Birthday of Janet Morris-Bair-Stutzman

For you, Mom...

You are well-loved. Another good year of life to you. Cheers! [raises imaginary glass]

Bonus photozzzz!

Here's some more photos I thought you should see...

Our feet warming up in a little hot spring pool near Reykjavik 

We ended up camping near a German couple right next to a volcano visitor center in the middle of nowhere after hitch hiking. The tent is theirs. Our stuff is under that tarp. Boy, am I sick of that tarp.... And it was my idea not to bring the tent in the first place O.o

The place we camped at that night was beautiful! This is a shot of the visitors center in the morning.

I told Stephen to look excited. No results. I told him to wave his hands in the air like he just don't care. This is what I got. Yyyup...  XD

Stephen & other tourists taking pictures of puffins! We didn't even know they were in this area when we hitchhiked there!!

Bluff with the puffins

Beautiful sunset...!

Puffins sunset "socializing" 

I pet some cows that don't want to stop eating me!

Stephen loves aaaalls the animals. By the way, isn't that grey cow cool looking?

Crazy bird spreads his wings in anticipation of leaping into the river! Stephen carried this guy quite a ways, talking to him all along. It's funny how huge these baby birds are. When we reached the river, Stephen set him near the edge and he practically ran to it & leaped in! Unfortunately the iPad was dead again at that point (turns out solar charging isn't always so practical in Iceland). And then we saw 2 more of these baby-giants on the roadside right after releasing this one! But they were too feisty for us to help.

The campground we stayed in last night had a super cool commons area! Although we didn't sleep so well because we set ourselves up in a claustrophobic trap of an upside down tent with no poles in it (free pile find). We were so pleased with the idea at first....not anymore. Hehhhh

S.O.L. In Iceland :/

The last few days have been.. "Trying" to say the least. Unexpected interruptions and pitfalls at almost every turn! (I know, I'm being dramatic... But not really!)

Our troubles in Iceland started on the 27th. We went to a couch surfing meet up to talk to like-minded and interesting people, and possibly score a place to stay the night, considering we had nothing lined up. We met an Icelander, who had moved there from the states a few years ago, along with his brother, visiting, and a woman who was staying at his place. A few more people, including some some Germans, a Ukrainian, and some polish countries. One of these people happened to have a backyard that we could camp in, in secret, so we should leave before 8 AM. No problem! Little did we know, we would be leaving much earlier than that..

Before we go on, I have a noteworthy mention about SOL (Survive Outdoors Longer) products. Their escape bivvy, an insulating shell for your sleeping bag, says "waterproof" on the package. It is most certainly not. It rained that night, and my sleeping bag was wet in a half hour, in light rain. Don't buy SOL products, or you will be the more appropriate use of the acronym....

Moving on! There are good moments in some of the worst ones, and seeing the northern lights for the first time in my life was one of them.

I will provide for you the poorest photograph of the northern lights ever captured, taken in in desperation as an effort to provide something for the blog. I cry inside that I am the person to have taken this miserable picture, but I had an iPad. I will try to take a better picture later.

Needless to say, I was ecstatic, and even bothered to wake up the Ukrainian, who had also come with us to camp. Things were good, until the rain. We packed up and left during a dry spell at around 2:45 AM, and grabbed some milk at a convenience mart to eat some cereal. After that, we walked the street almost aimlessly, and proceeded to look for dropped Icelandic krona.. At 6:30, we entered a geothermal pool, and hung out for a couple hours. We felt good, but tired, and figured we would find out what to do. I bought an extra tarp at a hardware store, and we ended up taking the bus out of Reykjavik, to the Mjod station at the outskirts. It is here that our greatest letdown was had. The but passes we bought for 10,000 ISK only made connections within Reykjavik. We were under the impression we would be able to make connections to other cities, and this was not explained to us. We went into the Mjod bus station, and they told us we could trade our passes for 30 bus tickets each (worth 10,500 ISK) so we took it, glad to have been able to get some kind of exchange. But the five tickets we were told it would be to get to Vik, tuned out to be much more. It took 4 to get to Solfoss, and the bus driver told us the transfer would count as our last ticket to get to Vik. When we changed buses, the driver then asked for 10 tickets! It would cost 14 tickets each to get to Vik, each way... I was crestfallen, and started to panick. Hannah suggested we hitchhike, so we did. We were picked up by a lady from Spain who works at a hotel outside of Vik. We stopped sooner than that, at the Eyjafalljokull museum, and camped behind it in the company of some German cyclist going the other way.

I decided there that hiking the volcano was a terrible idea, and it is here that I realized how Ill prepared we were for Iceland. We hitched the rest of the way to Vik with some picture happy American tourists on their way to Vik for lunch.

We decided to have lunch too, and they ended up buying us lunch as well! After that, more geothermal pools (as is the theme of our trip..) and on our way to the plateau in Vik. We saw some friendly horses, some less friendly sheep (they ran away) and puffins! 

We camped on the bluffs that night,

and woke up late, as usual.. Black Beach is pretty cool (other side of the plateau) and I promise to put up some film pictures at a later date, because our iPad was dead.

And at this point, we headed back to Reykjavik.

We hitched a short distance with some Germans in their sweet travel van! And then we walked some more. We met cows 

And some some super happy sheep, who thought we had tasty treats. They were so cute! But we disappointed them, so they proceeded to ignore us, thus, no pictures...

Along the way, we found a young sea bird, stranded on the roadside.

Hannah said she read a poster in Vik saying they fly away, but can't keep flying with their young wings, so they look for rivers to take them back to the ocean. Roads, to a bird, look like rivers, so they get stranded, and cannot fly away. So I took it to a river! It did bite me though...

