Showing posts with label Iceland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iceland. Show all posts

Friday, July 8, 2011

Photo Blog of the last 2 days

Weds we went on the Golden Circle tour, which is basically the southwestern (and coincidentally, inhabited) parts of Iceland.  This is what we saw:

Vikings:
Iceland

Geysers:
Iceland

Really big water falls:
Iceland

A rift valley (between the European and North American Plates (I called this "in-continent" teehee)):
Iceland


Cranky Lady Vikings:
Iceland

Men, trying to be cranky-men Vikings:
Iceland

You get a little goofy here, what with all the sun, and start doing strategic statue photo taking:
Iceland

We went to the opera house/convention center that was still being worked on by construction workers at midnight, which reminded me of playing Q-bert:
Iceland

Yesterday, we hung out in Reykjavik and saw shoes:
Iceland

and knitters:
Iceland

and this is a taxedermied Puffin for Jackie:
Iceland

And finished our evening hanging out with the Fuses:
Iceland

Today we are going to take it easy, get packed, do a little shopping and maybe have dinner with the Fuses again.  I'll update when I have further news.  Oh, and no Volcano eruption as of yet. :-/


Wednesday, July 6, 2011

AWESOME!

An eruption of Hekla, one of Iceland’s most famous volcanoes, may be imminent, scientists in the island nation say.

Pall Einarsson, a geophysics professor at the University of Iceland, told Iceland Review that sensors around the volcano have shown unusual movements in the past few days.

While those sensors are new and the data they provide cannot be seen as conclusive proof that an eruption is coming, Einarsson told Agence-France Presse that “the volcano is ready to erupt.”

“The mountain has been slowly expanding in the last few years because of magma buildup,” AFP quotes Einarsson as saying.

And it may be due for an eruption. Hekla has erupted four times since 1970, about once every 10 years. The last eruption was on February 26, 2000.

Hekla is close to the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which erupted last year and emitted a massive ash cloud that spread across Europe and forced the cancellation of thousands of airline flights a day.

Air traffic was again disrupted by volcanic ash in May when Iceland’s Grimsvotn volcano erupted. Grimsvotn’s eruption was more than 10 times larger and put more ash into the air in 36 hours than Eyjafjallajokull did in a month, University of Iceland geophysicist Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson told CNN then, but flight disruptions were far fewer because prevailing winds pushed the ash away from populated areas.

Geophysicist Ari Trausit Gudmundsson told AFP that Hekla usually erupts with both lava and ash and “if the next eruption is of the same character (as the previous ones) it is unlikely that it will have any effects on flights in Europe.”

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Quick photo blog before bed

We have to be outside waiting for a bus in 7 hours...

Iceandic Horses:
Iceland

Iceland

Blue Lagoon:
Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

This photo was taken at 11:30 at night:
Iceland

Iceland

Chris's blue dipped ice cream:
Iceland

The promised photo blog!

The church:
Iceland

The ceremony:
Iceland

The couple:
Iceland

Morgan and Will:
Iceland

me and Chris:
Iceland

Amber and Morgan:
Iceland

more photos from the road:
Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Monday, July 4, 2011

Ghetto connectivity here!!!

So, I an trying to connect to the Internet here to upload my photos of our time at the Fjordlands, but the Internet seems to only work on my phone and my computer can't find it at all right now. This is a terrible bummer, but I can at least tell you all what happened.

On Friday, we basically rented a car and mashed 4 fairly large people and Amber into a relatively small vehicle and drove for7 hours back and forth along a bunch of fjords on pretty bad roads (I rode back-seat-in-the-middle-with-the-hump style for 1/2 of this) to get to the town of 300 people in the middle of nowhere where Vigfus' wife is from. That night, we attended a family party and then Chris and I crashed out while our pals went to another bar party at the hotel (the only bar or restaurant in said village).

Saturday we woke up, had breakfast and went to the local pool, which is kept toasty hot by the local geothermal heated water. I am officially so white that I got a sun-burn after 1.5 hours in a tub in Iceland. Lame. Anyway, Morgan, Amber and I went to a nearby town through a tunnel through a mountain that actually has a fork in it, it is so long, and you have 3 options of which way to go, to get some lunch while Will and Chris climbed a huge hill. After that, we attended Vigfus' wedding, which was all in Icelandic, but it was basically the same as ours. The party after went until just before 4 am, which didn't seem to matter, as it was still light out.

We stumbled out of bed in Sunday for brunch with the Fuses, and then piled into the car. We visited the bird cliffs of the western fjords and saw puffins. The drive was really beautiful, but except for a couple of waterfalls, it all doesn't seem to come across on film very well. We finally found a hotel at like 1 am and parked for the evening. There's really not much out there. A "town" may consist of a farm and that's it. There's rarely any services and even fewer hotels, and pretty much no food. It was an strange day.

Today we got up, ate, and drove the south peninsula on our way back to Reykjavik. Again, very pretty to drive through, not much on camera. We did stop for a cave tour through some lava caves at one point, which was pretty cool. All-in-all just a lot of scenic driving while packed in like sardines in a small car for several days punctuated by drinking heavily in the middle.

The roads are pretty odd in that they transition from dirt to pavement with Bo sense, they don't have guard rails on huge cliffs that have crazy drop offs, but random straight-aways get full coverage and they have a love of signage in the middle if the two lanes in blind hill tops with sharp lefts right afterward that don't actually tell you any of that. They just tell you which side if the sign to be on. Iceland is odd.

We arrived back in Rek this evening, had some weird hot dogs, some pretty odd but tasty hot chocolate and then punishes ourselves by going to see the Transformers movie. Um. Yeah. They have cotton candy that mysteriously tastes Luke chicken teryaki and the also abruptly stop the movie at a critical action point so they can have intermission. This is dine with no signal or signage. It's just what they do here. How odd.

Anyway, it's 3 am, and the sun is down, but it is perfectly light out. Tomorrow we are going to head toward the blue lagoon, which is a big attraction here, and see what the healing waters will do for us.

Yay! Chris for my computer to find the Internet so pictures from at least 3 days are uploading now. I'll try and do a photo post tomorrow so you can see some of what we saw. In the mean time, you can go check them out for yourselves.

We hope that you all had an awesome 4th if July! We had a pretty good one! Iceland is odd, but cool!

Sent from my iPhone

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Iceland Adventure: Part 1

We got here and spent the day taking a short nap and walking around Reykjavik. The town is very awesome: clean, architecturally interesting, and the weather is perfect at about 60 degrees, even now at 11:30 p.m.. The sun looks like it will go down, with a pink sunset, but really, it will just dip under the horizon and come back up, so there's daylight 24 hours.

Pictures have been posted to my Flickr, but here are some highlights:

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Iceland

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Next up: Iceland... tomorrow!

Yep, we are about to set off for Iceland! Our good friend, Vigfus, is getting married, and since he lives in Iceland, that's where we are going! We are super excited, but have no idea what to expect.

We will be updating the blog for the 10 days that we are there when we have internet (which should be for most of the time), and I will, of course, be posting pictures when possible.

In the mean-time, I leave you with this video made by the tourist board of Iceland, which makes me totally excited to go there: