Two weeks in another world
Travel hints and info
The rules are different everywhere — wait to be seated? find your own table? order all at once? What IS that on the menu in a foreign language you probably don’t speak well? Do you pay at the register? Do you tip? Is it normal to be left alone until you summon a waiter?
Read MoreCheck any travel guide, or campervan rental site, and you’ll very likely see some sort of notice that you can “camp anywhere” in Iceland, that there is a law that says you can camp wherever you want for one night. It’s free! It’s beautiful!
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Spring in Iceland is likely to have all the weather — sometimes even in the same day. (“If you don’t like the weather, wait 10 minutes!”, we heard dozens of times). So – what to wear? The answer? Layers. Of course.
Read MoreWant to learn a little Icelandic? You don’t actually need it in Iceland, everyone speaks perfect English, but it’s fun to try just a bit.
Read MoreI think it’s just polite to try to learn a few words in the language of the country you’re visiting. You don’t need to speak fluently, and you’ll probably mangle the few words you know, but learning just a few — please, thank you, hello — is nice. I hate seeing people just start talking […]
Read MoreI’ll be the first one to tell you that I hate yogurt. I loathe the stuff. It’s right up there with oatmeal and raisins and lutefisk. I don’t even like frozen yogurt, which purports to be sweet and ice-cream like. I cannot remember the last time I voluntarily ate the stuff.
Read MoreEvery country has some food, some ‘national dish’ that defies all good taste. Haggis, balut, lutefisk, casu marzu…it’s a point of pride to eat it, and great fun dare to visiting tourists to try
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There are wild reindeer in the eastern fjords (although I missed my one chance to take a picture of the ‘caribou next 2 miles’ sign). This prompted a conversation in the car about the differences between caribou and reindeer (a difference in semantics really only used by North Americans, I discovered — apparently everyone else […]
Read MoreThere are hundreds of volcanic cones dotting the landscape of Iceland. Most are extinct, of course — although there are eruptions every few years that remind everyone that Iceland isn’t quite docile yet. The stark and rocky sides of volcanic craters are a huge tourist attraction in Iceland — climbing to the rims of extinct […]
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There are two general types of basaltic lava flows, pāhoehoe and ʻaʻā. In Iceland, they are called helluhraun and apalhraun. Pāhoehoe Pāhoehoe is smooth thick lava, that flows like molasses and cools in wavy arcs. When lava flows slowly, a crust can form on top that inhibits the lava from bursting through. It can form into huge […]
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