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13 March 2011

It's time for some new adventures...

It's been a while. I've been a terrible blogger. It's been a very strange couple months -- maybe it's because I haven't been doing the outdoorsy things that I love nearly enough! But I'm hoping to be back in full force for a while, at least until my master's project takes over my life in April.

I'm happy to be back with news of some upcoming adventures. In the works is a 5 week summer roadtrip with Marika, my best friend from high school. I am ridiculously excited to finally get to explore the middle of this country! I'll post more details about the route/plans soon.

The adventure that currently has my full attention is...

Iceland!

Yep, my trip to Nepal revived/reminded me of my excitement and interest in traveling, so I spent some time searching for plane tickets to cool new places over spring break. Here's a really neat section of the kayak.com (the website that I usually use to buy my plane tickets... it's just a coincidence that it happens to be named the way it is!). This page lets you type in a starting airport and shows you the prices of all possible destinations with ticket prices. This led me to realize that Iceland was a very convenient 4 hour non-stop flight from Boston for only ~$450! After talking with a few people about their trips to Iceland and only hearing good things, I decided to buy a ticket.

I'll be heading over there in less than a week with Simon, a Boston friend from my New Hampshire internship last summer. We are currently discovering that traveling in Iceland in the off season will certainly be an adventure. The roads can be in terrible condition, making travel outside of Reykjavik a nightmare. We're hoping to venture out of the city during the first half of the week, and explore the city for the last few days. Hopefully this will give us enough of a time-cushion when we get stranded on a glacier somewhere.

Some items on the very tentative agenda include:
  • Lots of hiking/walking around
  • Checking out the cliffs/fjords on the coast
  • Finding a volcano (and hoping it doesn't explode and keep me from getting back to my graduate project...)
  • Seeing the northern lights (assuming the stars align... or something)
  • Visiting Gullfoss - a huge touristy waterfall! 
  • Geysers!
  • Visiting a geothermal power plant, because we're nerds like that. 
  • Visiting the famous Blue Lagoon for an afternoon
  • Museums in Reykjavik
  • Staying at farms around the country. They have a really neat program that lets tourists stay in farmhouses - all you need is your sleeping bag. I guess it's the Iceland version of a B&B?
  • Kayaking?????? Still looking into this option since I can't imagine I will be dragging all my kayak gear over there.
 Yay! More to come soon :)

3 comments:

Tammela said...

Nena you will have SO much fun in Iceland! In just one day last summer my parents and I made it to Gullfoss (gorgeous waterfall which you can approach/view from top and bottom) and the geysers and the Blue Lagoon. Can't wait to hear about your time there.

Bailey said...

Whoa Nena.. Whoa! This Kayak.com explore thing you just introduced me too may have just changed my life. This is bigger than the hourly weather graph.

Rabindra Parajuli said...

Sounds Great:)

looking forward to read more!