For the first time since November of 2019, we’re back on foreign soil! A deep gratitude to God and many thanks to the medical researchers, policy makers, and common people’s best efforts to get us to this point. Thank you, all!

It took a little time to clear customs and get our rental car at the airport, but by about 8:30, we were underway in our yellow Kia. It is almost brand new, and has a million features even my 2015 car doesn’t have – hybrid engine, push start, automatic lights, automatic washers, lane detectors, and many other things I don’t even know about. Renting a car is series of happy accidents with controls for some time.

We drove about an hour and forty-five minutes north to the small town of Borgarnes. We certainly got a taste of traveling in Iceland – we drove from mist to rain to mist to rain to cloudy (which was a happy progression for landing in a town we wanted to tour). We also traversed lava fields, green pastures, the outskirts of Reykjavik, drove under a fjord in a three-mile tunnel, and were dwarfed by roadside mountains. This is going to be fun (not to mention beautiful).

We got to Borgarnes about 10:00 in the morning, so our room wasn’t going to be ready. We ate a light meal in a bakery that overlooked the mountains and a fjord, and so that was a good use of time. Meredith always leans on Rick Steves for her touring wisdom, and Rick does cover Iceland. So we followed Rick’s introductory walk around town, seeing a small park, the heated town pool, the surprisingly excellent track and field area, a hill commemorating parts of an Icelandic saga (a son’s nurse was hit by a rock and drowned by a cranky father, which made his son retaliate by killing a servant of the dad – strange tales), and a small island, and finished by walking a path along the fjord back to the athletics fields. That got us to noon, and our room was ready, which allowed us to take a long nap until 4:00.

After showering and eating at a local restaurant (where I saw horse on the menu for the first time; I got beef), we jumped in the car and headed off through incredible countryside for about thirty minutes, until we got to Grabrok Crater, a very small extinct volcano. The area is still very rugged since the volcano erupted only about three thousand years ago, but the locals installed a boardwalk with steps all the way to the top. The views of the surrounding countryside kept changing as we climbed, and the views from the top were photogenic. Meredith is very patient with my “Wait! Stop!” moments of reaching for the camera. There is a path all around the lip of the crater, and we took our time strolling along it. The evening was pleasant, and the weather was very good.

Grabrok Crater was the only touristic goal of the day. We took the car back to Borgarnes and settled in for a fairly early evening. We indeed have many things to be thankful for.