you with a map of Iceland and wall monitors that show all earthquakes on the island in the last forty-eight hours. That was eye-opening, especially when many quakes seemed to center on Katla, the volcano under the Myrdalsjokull glacier. There have been indications that Katla is gearing up for another eruption, and if a big one comes, it could flood the southern coast with sudden rivers the size and flow of the Amazon.

There was a twenty-minute-long video showcasing all the eruptions in the south for the last one hundred years. As an aside, this was the first theater I’ve seen where there were mats laid out in the front so people could lie down to watch the show. All of the volcanoes were impressive, but the eruptions of the last fifteen years were in vivid high-definition videos, which was sobering.

The interactive part of the museum let you move simulated eruptions backwards and forwards on a timeline to see how they worked. The screens were stationed over islands upon which were projected rivers of lava. It was visually quite effective. Another room – the whole room – was a projection of the skyline around the Lava Center which showed the six volcanoes close by (most within twenty-five miles). You could stand on specific spots and learn about the volcano, and use gestures to “go” to points on the mountain to get more information. All the while, each of the six volcanoes erupted in turn, sometimes filling the entire screen with blinding ash.

Ash, it turns out, is way more damaging than lava. It covers much more area, and endangers people and animals. Most lava eruptions are not explosive, and even the ones that are violent tend to throw lava only short distances. Of course, some volcanoes erupt with both ash and lava, sometimes for months at a time or longer.

It was a great little museum, and perfect for a rainy day. One startling fact we learned is that Iceland has thirty active volcanoes being monitored. That’s a big number for a country roughly the size of Maine.

After the museum, we stopped off in another town for a combo lunch/supper meal of pizza a little before 5:00. Lunch is often the ignore meal when we tour. Then, on to our hotel in suburban Reykjavik. It was very weird seeing a city again after two weeks of being in very rural areas. Happily, the rain stopped as we approached the city, so we didn’t get wet moving our luggage into the hotel. This hotel is very big and modern, and is the first hotel we’ve been in that has not looked out over a mountain or stream or ocean or all three. We see a highway. But we’ll be here for three nights, so it is good not to have to pack up every day.

We had to take our return-home Covid tests, and that took almost two hours by the time everything was done, but at least we are officially Covid-free, and so can get on the airplane. It was now 8:00, so rather than make some big trip out and about, we took a two-mile walk in a small nature preserve five minutes behind our hotel. It is a weird thing to be walking though a lava field with suburban buildings all around and being able to hear an outdoor concert in the distance.

Having gotten back to the city, we completed our circumnavigation of all of Iceland. The ring road (Route 1) is 825 miles long, but if the rental record was correct on my initial mileage, I drove something closer to 2,400 miles in thirteen days with all of the side trips we took. I told Meredith that next year we are going to Denmark (less than half the size of Iceland). And we have more driving coming tomorrow – Meredith is planning on doing the Golden Circle drive near Reykjavik, which will be another 155 miles. But we are supposed to be rain-free after 9:00 am, so tour on! I won’t be putting the driving into driving rain.

Diamonds, so the song proclaims, are a girl’s best friend. That doesn’t hold true for Meredith, whose love of European travel gives her an energy and endurance that can astonish at times. She often leaves her marathon-running husband in the tired dust. Meredith does come around to diamonds, though, when it is a sight to go see.

We started the day needing to get to the area around the town of Vik, and I was racing against the weather clock this time. Vik was supposed to start to get rain around 1:00, and I wanted to do some touring there before the heavier rains came along. Still, I had to make one stop – Diamond Beach, which is the beach next to the Jokulsarlon glacier lagoon. The lagoon empties out along a short and fast river that dumps into the Atlantic Ocean. When icebergs get small enough, they float down the river and out to sea, except for some which get stranded on Diamond Beach.

We had looked over at the beach the night before and hadn’t seen much ice. Still, it was on the way, and I had heard good things about it, so I stopped by. There was ice all over the beach. I don’t know if the tide had gone out and stranded more ice, or what had happened, but there were icebergs all over, from the size of my fist to the size of large boulders. Most were glinting in the sun because they were covered with meltwater, and they really stood out because the beach is a black sand beach. It was beautiful. We strolled around the place for about half an hour before getting back on the road.