After this, we were picked up for our last stretch into Reykjavik by an Icelandic woman from an east coast farm, on her way to Reykjavik for college. It was fun talking to her, and sharing information about our countries. She informed us that the bird I picked up will often spit terrible smelling stuff on people if they're stressed, so luckily that didn't happen..

Now, we are in Reykjavik at an expensive campground, and we will take the bus to the north west tomorrow morning.

As a final note, there is one more terrible thing that happened.. I lost my one of a kind, homemade French press when we left for Vik, and I will never see it again.. So sad!

Right now, we are pretty tired, happy, and looking forward to tomorrow. Goodnight!

(This picture isn't where we are....)

Harðfiskur (Dried fish)

It's already been two days in Iceland, and I can't express how thankful I am I won't be stuck in a plane for my whole life, and that I'm not currently in Boston... If I ever have to go in a subway in Boston again, I'm sure I'll contract some rare form of cancer. Avoid, if possible..

(In Boston. Hannah taking pictures when I'm busy..)
I haven't ventured very far out of Reykjavik, and I'm still fairly certain I won't be able to get enough of this country. The jet lag was horrendous.. We almost slept until noon this morning! But we didn't..

(The view from our first stay)

(Things get a little chilly)

 The wind was strong, and there was only a little rain, which inspired us to go home and get our jackets before venturing out further. Glad we did.

I can't wait to find out more about this place.

(3D map of Iceland at Reykjavik city hall)

Everything I hear and see only makes me more interested, aside from one surprising thing I learned not long after entering the country. There is a fair bit of litter around the city of Reykjavik. It makes me wonder how people could not appreciate it enough to let that happen, but I guess it's just anywhere these days.

Icelandic is one of the most interesting sounding languages, one that I aspire to learn (as soon as I can properly pronounce "Eyjafjetlayökull" without tripping on my own tongue..)

We checked out a geothermal pool and fitness center, just about 12 minutes by bus outside of Reykjavik. The hot water was excellent, and the absence of chlorine, even more excellent. I found my way over to their hottest pool as soon as I could. Just a short distance from that was a small black tank (maybe 80 gallons) full of frigid water (4~6 celsius)
After one go in the cold water, back to the hot pool, I decided to try a little longer. I stayed in the cold water (or warm ice) for about 2 minutes! Not so cool when I got out. The whole place looked like it was spinning. Any faster and I would have performed my first successful backflip! my stumbling caught the attention of one of the staff, and they came several times to check on me ("how are you feeling?" "much better, thank you" "Just pay attention. This is a different world")
So that concludes my dumbAmerican tourist story..
As you might have guessed, not many pictures taken by me have made it to this blog, and they won't for a while. They will be developed as soon as possible, though, and I'll share the good ones with you. More to come!

(This blog post title might be confusing, if you read the blog. Harðfiskur "dried fish" is a traditional Icelandic food. Imagine jerky, made of fish, and a little crunchier. Hannah thinks it tastes like cat food, but I think it is pretty good)

A-Day

Dear Bob,

Today, is a special day. Not only is it a day. It's A-Day. A for airport, and A for anniversary. A for "Aaaaah!"

Today we left your house, Dear Uncle, and headed off into the wide world of San Fran. We ventured though high streets (& I mean high in multiple ways) and low streets. Through impoverished lands, complete with a man sprawled out & snoring in the middle of the sidewalk, and through wealthy districts.

We counseled with a policeman, who highly recommended BART for airport travel. We took his counsel to heart, and purchased 2 tickets, with help from the BART stewardess. The BART ride was pleasant, and less than $9 a person!

Upon reaching the airport, we found that we are not permitted to check in until the day of our flight! So, we shall stay out in the pre-check in area & try again at midnight. For now, we are entertaining ourselves with card games and such. I expect that we will survive.

Here is Stephen, posing. I said, "Okay, be cute & funny!" This is the result:

Missing you & your lagoon already!

-BeebFishes

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Well, things are always changing in this world. And that includes our travel plans!

The update is that we will be flying from Copenhagen to France via London (so no Cologne, which I am sad about...but not so sad). And we may or may not be going through northern Italy and Berlin at the last bit of our trip.

BUT! We are staying at super cool places along the way! Ever heard of Airbnb?? It's super-cool! You should check it out. They have interesting places to stay all around the world-- for example, we will be staying in an old tour bus parked in a chic neighborhood of Copenhagen during one of our nights there!

How cool is that? ...and grungy. But grungy-cool! (It's rated very well, by the way, so I assume it's clean & just appears grungy from the outside--hehhhhh. We shall soon see.)

Here's a better shot of the neighborhood:

Also! Stephen has made a cool French-press body :D
We bought a French press top at a yard sale for $0.50, but there was no glass for it. So, Stephen found an aluminum water bottle at a thrift store & retrofitted it to work with the French press top. Voila! A new-to-us, light-weight travel French press!

Stay tuned for the many more changes to come!.....

European Adventure Extravaganza!

Hello, there, folks!

We now have our approximate itinerary for our trip to Europe! Here's a screenshot of the location's we plan on heading to (Iceland will be the very first stop, but I couldn't include it on the "directions" part of GoogleMaps):

Side-note: No, we will not be completing this trip in 58 hours...

We leave on the 24th out of the San Fran airport. So, over the next few months, we'll be posting here for the amusement of ourselves, and also for the entertainment of you good ladies and gentlemen! May the fun and crazy begin.

Tuna Test

I TEST! Test, test! 1-2-3!!

Test Post

This is a test post, testing, testing, 1-2-3!