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Iceland Recap #1
Monday, September 30th, 2019 10:34 pm[I started to write a blog post about my Iceland trip on the ride home, then promptly got busy on return, so didn't even post the beginning. Hopefully I can carve out some more time in October for blogging; there's plenty to share!]
International travel in the previous decade featured planned and opportunistic visits to a desktop computer to check email and post to LiveJournal. Many hostels had a computer or two in a common area and you could pay cash at cyber cafes to use the Internet for a few hours.
Traveling in 2019 means the Internet is always in your pocket and you can reply to an email at any ol' cafe (many of which offer free WiFi but none of which have a keyboard handy). Typing on a phone is a pretty miserable experience, so proper travel journaling tends to lose out to flipping through RSS feeds of publications that haven't woken up yet.
A brief Iceland trip report, written on a smartphone keyboard on a plane over the great plains…
The idea for the trip was to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary and Kelly and my 4th. Icelandair's Denver to Reykjavík flight features a totally reasonable early evening departure so we had ample time to show up at my parents' house early, focus my mom on finishing packing, and get to the airport with no need to rush around. The overnight nature of the flight had given me hope that plane-sleep would be possible, but with a flight time under eight hours you'd have to be a sleep ninja to get a good night's rest between beverage service and morning-over-Greenland (which was gorgeous, by the way, with black stony peaks poking up through white ice and clouds).
Upon landing we managed to take a bus into town, pick up a car, find a restaurant, and buy groceries (all praise the "Google Lens live-translate the words your camera is pointing at" feature of Google Translate for helping us avoid allergies and properly identify herring in wine sauce). Everyone else in the car nodded off while Google Maps led us to our rental cottage near Þingvellir lake. I guess travel in the smartphone era isn't all bad.
Þingvellir, ancient site of the Allþing the world's first parliament, sits dramatically between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. The Öxará river plunges over the cliff face (the first of many waterfalls we saw) and then shifts suddenly back to a slow and wide steam. The seats of government power tend to be designed to inspire awe—think of the grand marble buildings in Washington, inspired by the marble ruins of ancient governments in Athens and Rome. But as upstarts with only the resources available on a volcanic island and whatever they can row across the North Atlantic, an annual gathering in a stunning outdoor setting saves labor for the more important work of building farmhouses that stay warm for the winter.
International travel in the previous decade featured planned and opportunistic visits to a desktop computer to check email and post to LiveJournal. Many hostels had a computer or two in a common area and you could pay cash at cyber cafes to use the Internet for a few hours.
Traveling in 2019 means the Internet is always in your pocket and you can reply to an email at any ol' cafe (many of which offer free WiFi but none of which have a keyboard handy). Typing on a phone is a pretty miserable experience, so proper travel journaling tends to lose out to flipping through RSS feeds of publications that haven't woken up yet.
A brief Iceland trip report, written on a smartphone keyboard on a plane over the great plains…
The idea for the trip was to celebrate my parents' 50th wedding anniversary and Kelly and my 4th. Icelandair's Denver to Reykjavík flight features a totally reasonable early evening departure so we had ample time to show up at my parents' house early, focus my mom on finishing packing, and get to the airport with no need to rush around. The overnight nature of the flight had given me hope that plane-sleep would be possible, but with a flight time under eight hours you'd have to be a sleep ninja to get a good night's rest between beverage service and morning-over-Greenland (which was gorgeous, by the way, with black stony peaks poking up through white ice and clouds).
Upon landing we managed to take a bus into town, pick up a car, find a restaurant, and buy groceries (all praise the "Google Lens live-translate the words your camera is pointing at" feature of Google Translate for helping us avoid allergies and properly identify herring in wine sauce). Everyone else in the car nodded off while Google Maps led us to our rental cottage near Þingvellir lake. I guess travel in the smartphone era isn't all bad.
Þingvellir, ancient site of the Allþing the world's first parliament, sits dramatically between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. The Öxará river plunges over the cliff face (the first of many waterfalls we saw) and then shifts suddenly back to a slow and wide steam. The seats of government power tend to be designed to inspire awe—think of the grand marble buildings in Washington, inspired by the marble ruins of ancient governments in Athens and Rome. But as upstarts with only the resources available on a volcanic island and whatever they can row across the North Atlantic, an annual gathering in a stunning outdoor setting saves labor for the more important work of building farmhouses that stay warm for the winter.