The road to Vik got us along long plains of flat space where the glacier used to be a hundred years ago, but then changed into one of the largest lava fields in the world. There were cone-shaped mounds everywhere, which I assume was a result of lava meeting up with water. As we got close to Vik, we went back to mountains, with Iceland’s second biggest glacier, Eyjafjallajokul, sitting on top (and oozing down the mountains).

We drove on through Vik, and I turned down the road to Reynisfjara, another black sand beach. My brother had been here and loved it, and it sounded cool. We grabbed a quick bite to eat at the cafe (now being cautious to eat when we can!), and then went to explore the beach in a misting rain.

It is a dramatic place. The beach is mostly made up of very small black pebbles, although it does have some sand near the waterline. It is also dramatic in the numerous warning signs telling you not to go in the water and not to go near the water and not to turn your back on the water. Iceland has a phenomenon called “sneaker waves,” in which every now and then, a wave much much bigger than the other normal waves will sweep in on people and carry them off. Sadly, two people have died because of them in the last fifteen years. Meredith and I noted where the maximum wet sand line was, and then we gave that a healthy buffer.

The beach is walled in by a cliff which is made of twisted columns of basalt (cooled lava that looks like pillars), and it also has some sea stacks out from shore. Throw in several sea-eroded caves in the cliff, and you have a pretty magical place. With the misting rain, it kind of added a somber feel to the place, but didn’t get us wet through our coats and hats.

Since it was about 3:00 and we could check in, we drove down the road a bit and found our hotel. We tossed our bags in our room and headed out again, this time to Skogar, home of the Skogafoss waterfall, one of Iceland’s most visited. We went to the Skogar Museum. It is an interesting little museum in that it is an outdoor folk village of six buildings from the late 1800s, and an indoor museum of transportation and technology. We like folk museums and hadn’t been to one in Iceland yet, and it was starting to rain a little harder, so a museum seemed like a good idea.

The folk museum had several turf-roofed houses and sheds, some of which were very nice inside. Wood was at a premium in 1880 Iceland (and probably still is), so many of the formal rooms of the houses on display were made from driftwood, or, in one case, wood salvaged from a shipwreck. The tiny one-room schoolhouse on the grounds was in use near here until 1968 (the ring road, Route 1, wasn’t finished in the southeast part of Iceland until 1972). The small church was a reconstruction on the outside, but the interior is almost all original and was pretty – carved wood that was brightly painted blue.

As the rain started to pick up, we moved inside to the transportation museum. There was a good section on the founding of Iceland’s postal system, which used to be by private contractors who had to pay for everything (food, horses, etc.) themselves. There were only four postal district sections originally – north, south, east, and west, and each section could initially only hire one man. This was expanded to two men in the south in the 1880s. Postmen had to carry horns with them to try to summon help should they get in trouble in a river or some such, and three postmen on the southern route died on duty. It sounded like an insanely difficult job.

Much of the rest of the museum was dedicated to transportation that moved well in snow (like half-tracked or fully tracked vehicles), or to machines used to make roads. Both of these made perfect sense for an area that had no roads to speak of until around 1900. The final section of the museum showcased rescue equipment and vehicles, which also fit for the area.

After the museum, we went back to Vik to have a good supper to make sure we didn’t miss an open restaurant. I also wanted to go to the Lava Show, where they mess around with molten lava, but the shows were all sold out. Still, we did get a good and hot supper, which we don’t take for granted in Iceland now.

We made an early evening of it because of the rain, but I suspect Meredith would rather be rained on in Iceland while touring sights than be rained on back home schlepping papers from her classroom to the car. She needs the energy boost from the one to keep up the other for nine months each year.

Meredith has a travel axiom – you will waste some time or some money when you travel, and it is best not to fret too much over it. Due to a map error in our guidebook that mistakenly placed our cabin near a sight I wanted to see, I ended up wasting an hour of driving today on top of a long driving day already. These things happen, and it was still a good day.

Today was not a “the journey is the destination” day. I wanted to get us to Iceland’s south coast region as quickly as I could. It was still amazingly scenic – we drove in and out of at least half a dozen fjords, and there were many places begging for a photo stop. I pressed on, with only two bathroom stops over six hours. But we made it in time.

