On Us Adventures

I'd booked us on the Tour Israel Dead Sea and Masada tourto start the trip. The coach picked us up at 0715, our tour guide was Norbert who delivered the tour in English and French, switching seamlessly between the two making me jealous. I slept though the journey and BAM delighted in telling me about all the cool views and facts that I'd missed. Thanks BAM. The coach stopped at a cafe/gift shop selling Dead Sea Minerals creams and had a cracking view of the Dead Sea. We continued onwards to the Masada ruins. Masada is an ancient fort atop a massive mountain. There's a visitors centre at the bottom with facts, a gift shop and a cafeteria. Our tour ticket included the cable car to the top, but the traditional route follows the "snake path" ... read more

Why? Neither of us had ever been to the Middle East, and Israel is as western as you can get whilst still being in the Middle East. On top of this, I wanted to visit the sites of important religious, historical, social and military events. Most sites being a combination of all four. I didn’t know whether we’d enjoy it, our parents tried to talk us out of it (we hear horror stories in the news and just before we left an American tourist got stabbed in Tel Aviv), but I knew it would be eye-opening. Admittedly, my motivations also included the downright tourist trap of floating in the Dead Sea and the fact that no-one else we knew had ever been there, so it felt like we were forging our own path. Where? We slept ... read more

We watched the sunrise by the Sun Voyager, the pink sky reflected on the mountains behind the statue which was enchanting. We visited the Aurora museum which was informative and gave us free tea. The Saga museum let us try on chainmail and had an audio tour about the first settlers on Iceland and how Reykjavík became the capital (SPOILER ALERT: a Viking threw two engraved posts overboard for the gods to decide where they land to build the capital, took them two years to find them in a bay which wasn’t the best location but Reykjavík was built). The national museum covered most subjects and is where JA fell in love with the name “Bjorn”. Long walk back to the hotel but I found a broken sledge by a bridge so went sledding twice to ... read more

Today the tour was Golden Circle which started at 8.30am and was led by “the grandma” team, first stop was a tomato plantation where the owner gave a speech about Iceland having the best water and therefore best tomatoes…shame I don’t like tomatoes. The Geyser area was extremely icy, JA mist the first few looking at trees and posing for pictures, we got close to the main Geyser which was surrounded by ice and hilarious watching people (JA) with bad grip to try to distance themselves from the boiling water. The museum inside the shop let us experience what a 5.1 Richter scale earthquake feels like. Next stop was Gulfoss waterfall which was dressed in its winter clothes (partly frozen), this prevented us being able to walk right up to the waterside like you can in ... read more

1am start for the train to Manchester airport, it was about 5am when we cleared security and got to Duty Free where free samples of Spanish 43 liquor were being handed out; I couldn’t say no! Very nice and sweet like honey. Also learnt Homme means men in French and one spray is enough! When we landed it was snowing and the ground was white, I was astounded as it was not how I remembered from my last trip nine years ago with school; “they should have called it lava-land as there isn’t any ice”. We were too early to check in to our room at the Arctic Comfort Hotel so we got a map and went to the supermarket for supplies which was harder than we first thought with everything being in a different language. ... read more