My Travels Around the World

Category: Iceland

Iceland Chapter 2: Iceland’s Unofficial Emblem – The Puffin (and other flying creatures)

July 2021

As mentioned in other chapters, I got to escape the COVID pandemic and travel to Iceland for 12 days with National Geographic and Natural Habitat on the Nat Geo Explorer in July of 2021. My good friend Marilyn joined me and we both saw this as an opportunity to get away and regroup. We circumvented the island of Iceland on the National Geographic Explorer in conjunction with Natural Habitat, stopping at many small islands and villages and seeing many, many waterfalls (please see the posts on each of these). But this post is about the birds of Iceland, in particular the Atlantic puffin.

Iceland: Love on the Waves  – Orcas X-Rated

July 18, 2021

In July 2021 I finally got to travel again after 1.5 years of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. My first foray was onboard the National Geographic Explorer on a 12-day circumvention of Iceland. I had been to Iceland twice before (see my older other blogs on Iceland), but this was both an opportunity to escape as most other destinations were not yet open for travel, and a chance to see parts of Iceland I had not seen before. This was a special trip as well as it was sponsored both by National Geographic and Natural Habitat – two companies I love to travel with. There will be lots of posts on this trip to Iceland, but this one is about orcas. But this is not your usual orca blog….

Iceland (2012)

July 7-8, 2012
We left on the non-stop American flight from San Diego to New York. This was one of those times when rather than an old plane, we had a wonderful large plane with flat beds. Wouldn’t you know it was early in the morning and we didn’t need to sleep. Nevertheless, it was awfully comfortable. We landed in NY 30 minutes
early and headed over to Terminal 7 for our next flight – which was 4 hours later. Luck was still with us as Icelandair shares a club with British Air, and while we had access to business via our seats on Icelandair, we had access to the first class club via my status on American. So we spent 4 quiet hours, eating, relaxing, reading and just waiting.

We boarded the Icelandair flight and as wonderful as the seats were on the first leg, now that we needed to sleep, these seats just did not make it. But Icelandair is a very nice airline with little sayings in Icelandic on the pillows, blankets, cups etc. That did not make up for not being able to get comfortable to sleep. The flight from JFK to Iceland was only 5 hours so we slept just a bit. And it felt like we were flying from night to day. Well, literally, we were. But as we arrived in Iceland, the sun was shining and we knew we would not see it set until we were back in the States in one week. This time of year Iceland has light 24-hours a day.

As we neared land we were very anxious to see what Iceland would look like. At first the land was green and lush, but quickly it turned into dark, brown, dry mud. The International airport is tiny in comparison to what we are used to around the world. It took 15 minutes from when we deplaned to when we were sitting in the cab (and that was with waiting for luggage – yes we decided to send it through as we had  cameras and computers to shlep).

And then it took about 40 minutes to get into town. The drive was interesting. The land seems very flat although in the distance one can see mountains. The houses were all very square, somewhat colorful, but really rather boring looking. No very interesting architecture. The roads were empty (it was 6:30 on a Sunday morning after all). The one bright spot was the carpets of purple flowers along the side of the road. We noticed stone sculptures that looked like people along the road as well. Turns out they were cairns (man-made pile or stack of stones) used as markers along the numerous single-file roads or paths that crisscrossed the island…

 

To read more of my Iceland blog from 2012, please click on this link:

Iceland 2012

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