Happy New Year! I hope that everyone had a very restful holiday season. I haven’t posted any new projects in a while because I have some really big ones in progress but nothing new completed. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some of my travels and the stunning visuals along the way.
Right before Christmas 2023 Jake and I took our first trip to Iceland! We’d heard wonderful things about the small country and I’ve always wanted to (try to) see the northern lights.
We started with a challenging red-eye flight to Reykjavik where we caught a glimpse in transit at the active volcano spouting off in the distance at the time near the town of Gindavik. Even in the capital we found the country to be very sleepy. Maybe something to do with it being dark 20 hours a day at the winter solstice. The sun didn’t rise until near 11:30 am each day that we were there and stayed so low to the horizon that we technically only saw the sun itself once during our five day trip. That translates to a lot of prolonged twilight and golden sunrises that paint the barren volcanic landscape, dusted with snow, with pastel pinks, purples, and oranges in the dim cloud-broken sunlight.
While in town we visited two museums: the Saga Museum and the Whale Museum. Both excellent, and both fairly deserted, the Saga museum especially was costume-motivated. It was a self-guided tour through Iceland’s history aided by wax figures dressed in region-specific medieval garb!! I took lots of photos of the clothing of course.
We stayed in a lakeside tiny house in the countryside. Once you leave the capital, in the wintertime anyway, the country is pretty much empty. We fought crowds at some of the major tourist attractions but for the most part we were all alone. Getting a rental car was a great way to see the scenery. We saw geologic phenomenon unique to the tectonic divide where geysers and hot springs are heated from below. Rifts in the earth and old volcanic hills were all around. Lava tunnels on the sides of the road. We visited two hot springs while there; one fed by an actively bubbling geothermal spring, and the other right on the ocean in negative 14 degree Celsius temperatures with sustained 25mph winds! The landscape was beautiful and rugged.
The picturesque coastal town of Akranes eluded to how much more there is to see the further out you venture. There’s a lot of diverse coastline in Iceland and we only had a pretty little taste of the black-sand beaches and big waves.
The food was also pretty good! I was expecting something more bland and English I suppose, due to proximity to Ireland and England, but the abundance of greenhouses on the island meant we were eating salad, exciting pizzas, and really good juice in addition to the fish and lamb stews which were also excellent.
We also managed to travel safely and not get sick during the second-largest covid wave to date. We wore masks in the airports and on the planes coupled with virus-blocking nasal sprays. We took vitamins everyday and tested before coming home to see my family for the holidays. The countryside being somewhat deserted also really helped in not picking anything up, I’m sure. Restaurants were almost empty and lots of the activities were outdoors. With minimal and sensible precautions we got to see a lot of beautiful and adventurous locals without ruining Christmas.
