(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

After nearly 140 posts, it is finally time to move on from my 2014 travels.   This is the first in a series of “Travel Flashback” posts that revisit some of my pre-2014 travels.  Of course, I still have some  travel plans going forward, so I will report on those too as they happen.

Like most great trips, our trip to Iceland in the summer of 2008 was not the culmination of years of planning.  I had always been intrigued by Iceland but assumed that it would be too expensive for a high-season trip.

Iceland *was* expensive while we were there, as this was just prior to the Icelandic banking crisis of late 2008, but we were prompted to visit by a tremendous promotional airfare from Icelandair.  We committed to our extremely cheap flights about 6 months in advance and began reading up on economical ways to travel through this notoriously expensive country.   In a nutshell: we kept our costs down by utilizing shared bathrooms and eating lots of Thai food.  Iceland has a small Thai community and it turned out that our favourite international cuisine was the cheapest dining option (other than hot dogs)!

We saw so much in Iceland that it is impossible to capture it all in a single post.    How much did we like it?  We often joke about applying for accreditation and/or compensation from the Icelandic tourism authorities, as we have said on many occasions that it was our favourite trip ever.   In short:  if you love the outdoors and have any sort of interest in geology, Iceland is a stunning place to visit.   It may not get hot in the summer (the high was 16’C when we were there) but there is plenty of daylight.   Thanks to the moderating ocean currents, the winters aren’t as cold as you might expect:  we were told that it rarely drops below -10’C.

We flew into the capital city of Reykjavik after a flight of less than 5 hours from Toronto.   Iceland only has about 300,000 inhabitants, two-thirds of whom live in Reykjavik.    This is where you experience cutting-edge urban Iceland.  After a couple of days in the Reykjavik area, we set off on a day-long journey to the northern city of Akureyri.

I’ll focus on the even more spectacular Northern Iceland in a future post.  For today’s post, I’m focusing on the photos from our trans-Icelandic odyssey.    We had not yet been to Nunavut but the Icelandic interior looked like our “mental image” of Canada’s northern tundra.

The road is only open for a couple of months of the year.  *Nobody* lives in the interior.  In fact, rather than put them into prison,  it was an ancient Icelandic custom to exile serious criminals to the bleak interior.   If they survived for 20 years, they could return to society.

There is plenty of bizarre geological bubbling, gurgling and exploding in Iceland, as it lies at the intersection of the North American and European plates.  In fact, the word “Geyser” comes from the Icelandic “Geysir”.  Hot springs, geysers and riotously coloured landscapes are everywhere.   So are massive waterfalls…and we saw all of these within the space of a couple of hours, in addition to the stark desolation of the Icelandic tundra.

I’ll eventually write some more about Iceland but the next post will be about something else altogether.   I’ve also just committed to some shorter trips in the next couple of months…stay tuned for a series of surprises!