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Published: June 16th 2015
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Reykjavik, Iceland--Sunday, June 8th
Sailing into Icelandic waters early this morning, we passed a number of volcanic islands that were squared off at the top like a table. The volcanoes have essentially risen from the sea, spewed their stuff out over their sides, and then blown their tops off and folded into themselves. One island is still active with hot lava and is large enough that you can fly out to it on a 20 min. flight and tour around by bus for a day. Would be interesting to see, but I am not sure I can be comfortable in this tiny little plane to land on a volcano—plus the trip is quite expensive.
We were docked by 8:00 am this morning at the New Harbor, quite a distance from the center of town. The Old Harbor area with the newly built Harpa Concert Center has become an entertainment area with restaurants and hotels since we were last here in 2010. At that visit to Iceland, we spent several days staying at a hotel downtown so we had not booked a tour for this visit. This town is one in which, once you are transported to the center of
town, you can easily walk all over to see the sights, which is what we did on that first visit. We also met with some friends who were spending several weeks there and we all booked a tour out to the falls and thermal areas together.
Valerie went up onto the upper decks and took pictures of the town in the distance, the harbor/pier, a stack of drying fish nets, some hexagonal rock outcroppings in the water, and the lovely setting of snow covered mountains around us. We watched a small ferry-type boat make several trips back and forth dropping off passengers at a dock on the other side of the water we were sitting in. There was a large red and white tent set up, but the people didn’t seem to be going into it. They just seemed to head up the walkway to the top of the hill behind the tent and then walk along the crest. Never fully satisfied our curiosity as to what was going on, but as the day went along, more people were swarming the area (looked like ants from the distance we were at) and walking here and there such that we
decided that since it was a Sunday that people were just out hiking and picnicking on the nice day. (After coming home, and looking at Google maps, I discovered they were walking on various paths on the island of Vidley where Yoko Ono apparently has some impressive artwork and the oldest church in the country as well as the first building to be constructed of stone are located.)
We understood that the terminal here had free wifi. It did, but it was very slow and sporadic in what was basically a small store with Icelandic goods for sale. I found a stack of soft sheepskins and settled on top of them to try and send out some e-mails.
For more of our travel in this Icelandic capitol, visit our first few blogs posted in August of 2010.
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