After spending 2 weeks on a cruise to Greenland I flew back into Iceland. I rented a lovely apartment near the harbor for 4 nights as I was waiting for my 12 day Gate 1 Country Tour to begin. Since restaurants are notoriously expensive in Iceland, I wanted a kitchen to make some simple meals. Oddly groceries are much less expensive than restaurants, and I enjoyed a bit of a food detox after the gluttony of the Seabourn cruise.
Iceland is a pretty new island in geological terms and continues to grow everyday. There are daily earthquakes and lava still flows at a regular rate. A drive of the countryside is nothing but old lava. It’s also where the EuroAsia tectonic plate meets the North American plate and unlike California where the plates are colliding into each other, these are moving apart at the rate of 2cm per year. I know that doesn’t sound like much but if you were a geologist you would be gob smacked. This whole trip has been about rocks. In Greenland the rocks were 3.5 Billion years old and in Iceland they got new rocks last month.
This Church is the most prominent landmark in Reykjavik, towering over the landscape.
It’s a good thing I had downloaded Netflix because the tour was grounded for an entire day due to “extremely hazardous winds”. They were flashing red travel alerts and the entire country shut down, Jim Cantore wasn’t here so I didn’t know if I should be really concerned or not. Fortunately the hazard only existed for 24 hours and we were back on the road again.
WanderlustandWhimSea 