Next week at this time Rick and I will be getting on a plane for Iceland. I'm excited. We are busy packing for the sixteen days that we will be "on the road." I think it is sixteen, but the time changes and the six hour flight has me a little confused. Anyway, I'm packing clothes for sixteen days.
A few years ago I read a blog written by a woman who was driving the "Ring Road" which goes all around the island. The drive sounded both adventuresome AND doable by senior citizens. I put it in my bucket list. However, we are not getting any younger and my "someday" bucket list seemed like something I ought to look at more closely.
So I got on the Internet, found the travel agency that I looked at before and started making plans. Nordic Visitor agency is based in Iceland. It offers bus tours, but also self-drive tours. We opted for the fourteen day self-drive tour and then added a day on each end to give us some recovery time from the overnight flight.
I am used to doing all the travel planning - the route, reservations, and all other activity arrangements. It was great to leave this to Nordic Visitor since I know nothing about Iceland except that it has some really beautiful landscapes and they drive on the right side of the road. Much of the information I have read since deciding to do this trip makes me believe that it will be amazing.
The language spoken by the Icelandic people is a version of Old Norse. There are only about 400,000 people who speak this language. The electronic age has not embraced such a rare language and so most Icelanders speak English and use it daily to do business. Nice for us English speaking tourists!
So we are packing and packing. Iceland is near the Arctic Circle. Temperatures in early May are in the 40's during the day. In addition, we are told to expect lots of moisture - fog, rain, mist. So we are packing layers. American's apparently can be identified by the fact that they wear blue jeans which get damp and never dry. We have packed some hiking pants, waterproof hiking boots, raincoats, fleece, fleece and more fleece.
I am told that WiFi is available in all our accomodations so I plan to blog. We will see how well that works so there may not be pictures, but at least you get to follow our adventures.
Gott kvöld - Good evening.
