So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.-Jack Kerouac I was on the fence about writing another travel blog for this trip, but here I am. Apparently there is a few people that still read it and were asking about it prior to our departure. Sometimes I feel the more ordinary trips in accessible countries don't deserve the same amount of chronicling, but then again these are the trips people are most interested in because it is recognizable and within easy reach for their own travels. As with all our trips I utilized my credit card miles to purchase the airfare, this time through a KLM credit card signup bonus. This time we needed to unfortunately fly out of LAX to score the deal, our most hated airport. However it was a direct ... read more

The wind started picking up again during the night, so much so that I got paranoid and woke Dennis up at 0300 so we could move downstairs from our soft sided pop top before it ripped. The wind did blow out the clouds and we were greeted with blue skies in the morning. Our first stop was at Stokkness, a seaside Viking village built as a movie set near the ruins of an old farm. It was a small collection of deteriorating wooden structures distinctly Norse in architecture, mired in damp, muddy grass and partially enclosed by driftwood battlements. Besides the friendly herd of beautiful horses grazing nearby we had the place largely to ourselves. Stokkness also has black beaches, more picturesque in my opinion than the famous ones to the south because these have small ... read more

In 2018 Mom and I came to Iceland as part of a long layover coming back from Scotland that Iceland Air offers as part of their fares. We had about 36 hrs, long enough to do the 140 mile golden circle drive and to go to the blue lagoon. Truth be told we weren’t overly impressed, but I heard that to really see the beauty of Iceland you needed to drive the entire ring road around the island. That along with 50% off ticket vouchers from that first trip that were expiring, and Dennis being incredibly jealous of our trip, I decided to come back again and give it a better look. We arrived at 0600 after getting a few lousy hours of sleep on the plane leaving out of Newark, having left AZ that prior ... read more

We were woken up by Frank at midnight after having a few hour long nap that was too short but thankfully pretty restful considering. The wind was howling and it was painfully cold making it hard to get started, but luckily it wasn’t raining, which really was all I had hoped for. As much as we didn’t want to get out of our warm sleeping bags the summit called. We quickly drank some coffee and ate some popcorn and cookies and were off. We were instructed to wear 2 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of gloves, 4 layers on the bottom and 5 on top so we both slowly waddled up the mountain at the mountaineering pace we’d established. We had to put warm water in our camelbaks and had to blow the water from the ... read more

We arrived late at night in Belfast, a city made famous because of it's turbulent past referred to by it’s people as “The Troubles.” Dennis had visited Belfast in the mid 90's and didn't have a chance to stay because of a car bombing that had occurred that day that scared off his travel companions, so he looked forward to finally returning. The troubles were primarily from 1968-1998 when bombings and assassinations occurred between the Protestant “Loyalists,” who were supportive of a British controlled Northern Ireland, and the Catholic IRA “Republicans,” who were supportive of an independent and unified Ireland. There had been religious conflict between the Protestants and Catholics well before this time, but this is the period when armed conflict escalated and British troops were deployed to Northern Ireland and over 300 miles of ... read more