Akureyri iceland

I don't mean to imply that the flood is totally behind us.  But for the most part we have put it out of out thoughts and minds and carry on lives as if it didn't happen.  It touches my mind most when I go to do an art project and think of supplies......oops, that was there before the flood!

So when the opportunity to take this class came up, I was all excited.  Donna LeFleur is teaching her  Amulets, Talisman and Spirit Pendents.  Doesn't that sound amazing?

We need to bring some personal item to use as a talisman.  I  have thought for a few weeks now on what to bring for my piece.  Everything that crosses my mind is gone.

I finally uncovered a gilded leaf that used to belong to my mother.  Not that we ha a really strong connection, but I think it would please her if I used it for this class.  She would have been in the front row on Saturday.

But now that I have had time to think about it, I am thinking that Chloe's dog tags might be a good thing too.  Maybe I'll bring both and see what happens when I get there.

that is the Arctic Circle!  During these days we were having 22 hours of sunlight.

So here we were in Iceland.  Akureyri.  Don't ask me to pronounce anything in Iceland.

See that dotted line above the country?   That is the Arctic Circle.  During the day we had 22 hours of sunlight.

This is what midnight looks like there.

As luck would have it, Frank was reading his favorite author.  Clive had his characters running around Reykjavik and the icefields all over Iceland so Frank was having fun with pointing out familiar things to me.


 We took a long bus ride (Made better by the fact that Frank DID have his Dramamine and DID NOT throw up on this trip.)  waterfall

I can't even tell you the scale of this waterfall.  Huge!  The upper falls are 96 feet high.  The sound of the water falling over the cliffs was so loud you could hear it from nearly half a mile away as we hiked toward the site.

 I could have stood there forever.  But there was more to see.

We hiked up the hill to the café for some pie and tea.  I love bridges.  There is no better way to improve a landscape than to slap a bridge across the creek and put some mountains in the distance!

 Further down the valley along the road they call the Golden Circle, the land became flattened.  Glaciers once scoured the landscape flat and carved deep grooves for these beautiful inland fjords.

 You can see the sky was pretty dark and threatening.  This is called False Crater Lake.  In this area the lava flows encountered colder water and formed craters rather than lava fields like on the rest of the island.

Not sure if you can read the explanation they have, LOL.  Like I said, you can't really understand a lot of Iceland.

Just look at the pictures!

Swissys are sheep herders, you know.



The sheep were grazing in the fields around the craters. Mind you, there were people everywhere.  But when the lambs saw me, they came running over to me and wanted to get really close.  It was like they knew me!  Frank couldn't believe it.  They followed me the whole time I was there.  I kept trying to shake them, but they persisted.  When we left, they bleated pitifully, come back!

The landscape was so beautiful.  You know, I actually think the Dimmuborga explanations are from the next place we went.  I will try to write that up for the next post for you.  It is the Lava Fields.

Different in its own stark black beauty.

And the Sulfa Steam Pits.  Later.

Sailing day Southhampton England

FYI:  The vacation posts will have a lot of photos so I am going to make them smaller in the posts.  You can make them larger by clicking on them and just scrolling though the photos themselves.  Or individually.  Some of them are very well worth making larger!

The plan was to take a flight from Baton Rouge to Houston, then we had first class tickets from Houston to London directly.  But the Baton Rouge flight took off almost an hour late and we missed the connection in Houston by 5 minutes.

We always build a day into our travel in case of disasters and we needed nearly every second of this one.


We were put on the 4:30 pm direct Houston/Heathrow flight (didn't make it on), then on the 8:30 pm direct Houston/Heathrow flight (got cancelled), then on an 11:30 pm flight to Washington DC Dulles  to sleep overnight in the terminal waiting for the 7 am London flight the next day.

We had no idea we would be on the Washington Dulles flight, we wondered if our luggage knew it would need to be on that flight as well.  We wondered if we would ever see it again because we knew we would be in no place to be able to receive the luggage.

 Finally we made it to London after a 12 hour flight, Frank in the back of the plane sitting next to a very young woman with a 6 month old baby, both of whom cried the  entire light.  And me in the middle section of the plane watching 3 movies trying not to wake the people on either side of me.  Obviously not first class.

We had planned on touring around London a bit but that didn't happen!  Alas, Big Ben.

On Friday, as we rode the bus to the pier we passed at least 3 Ikeas!  The Costco stores I saw Norway and Iceland had 3 stories! Wow!

We were sailing on the Norwegian Jade, a ship we had been on several times before in various locations in Alaska and the Caribbean. 

As we left the Southhampton pier, we were reminded of another famous ship that had also sailed from that great city so many years ago, heading on nearly the same path as we were taking toward Iceland.....the Titanic.  Luckily the passengers on the Jade had a happier cruise.



 It was a clear day when we left port. If I owned a sailboat like this, I would greet the passengers on cruise ships too!  What a lovely way to spend a weekend outing.

As we were sipping our tea and eating crumpets on Deck 12, I don't think I had found those amazing brownies yet, when I realized a thick fog was rolling in.



We watched the cloud come over the ship as the foghorn sounded.  We went from clear day to heavy cloud overhead.  I have never seen a fog like this. 

As the Jade went deeper into the the fog you could see the layers from the ocean looking up to the clearer atmosphere.

I have a number of sunset photos if anyone is into that, let me know, I can share with you.  I play with screwing up the camera settings and taking a bunch of them. 

As we walked down Deck 7 Promenade it was unbelievable to see the fog thick enough to obscure the ship a quarter of the way down the deck.

We sailed like this throughout the night. This was not the only time we would run into this incredible fog on this  trip.

Next stop, Bergen Norway.

Just getting there was tough

The first hurdle was getting to London.  We had a direct flight to Houston from Baton Rouge.  Which took off an hour late, causing us to miss the direct flight with first class tickets from Houston to London.  The woman chuckled as she said, I can put you on this next flight....but you won't make it.  (so why put us on it, duh?)

After we didn't make that flight, we were put on another flight.....which was cancelled.

I stood in the terminal, feeling kinda terminal, and shoved my ticket into on of those machines that  proclaimed "see what connections you can make!" Frank was yelling at me, I thought I might connect with a nice Greek millionaire.  It put me on a flight to Dulles Washington DC/London.

Frank yelled at me for doing that, but I couldn't undo it. After an hour when he got to the front of the line, the customer service rep said , yep, sure enough, he needed to be on that flight as well.

We rushed across the Houston Airport for the THIRD time in 5 hours to a different terminal and got there just as they were closing the doors.  Frank yelled at me the whole way about not wanting to be on that flight.

When we got there, he told the gate attendant he didn't want to be on the flight, she shut the gate down, looked at his stuff, told him he NEEDED to be on the flight.........stopped the plane and got us on.

That is how we ended up sleeping on benches in Dulles Airport Washington DC overnight, and thankfully in London the next day.  It had taken us only 36 hours to get there.  Frank sat next to a woman in the window seat with a 6 month old baby in her lap , both of whom cried the whole way.  Better man than I am, for sure. 

Remember those first class tickets?  We ended up jammed in middle seats for 11 1/2 hours in separate sections of the plane, not even close to each other.

But we were in London!  Now we just had to get to the ship somehow.

Being American and thinking his money ruled the world, we got kicked off three buses before Frank figured out we had to get us some of that English money.  I was just too tired to care at that point. 

We are so traveling with Marchita next time..........And taking less luggage.