Day 1 - We arrive in Iceland (August 5)

Sorry for the delay in posting our first blog. About 95% of Iceland has internet access, but we managed to find an unwired cabin for the first part of our trip. Now that we are back in Reykjavik, we are all back online.

To begin, we left Halifax at 10 p.m. on Tuesday and arrived 4.5 hours later at Keflavik Airport near Reykjavik at 5:30 a.m. local time. We all managed to get a few hours of sleep on the plane, but waking up at 2 a.m. Quispamsis time was not the easiest thing to do.

After getting our rental car we drove into a suburb of Reykjavik and without too much difficulty found our AirBnB apartment. All of us were asleep by 8 and we slept until around noon.

We then drove into downtown Reykjavik where we first went to a small seafood restaurant that Karen ate at her last time in Iceland (Summer 2014). (It’s nice to have a well-travelled guide.) We are really struggling with Icelandic place names, but this restaurant has an easy English name, “The Sea Baron”. You pick the kabobs of fish you want (we chose one with shrimp and one with chunks of char) and they grill it up for you. Very tasty and reasonably priced for an Icelandic restaurant.

After lunch we walked around the downtown/oldtown for a bit and visited the Hallgrímskirkja Cathedral and a statue of Leifur Erikson (naturally). From there we walked along the waterfront and then took in a short movie about two recent volcanic eruptions. The first eruption took place on Heimaey in 1973, a small island with a fishing village off the south coast of Iceland. Very dramatic pictures of piles of volcanic ash and homes in the village being consumed by lava and fire. I wish I could remember more, but I drifted off for a bit. The second eruption the film discussed was the 2010 Eyjafallajӧkull eruption. This was the one that disrupted international air travel from March 20 to April 12, 2010. Eyjafallajӧkull last erupted in 1821-23.

After this we drove to a grocery store and then back to our apartment for dinner. After dinner we went to the neighbourhood pool. If you like to swim or enjoy hot tubs, Iceland is the place for you. There are 170+ plus geothermally heated public pools located around Iceland and apparently, on average, each Icelander visits a pool 15 times/year. (75% of homes are heated geothermally.) We have been told that a morning swim followed by a soak in the local hot tub is ritual for many Reykjavikians. Given our relaxed state after our swim, it was easy for all of us to be in bed and asleep by 10:30.

MORE INFO ABOUT ICELAND VOLCANOES - The reason Iceland has so many volcanoes is because the Atlantic rift runs north-south through the country. Along this rift the Eurasia plate and North American plate are spreading apart about 2 cm/year. There is some sort of volcanic eruption every 3-4 years in Iceland; some small, some large. Most eruptions occur sub-glacially, which makes them even more explosive (when the lava contacts the ice).

Remnants of an old volcano on the Snaefellsness Peninsula (see Days 2 and 3)

Volcanic eruptions have had a significant impact on the history of Iceland. The eruption of the Lakagigar fissures for eight months in 1783-84 released so much ash that it caused widespread famine in Iceland (50% of the island’s livestock died), leading to the deaths of 1/5 of the Icelandic population. In Iceland the eruption is known as the Skaftá fires. The effects of the Lakagigar eruption were felt throughout the Northern hemisphere, resulting in several famine inducing unusually hot dry summers and cold winters in Europe and North America.