“Spring Break” in
Iceland
March 2015
Seriously, Spring Break in Iceland? Granted, it’s not beaches & palm trees, but to paraphrase a famous movie line: We don’t need no stinkin’ beaches! Iceland has been on our to-do-sometime list, and interest was further stimulated last spring when we flew to Europe on Icelandair thru Keflavik airport outside Reykjavik. Pretty views of the countryside, enticing tourist info in the seat pockets. My brother Doug & sister-in-law Ann had an enjoyable escorted tour circling the country during the summer. We’ve opted for a shorter 3-night visit focused on Reykjavik w/ some add-on excursions. Nearing the end of 2 academic years of “semi-retirement,” this is my last semester of teaching ̶ we chose the March break in classes to put us into the Northern Lights season (fingers crossed). Iceland is just south of the Arctic Circle, but the Gulf Stream keeps temps “surprisingly moderate” (says one travel site), should be in the 20s and 30s (fingers crossed again). And volcanoes will hopefully be calm (are we running out of fingers to cross?). We hoped to connect w/ former colleague Thor, an Icelandic native who left UAlbany to take a very attractive offer back home, but he’s located too far north in Akureyri.
We’ve been
having a pretty rough winter. By early March we still had over 2 feet of snow
on the ground. Our paper says it was “the coldest February in our lifetime”
(the only colder was 1934), wind chills down to -30°! So maybe Iceland will
warm us up.
Saturday, 3/14:
We have the luxury of almost a full
day to finish our trip prep. Not our usual packing: we need to be ready for
both cold (e.g., long underwear) and rain. I watch the UAlbany men’s basketball
team win their league championship on a last-second 3-pointer by the player
whose mother died during the season after the team and campus had rallied
around the family; the women’s team won yesterday, so both are headed to “March
Madness.” We’re finally seeing some grass over the past week here, tho plenty
of snow piles still around. A rainy foggy drive to NYC, the usual exciting ride
thru traffic in the Bronx & Queens, drop off the car (airparkparking.com) and
shuttle to JFK. It’s good we weren’t flying last night or this AM: lots of
lengthy delays and cancellations due to gale force winds up to 75 mph in
Iceland; even bus tours into the countryside were being cancelled. But our
Icelandair 9pm flight departs a bit early. So we’re off to the land of fire and
ice, hopefully not much of either.
