It’s at this point in the trip that this writer’s limited language skills fall apart. I know about 200 words of German and maybe 100 of French (maybe even more words in English!) and can generally figure what’s a verb and what’s a noun and am able to count to ten. There are enough common word roots between them that you can muddle through. But just look at the place name in the title above…so many vowels and consonants all in the wrong places. Iceland is an adventure all of its own.

It should have been seasonably cold in Akureyri, but our good weather trend continued…it even extended to reasonably calm seas yesterday as we crossed the North Atlantic. We’re now as far north as we’ve ever been, above the 66th parallel. This day’s excursion was via a tour bus to see the north Iceland countryside.

Iceland truly is a land of fire and ice. We could see the snow not too far above us and could see lava flows and the like everywhere. Some of it looked familiar. We stopped at an area of volcanic features like mud pots; they were similar to Yellowstone, but Iceland lets you get a lot closer. The tour guide talked about lava tubes, but we’ve walked through the Ape Caves enough that we know about those.

One new thing: our stop near a lake (Myvatn) that had been formed by a lava flow. Well, more than just one new thing: first, there was an intriguing lava labyrinth that the tour guide walked through with some of the group. Second, the lake came equipped with millions of freshly hatched midges…you couldn’t walk outside without having a swarm of them surrounding you. The fish in the lake surely don’t go hungry.

All of the mountains built up by volcanos leave mountain snow nowhere to go, meaning the island has some tremendous waterfalls in the spring. We stopped at Godafoss, a great body of rushing water. One of the themes of this trip certainly is water in large quantities going somewhere in a hurry.

Fun facts: Iceland has just one native mammal, the arctic fox. A kid 100 years old must have been reading ads in the back of a comic book and saw a get rich scheme about minks…ordered some, and you can guess the result. What happens when an animal escapes into a climate where they have no predators? Second: Akureyri is a long, long drive from Reykjavik. The airport here has some international flights; according to our tour guide it’s cheaper to fly to London Gatwick airport then on to Reykjavik than to fly there directly. Tomorrow we move to the NW corner of the island, a town called Isfjordur. More then…