I had been aiming for the Fjallsarlon glacier lagoon. It is the smaller of two lagoons in the area, formed by the retreating Vatnajokull glacier. Being the smaller lagoon, it is far less crowded than the bigger and better-known (and tour bus stop) Jokulsarlon lagoon. Moreover, the Fjallsarlon location had boat tours on a more intimate scale (since the lagoon is smaller), getting you up close to the icebergs in the lagoon as well as to the glacier face. We got there a little before 3:00 and got booked on a 3:30 boat. We wandered up to a viewpoint over the water to fill up the time, and then headed back to get suited up.

For safety reasons, you have to wear a jacket that keeps you warm should you fall in the water, and over that is a lifejacket that inflates on contact with water. Since the tour takes place in an inflatable craft where you sit on the rim of the boat,  these are good precautions. (We didn’t fall in.)

There were eleven of us on the boat – eight adults and three older children, and then the pilot. He was both informative and amusing. He passed on that the boat was as unsinkable as the Titanic, and we would be fully safe as long as we saw no icebergs. He also told us there are three main colors of icebergs – blue, for ones newly calved from the glacier; white for any iceberg older than a day old; and dirty ones that scraped the mountains along the way down. Blue icebergs are blue because they are dense from being compressed during the five-hundred-year journey to the lagoon. When those start to melt (within a day), air gets absorbed into the surface ice, which makes them look white.

The trip was thrilling to me – not like anything I had ever done before. To my recollection, I have never been in an inflatable boat, let alone one surrounded by icebergs. We started out and headed toward where the ice had drifted back toward the glacier (the wind was blowing that way for much of the day). I was disappointed that the ice formed a solid mass and there did not seem to be a way through. Our pilot told us to hold on and rammed up on a small iceberg, which was especially exciting to me and Meredith, since we were sitting in the prow of the boat. With the nose of the craft beached on the iceberg, the guide simply used the boat to move it out of the way, since the ice was floating. We did that trick a few times in different places.

We weaved in and out of ice packs, making our way closer to the glacier wall. At one point, when the boat was stopped so we could take photos of an iceberg, the glacier let out a “boom” and calved a small iceberg. I didn’t see the ice falling, but I looked over in time to see the water splashing up and some ice fragments hanging in the air.

We got quite close to the glacier, but kept a safe distance. The guide fished out a small chunk of ice so we could hold five-hundred-year-old ice and get our pictures with it. He said it is pure ice and goes great with whiskey.

The entire tour lasted about forty-five minutes and was an amazing experience. We got out of our gear, and Meredith and I hurried to the cafe. It was 4:50, and they closed at 5:00, and there are no towns within fifty miles of the lagoons, so this was our only eating option we knew about. We grabbed the last two sandwiches that they had, and that was supper. Meredith commented that never before has she been so unsure of getting meals while touring Europe.

I wanted to go check into our room, which looked to be about ten minutes away on our map. Then we could return to see the big lagoon. The guesthouse turned out to be about thirty minutes away – the map had the location wrong. That meant thirty minutes there, checking in, and then thirty minutes back to where we had just come from. Mistakes happen sometimes when you travel.

We did get back to Jokulsarlon, and we loved it. It is much bigger than the other lagoon, and the icebergs are huge. We both agreed the smaller lagoon has much more ice, but the ice that Jokulsarlon has is big. The sun was also low(ish) on the horizon, so the water and ice were glinting in the low sunlight. There were still a lot of people around, but not nearly so many as the parking lot could hold (and no buses). It was a quiet place of beauty, except for the two booms of distant calving that happened while we were there. We were too far away from the glacier to see anything, but you sure could hear it.

After a quick look across Route 1 to see where the river dumps the icebergs into the sea, we headed home for the evening. It was an early turn-in for us (8:30), but we have been touring hard and long for a few days now. Sometimes getting rest is not wasting time.

Given how tiring yesterday was and the late hour we got to sleep (after midnight), Meredith let us sleep in until 9:00. That was quite welcome. We had breakfast/lunch in a bookstore/cafe that was cute, and we were finally underway for touring around noon.

Mer warned me we would be doing some driving today, and that today was another somewhat “the journey is the destination” kind of day. We went south along the lake of the area, Lagarfljot (“River Lake” – it’s narrow), which also took us through Iceland’s national forest. Much of Iceland was deforested a long time ago, but in this region, Icelanders have regrown 280 square miles of forest. Combined with the lake and surrounding mountains, it was beautiful.

