Monday 5 January 2015

To the land of ice and fire

Overdramatic title, much.

Anyhoos, holiday officially starts today. At 4:30pm. When I escape from work to get a train to Gatwick. Nevermind the fact that our flight isn't until tomorrow.

I hope everyone is impressed with my ability to pack five days' worth of stuff into a carry-on bag. I am the queen of packing. Oh yeah. Let's ignore the little voice in my head insisting that I've forgotten something. I haven't. I triple checked my packing list.

Moving on. As with New Zealand, let us have a shortlist of things I'm most looking forward to.
  • Geological geekery
  • Aurora Borealis
  • A final relaxing afternoon/evening in the Blue Lagoon
To be fair, that covers most of what we're doing, but there's also the two so far free days that we've not booked things for. There's plenty of little museums and galleries and whatnot in Reykjavik to explore, so I'm sure that'll be awesome too.

Currently, the Met Office says that in Reykjavik it's 0° and feels like -6°. It's also going to snow. Oh hurray for thermal layers...

Now to stop worrying about the train...

Friday 2 January 2015

Jetting off again

So, I'm still missing the last two posts for our New Zealand trip. It's only... oooh, four months or so since we got back to the UK. I'll sling up a couple of posts with pictures in a bit, but you can blame Amy and Claire for the lack of actual text.

Anyways, moving on. I'm commandeering the blog to be a general travel blog. It's a new year, I have loads of places I want to go and I figured I wanted to share some of it with folks.

First up is a trip to Iceland next week with my friend Gemma. Four days in Reykjavik. With it being the middle of winter, we've got a pretty good chance of seeing the Northern Lights, which would be most awesome. Itinerary so far is as follows:

  • 6th January - Fly out to Reykjavik in the morning, explore Reykjavik in the afternoon, Northern Lights spotting trip in the evening.
  • 7th January - More Reykjavik exploration? Yeah.
  • 8th January - Golden Circle Tour - height of geographical and geological geekery. Pretty lakes, pretty geysers (including the original, helpfully named Geysir) and the point where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet in Thingvellir National Park. Woo.
  • 9th January - Even more Reykjavik exploration? Maybe. And then a late afternoon trip to the super-famous Blue Lagoon to relax in lovely warm pools. Ahh.
  • 10th January - annoyingly early flight back to the UK, perhaps with a couple of hours in London before we get the train back up North.
Hoping that we'll also squidge in a spot of whale-watching, because after New Zealand and the joy of seeing so many whales and dolphins I will take whatever opportunity I can to do it again.

I'm hoping I'll be able to do a blog a day as with the New Zealand epicness. There should be plenty of photos at least. Now, to work out how to keep my packing to a minimum and how to take reasonable photos of the Northern Lights...