#loveithere

I’m in Iceland, it’s our last night here and tomorrow I head home again to a life far more chaotic and messy than mine has been for the past 3-1/2 weeks. Never feel quite ready for this.

My roommate is on the phone with her husband so I gave them some privacy. It’s nearly 11pm and I really want to go to bed. Argh!

So, my thoughts on Iceland:

I'm immensely grateful for the experience of traveling here. It’s a spectacularly beautiful country, in big and small ways. One of the best things about summer here is how slowly the sun moves across the sky. At 7 or 8pm you have beautiful, warm light. When I arrived, at 10pm you could still read a book outside, at 4:30 it was already light out. Now it’s getting darker earlier and by the end of the year it will be mostly dusk and only about three hours of daylight.

I can see why everyone falls in love with the place.

Less than 400,000 people in the entire country equals about a quarter of the population of the San Fernando Valley in California (1.17 million) where I live.

I’ve been traveling with a friend, we have very different traveling styles. I’m open ended about this. I didn’t do and see things I’d wanted to, but it wasn’t a bad trip by any measure. More a tasting menu with an invitation to return and have a meal the next time. I’m okay with that.

We bought and ate groceries the entire last 10 days rather than eating out. My travel companion doesn’t eat carbs, so very little food and drink fits the bill for her. And food here is really expensive. Much is imported. It wasn’t a huge thing, but I’ve never traveled that way and I've missed having a glass of wine and just hanging out in a place much more than I would have thought.

Hot pots made up for this. There are hot pots - soaking tubs in pools, some hot, some warm, some cooler. You move from one the the other. They are amazing. Several are outdoors, one we visited was on the beach just up from the ocean, another overlooked a fjord. They are commonly used by locals and travelers so they are a lively place to hang out and hear someone else’s story, swap tips and places you’ve liked along the way.

Prior to visiting, I would never have considered coming here in the winter, now I would. The summer weather the last two days has been really cold. The wind blowing down from the Arctic had dropped temps to below 5 degrees Celcius (about 40 Farenheit) and been VERY WINDY. I wore a camisole, T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, sweater and jacket. On the bottom underwear, long shorts, leggings with pants over them. Tall wool socks, boots, gaiter if needed, gloves, hat. And this is summer!

The Earthwatch expedition was amazing, the researchers passionate young folks, many just earning their Masters degree. We either spent the day on land watching the ocean for sea life with binoculars at a place 100 yards from a puffin colony, or on a boat following a pod of whales/dolphins. The first day we saw a blue whale close to the boat - the whale was 100+ feet long, our boat 20 feet long, but it allowed us to travel alongside it for a long time before we turned away and moved on. I had seen blue whales twice before from a sail boat, but this was very moving and we were very close.