Today we explored Pompeii. Kenzie did a lot of research about the city for her 4th grade independent project so she was able to tell stories about the places we saw including the House of Stephanus, the Garden of Fugitives, and Pompeii’s Coliseum.
Tonight ended with another torrential downpour, this time with huge hail!
The day started off with a 6am flight to Newark then an 8 1/2 hour flight to Naples. From there we took an hour bus ride to our hotel in Sorrento, passing Mount Vesuvius along the way. Since our room wasn’t quite ready, we explored the town then returned for a 5 hour nap. We ended our first day with gelato, more exploring, then a torrential downpour!
The Atlantic published a great story about the wildfires and all that went on behind the scenes. The PDF of that story is included here.
After visiting the rural parts of Iceland, we wrapped up our trip with some time in the only major city in Iceland (Reykjavik). We started with a Segway tour (that’s our go-to move in a new city to get an overview of the place, hit all the popular spots, and see what we want to go back and spend more time visiting). Having rental scooters in town was also a great way to get around. Some of the highlights included visiting the Reykjavik fire department to trade patches and check out their engines, walking around the downtown shops, and visiting the Icelandic penis museum. Yep, that’s right, who knew, but we wandered by an “interesting” storefront and sculpture that caught our attention and discovered that Reykjavik is home to the Icelandic Phallological Museum. You just know we couldn’t pass on checking that out. The museum was ok, but the gift shop was definitely worth a stop! 🙂 We did skip the Phallic Cafe after learning about traditional Icelandic food (shark that has been buried 6 months to ferment, puffin, and horse). I’d rather not know what was on that menu.
After a week away, it was time to head home and pick Kenzie up from grandmas house in California. Great trip, and a perfect place to venture out after the last year in lockdown!
On one of our last days in Iceland, we did the Golden Circle, which is a popular day trip from Reykjavik. It was an easy day, with some great scenery. We saw the original “geysir” (where the word comes from), an incredible waterfall, and some of the most historic areas of Iceland where the origins of government developed over 1000 years ago.
So after a day of recovery from hiking the volcano, we were ready to try another long hike. This time it was to the hot springs thermal river. This river is created by geothermal springs and so the water is the temperature of a hot tub. It’s was a long hike to get there, but a pretty amazing experience relaxing in a 100-degree river for our now daily Icelandic “soak.”
After hiking the volcano we headed down the south coast of Iceland for a few easy days of sightseeing. Lots of waterfalls and beautiful scenery. We went as far as Vik (which you might recognize if you’ve been watching the Netflix series Katal, that red church should look familiar). We ended the first day at a restaurant serving traditional Icelandic food. But we were not feeling that adventurous so we played it safe and ordered fish and chips from the tourist menu.
We hiked up the volcano!
Sometimes the timing just works out, and that was the case with Mount Fagradalsfjall erupting during our trip. When we started planning this trip it was not there, but in March the volcano opened up and it was relatively accessible (aka a very difficult but doable hike). It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so we brought our hiking gear and went for it. The day we hiked up, the volcano was not as active as it was initially, but it was still very much alive. It was a tough hike, up an incredibly steep mountain at some points, and very very windy at the peak. But we made it. Our goal was to roast hot dogs on the lava flow, and we did it! It really was an amazing experience, and this alone would have been worth making the trip.
Full disclosure, the 2 beautiful pictures of the eruption were not ones I took. The day we were there it was not this active, but I had to post them just to show what it looked like at peak eruption and how accessible it was. Amazing day!
After over a year of being grounded from international travel by Covid, we were finally able to get out and take a trip. Iceland seemed like the perfect choice. Iceland has been on our list for a while, and the chance to go to a country that had a handle on Covid and do a trip mainly in a motorhome on our own seemed like the perfect combination.
Kenzie decided she really wanted to visit her grandmas, so it was just Jodi and I.
After jumping through a few new Covid related hoops (I guess that’s the future of travel at least in the near term) we got the all-clear from our test and were free to start our trip. We took our motorhome and headed right to the Blue Lagoon to get our first Icelandic “soak” on. The water was amazing!
Brad still hadn’t received his Covid test results so we went to the testing site at the airport. They seemed a bit perplexed untold Brad he could move freely about the country and have fun. First stop- the Blue Lagoon! It was beautiful and so warm!
After the Blue Lagoon we went to check out the volcano. We hadn’t planned on hiking up the mountain to get a better view but then we decided to do a little at a time. We were able to see the whole lava field which has grown significantly over the past several weeks. We stopped before we could see the red flowing lava because it seemed that the we would need to hike a long way (all up hill). Later, we found out it may have only been another 20 minutes or so.
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