28 years ago today we wed. If you’ve wondered why we like to travel in May, now you know. We drove about 30 minutes through the town of Hveragerdi (try and pronounce that one – we’ve been told it actually starts with a K sound) and just outside of the town is the parking lot…

The Geysir geothermal area in Haukadalur Valley is a small but accessible hot spring on the Golden Circle in the western part of Iceland. The Strokkur geyser is the only one active right now. It erupts about every 5-10 minutes reaching 65-130 feet high. We stayed to watch a few eruptions. They were pretty cool,…

We woke early at the Glass House as it was sunny this morning – sleep masks can only do so much. We were treated to another great view of Hekla volcano – all that snow on the mountains is new since last night! By the time we had a relaxing breakfast and another soak in…

20 minutes east of Vik on Hwy 1 is Hjorleifshofdi, a 221m palagonite inselberg created from the interaction of water with volcanic glass, resulting in an isolated hill with chemical composition similar to basalt. The Gigjagja Cave in the wall of the mesa is affectionately called the ‘Yoda Cave’ (see below photo). The opening scenes…

Today we woke up to beautiful sunny weather with relatively clear skies. This was the first day we had no rain! It is still darn cold, though. Maybe 10 degrees and a lot colder when its windy (which is all the time). Reynisfjara black sand beach is at the edge of the town of Vik.…

Solheimajokull glacier is 8km long & 2km wide and flows from the mighty Myrdalsjokull ice cap – the 4th largest on Iceland with many other outlet glaciers. The ice cap lies over the Katla volcano which made a big mess with its last major eruption in 1918. A few smaller eruptions more recently did not…

Happy Mother’s Day! Mother’s Day has been celebrated in Iceland since 1934 (on the 2nd Sunday in May). This is the bag that Dave is using for his lunch. I think it came from a shop at Reitmans. We took a very long drive today (2.5 hours) east to see the Jokulsarlon Glacial Lagoon –…

Skogar Museum was a surprisingly great experience. We are not museum people in general so we might visit one museum per trip. The Skogasafn was small in stature but well executed. We got to explore early Icelandic history! Inside several buildings were the folk museum and the technical/transport museum. Outside was the open air museum…

And we’re off to Iceland. Unfortunately, with flights just recovering their previous schedules, we couldn’t fly direct out of Vancouver to Reykjavik. We had to book via Seattle. We flew to SeaTac mid morning and had a 4 hour layover. The upside of that is we had time for a nice breakfast in YVR, tasty…