Adventures With Patti

When my south coast/Sky Lagoon tour fell through, I decided to make it an urban day. I walked three miles from the Hostel to the dock where the whale watching tour was to take place, and along the way I took in the urban landscape. Downtown Reykjavik seems to be a mix of residential and commercial property, not organized in any way that looked apparent to me. An established neighborhood of traditional houses. Most of these older homes were stucco with corrugated metal roofs. New apartments being built near the harbor and downtown Reykjavik.  Another new apartment building, entirely clad in corrugated metal. Notice the large picture window with the smaller pane that opens. I saw these on almost all buildings, old and new. New buildings, mostly apartments, south of downtown Reykjavik Reykjavik is a small city but has grown recently. It’s getting sprawly. It made me think of Canberra, Australia in scale and modernity, but with some uniquely Icelandic features. Throughout the city, both re

My main motivation for stopping in Iceland was to witness its geology on the ground. One of my aims was to actually walk down into the Mid Atlantic Rift, which is what I was able to do on the first day’s tour. The rift runs from southwest to northeast across the island, but is highlighted in Thingvellir National Park, which is found on Iceland’s “Golden Circle.” Lake spanning the rift in Thingvellir National Park. On the official Rift trail at Thingvellir National Park.   Not wanting to rent a car and drive to sites alone, I joined a bus tour thinking that it would be better to experience Iceland’s features with others. As it turns out, little socializing took place on this tour. Our guide, a woman named Hilde, gave a brief geologic or historic lesson as the bus drove to each featured spot, along with instructions to meet back at a particular time (“And this means you should be in your seat with the seat belt buckled, so we are not delayed in arriving at our next destination,” she anno

I've put this place on maps so many times, I just had to visit. Icelandair flies directly from Minneapolis to Reykjavik so on this trip I scheduled a stopover here on my return from Italy. I'm proud of this map showing tectonic plates of the world. It's been used and reused because it does a good job of showing the relationship between the continents and their plates. As I type I'm sitting atop the spot where the North American and Eurasian Plates converge. Or more correctly, diverge. Iceland's landscape varies greatly from place to place. Departing the airport on an overcast late afternoon, I was struck by its starkness. The highway runs through mile after mile of volcanic rubble just barely colonized by herbs and mosses. Large areas are just fractured humps of solidified lava and scrubby vegetation. I say that the color palette of Iceland is gray and gold with accents of white and blue (if the sky happens to clear.) Fractured mound of lava, colonized by moss, alon

 Rain was predicted for Sunday, so we started the day with a trip to a cheese factory in the Val di Non. The point is not to tour the factory, but to shop the selection of local specialties. Each factory makes a few of its own cheeses, and they trade with others so each shop can sell a variety. Apologies for the lack of photos; I was busy tasting, oohing, and aahing.  The drive to the cheese factory took us through the center of Italy's apple-growing region. Here, unlike other areas near the alps, the land is wide plateau rather than a narrow valley, but the elevations are a bit too high for good grapes. I noticed that unlike most of the orchards I see in America where trees spread, here many are trained vertically. The trees are planted in rows the right distance apart to run a tractor between them for easy picking. Furthermore, many of the orchards are covered by nets to protect the fruit from hailstorms which are fairly common in this mountain region. Cheese in hand, we then dro