We crossed the lake at a narrow part on the southern edge, and we soon were driving up paved switchbacks to climb up to what I thought would be a pass. Instead, when we reached the top, we were greeted with a huge open plain with views of mountains in all directions. At some points we could even see a small part of Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajokull. This open space was not just a barren lava field, but instead was smooth spaces with some grasses growing.

We stopped for a very welcome bathroom stop at a surprise-to-us little hot spring and guesthouse place in the middle of this plain. We justified our use of the bathroom by buying some cake. I’m not sure who stays up there, but it sure felt remote.

We continued on the paved road, although I often hugged the middle line or crossed it a little, as the sides of the pavement were not always in great condition. That worked out okay, as we met only about one car every ten minutes.

Despite “the journey being the destination,” we really did have a destination, and one that once again shows that Meredith loves me. We came to a huge dam called Karahnjukar that came online in 2007. The dam runs a six-hundred-megawatt power plant, which is used to run the Alcoa smelting plant in Iceland. Energy is so cheap in Iceland that it makes fiscal sense to ship old aluminum to Iceland, melt it down, and ship it back to other countries. To make this dam, eighteen hundred people worked on it for five years, drilling and blasting over thirty miles of tunnels to route water around. We got to chat with an engineer who happened to be outside, and he said they have six turbines that run continuously to keep the Alcoa plant supplied. He said the national grid can back them up to the tune of two of the six generators if they need to take them offline. That is amazing; by comparison, he said the transmission lines that supply the entire north of Iceland supply one hundred megawatts. The entire national grid can’t back up the dam – the smelting plant uses that much power.

From the relative safety of the observation platform, we looked over the dam and surrounding mountains and crazy Swiss workers installing rock-catching fences on the opposite cliff. After ten days of hard hiking and treacherous footing, poor Meredith caught her foot on a normal step and fell hard, coming to within about one inch of hitting her teeth on a step. Never let your guard down in Iceland! We (and here I mean Meredith) had the option to walk along the pedestrian ledge of the dam all the way across. I walked “with” Meredith about ten feet below on the normal and safe sidewalk. We had great views of the canyon that is currently dry, but should have spillover water from the dam sometime next month as the glacier meltwaters fill the reservoir behind the dam. The pictures we saw made it look as if the waterfall from the spillway is something to see when running.

We spent about an hour at the dam, and then drove back the same way we had come. We could have kept going, making the journey a loop drive, and our Icelandic engineer said we would be fine, but the road that way becomes an “F road,” which in Iceland is an abbreviation for “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Those roads are rated for four-wheel-drive vehicles only, and are forbidden in a rental car. We played it paved and safe, and we saw several things on the way back that we had not seen on the way out, in the usual Iceland 360 sort of way we have seen all along.

We went back to the guesthouse to regroup. It was a little after 5:00, and we decide to go have supper in a cute little town on a fjord called Seydisfjordur. Apart from the waterfall in the Westfjords, this was one place in Iceland I really wanted to see.

We drove up the pass on a paved road through several switchbacks. It came out in a pretty place of pretty snowy mountains feeding pretty lakes. We eventually came to the descent, and went down several switchbacks, loomed over on two sides by pretty mountains with dozens and dozens of pretty waterfalls. The town came into view, down in the pretty valley area. It was nestled up against a pretty fjord, with a pretty river running into a pretty lagoon near the pretty harbor, towered over by pretty cliffs on either side.

I pretty much had forgotten my camera. It was back in the hotel room.

We had an excellent meal sitting outside, with grand views as dining companions. After supper, we took the recommended guidebook walk, which took us around the lagoon and past the ferry terminal that serves the ferry to Denmark, a two-to-three-day trip. We ended up climbing part-way up the double waterfall at the edge of town, which gave us great views of the harbor, town, and mountains all around. It was picture perfect.

We headed back to our room, with a brief stop at a gas station to use a free car wash for the second time on this vacation. Iceland is hard on car exteriors.

Tomorrow we start to head directly south, along the eastern coastline. It’s a four-hour drive, according to Google Maps, so I figure closer to five, which makes for a longer driving day. I’d better get another good night’s sleep, and try to remember the camera this time.