Who turned out the lights?

There are only a couple ways to fly through six time zones in four hours. You either need a very fast plane or you have to fly very far north to where the time zones get a bit ... narrower. In our case we flew to 66 degrees North, to Iceland.

This was a surprise birthday present to me from Liz. I left work on a Thursday and was instructed to meet her at South Station. Now from South Station you can get to restaurants, the train station or the airport so I really had no idea what to expect, but when I arrived Liz had our bags packed and our passports at the ready for a quick overnight flight to Reykjavik. We left around 8 PM, flew for four hours and arrived at the Keflavik airport around 6 AM. For the next few days we wandered around and toured the southwest corner of a truly fascinating country. Despite the darkness (the sun's only up about 5 hours a day during the winter) it was an incredible trip. I can't wait to go back and see more.

City Hall in Reykjavik

This church was huge and took 40 years to build--an impressive feat for a country of only 300,000 people.

The first light of the sunrise

This is where the American and European tectonic plates are separating and where the annual viking parliamentary meetings were held.

A frozen river

The sun about to rise at 11 AM.

Gulfoss waterfalls

Strokkur geyser (goes every 4 minutes!)

These were everywhere

Otherworldly terrain.

The Blue Lagoon. Geothermal spas where we swam and soaked in the various rejuvenating minerals (I need those now that I'm so old).

The water was 99 degrees and that's a swim-up bar in the middle there.

Special thanks to Liz for planning such a wonderful trip!