ugh, departure day. iceland is an amazing country and i want to spend more time exploring it. but we have to leave. in addition, leaving means returning to work. boo.

our flight was at 5pm so we had some time to visit the last item on the itinerary; one of the most visited attractions in iceland, the blue lagoon.

it was tough waking up early this morning, but i wanted to see adrian and lydia one more time before we parted ways. i wished i had spent more time with them. the 2 car situation influenced who you hang with greater than i had anticipated.
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oh boy, here was the one day that had me full of anxiety and nervousness. adrian and i were going to dive in 2 degree celsius glacier water between the north american and eurasian tectonic plates. it is the first time i will have dived in a dry suit, and even though the diving manual suggested it wouldn’t affect my bouyancy, the functions of the suit added another complexity to the already equipment overload that diving requires.

on the way to the dive site, our instructor, let’s call him jeff (cause his icelandic name is a tongue twister), stopped at the tourist lookout over thingvellir to view the rift between the tectonic plates and the lake where we would be diving. it is tough to capture scale in photos but the cliff next to the path is 26 meters (78 feet) high and is part of the rift between the plates. the entire area is being pulled apart by centimeters every year.
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the drive to the capital, reykjavik, wasn’t too difficult. we made it in about 2 hours. the scenery was beautiful and we drove through a tunnel that spanned a fjord. after exiting the tunnel, the feeling of getting close to the city increased with the traffic’s density. we were in a couple traffic jams, the first ones in 10 days.

the directions to the hotel were a bit spotty but we lucked out by taking an educated guess on the turnoff from the highway. the directions said to take a right on a one way street going the other way, so we had to improvise on how to reach the hotel. a more concerning thought was where to park the car, but that was quickly resolved when we noticed a huge parking lot across the street from the hotel.
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another day of long distance driving in the icelandic countryside. chris suggested to check out some turf houses, but that meant another hour added to the already 5 hour drive. no thanks. instead, we headed for the seaport city of Stykkisholmur. the city is surrounded by 10,000 islands and has a spaceship church. plus, harbor towns are so beautiful and quaint.

the drive through the countryside was beautiful. i kept thinking that my sister would love this country since she is outdoorsy.
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yesterday was an easy day in the respect of having only one scheduled activity; a guided boat tour of an abandoned, grassy high cliff island called Drangey. the island hosts one of the largest puffin colonies. a puffin is a bird that looks similar to a toucan. the sea captain has been featured in national geographic magazine for his tours. the boat leaves from the hot pools near a town called saudarkrokur.

on the way to saudarkrokur, we passed through the 2nd largest town in iceland with a population of 12k called akureyri. i think that many live on my block in NYC. i was surprised to see a cruise ship docked at the town. i was even more surprised to see a deloitte building.
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yesterday was a special day for icelandic people. june 21st was the summer solstice, and yesterday the icelandic people celebrated midsummer. midsummer is considered to be one of four most powerful days of the calendar. the other three are christmas eve, new years eve and jan. 6, which is the end of the christmas season. a tradition for midsummer celebration is if you have an illness or sickness, you will be cured if you roll around in the morning dew naked.
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it is growing increasingly harder to post on the website due to internet connectivity or finding the time to write. i spend roughly 70% of my time driving. if only i had been wise enough to know NOT to insist on renting a 5-speed car, the driver pool would be much bigger and i could possibly write while riding like i did on the F.E.L.L. trip. course, chucky and diane aspire to read in the car but end up staring out the window at the ever changing, amazing scenery.

regardless, i love driving and it doesn’t really bother me. yesterday was mostly driving. we went from the east side of iceland driving along the coast in and out of fjords and then drive straight into the upper middle of iceland.
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it is an experience that i will never forget. the effects of continuous sun. it is 11:30 pm and i’m sitting on the terrace of the hotel where the sun looks like it is,um, 7:00pm. essentially dusk. the sun won’t set. it will be dusk for a couple hours and then it will rise again. in fact, June 21st was the summer solstice. not that it mattered since the sun won’t set for another 3 weeks.

i woke up this morning to sunlight behind the shades and suddenly had anxiety of being late for the departure. not that we had a departure time but that we wanted to get an early start to the day. i jumped out of bed and checked my friends watch. 10:30am! oh shit. however, instead of waking chucky and diane, i got dressed to find a local time source to verify. i finally found one on the alarm system in the lobby. 4:30am was the local time. oh brother. 10:30am looks like 4am upside down. it was seriously daylight outside and i was completely out of it. as much as i wanted to stay up to work on the site, i couldn’t. instead, i recalculated the correct time and set the alarm on my iphone. i quickly fell asleep until the alarm went off around 8am (iceland time).
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iceland is desolate, which makes it pristine and beautiful. in the first day, i have seen some amazing landscapes and geological structures from waterfalls to ancient lava fields. prior to the trip, we were informed that iceland is statistically 2 degrees warmer than nyc due to the gulf stream. i am so happy i packed a jacket. it is cold, say 40 – 50 degrees, but the wind, oh, the wind.

anyways, we drive a lot. we landed in keflavik, near reykjavik (i’m going to have to learn how to spell this word instead of looking it up each time). as soon as we did, we jumped in the rental car and drove.
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