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dave_future_predatorAs promised, you'll be horrified to know, here are my pictures from Iceland and Canada *g*
We flew Icelandair, basically because that was the cheapest way to get to Canada and see somewhere else as well :) We picked up our nice little red Polo hire car and headed for Reykjavik, where we were staying in a very nice flat next door to the Finnish Embassy.
You get a nice view of Rejkyavik from the big church Hallgrimskirkja, where the Bristol Bach Choir were due to perform :) Just need to make sure Dave doesn't fall off! Hubby was very keen to tie bits of string to Dave and dangle him places all holiday... Bad man!
This is the church you go up. It is fairly modern and has a lift. Yay! And this cafe came with crocheted flowers on the windows *g* That, by the way, was the worst day of weather we had all holiday... slightly chilly and overcast!!
Here's Dave straddling the North Atlantic and Eurasian tectonic plates!! Clever boy.
The tectonic plates move apart by a couple of centimetres or so every year, but here at Þingvellir they rip apart more violently less often... eek!
It is beautiful at Þingvellir though... You can see the hardened lava...
The same day, we visited the hot geysir *g* His name is Strokkur *veg* I thought I got a video of the geysir blowing, but it seems to have disappeared :( Oh well. Have someone else's. Great fun place, though!
The water was very hot!
Also there was a nice cafe there with a statue of men wrestling. Lovely :D
Here's Dave dangling on another rope, over very much, much colder water! This is Gulfoss.
And another waterfall... you can walk right behind Seljalandsfoss! Brilliant.
Dave is perched on Little Miss's head *g* He then promptly fell off and got muddy :D
That was the day we walked on the glacier at Sólheimajökull. Our guide, Thorstein, was very sweet. I tried my only Icelandic phrase on him - Takk fyrir, Thorstein (Thank you, Thorstein *g*) - and I think he was pleasantly impressed *g* Of course, I had no idea what he said back to me.
Walking on the glacier was warm, sunny, and beautiful, and using crampons and an ice axe was a lot of fun! The dark ash on the glacier is from the volcanic eruptions last year and every other year the volcanoes erupt there!
And one last waterfall in Iceland! This is Skógafoss, and it gave us a lovely double rainbow.
It was big! Or big enough! Little miss was the only one willing to get wet...
While we were in Iceland I also went horse back riding with Little miss. It was amazing, with wonderful volcanic landscapes, and the fantastic little Icelandic pony that has a unique gait - tölt - it was so cool, I cannot tell you. Fast and comfortable. Amazing.
And of course can't be in Iceland without going to the Blue Lagoon. I don't care if it's a tourist trap, it's freaking awesome.
And don't think Dave didn't get his feet wet. This water wasn't heated though *g* His feet were cold and he got his scarf wet!
And then we were off to Canada!! Flying over Greenland, woo! You can just about tell that some of the clouds are actually mountains and glaciers *g*
We had a lovely time in Canada staying with my lovely friend (I've known her for 37 years!) and her lovely family in their lovely house with their lovely cats!
It was much hotter in Canada, 10 degrees centigrade hotter on average! Very nice, maybe too hot :)
They also have a lovely back deck, from which we saw a raccoon on the bird feeder one morning!!! That's quite unusual, and of course they discourage the raccoons as they can bite and damage things, but they graciously let this baby one stay for a while until we'd seen it! Isn't it adorable?!
We had an automatic car over there, much bigger than we paid for *g* Kind of weird, but cool, too. Give me stick shift anytime, though.
We visited Lunenburg, a UNESCO world heritage site, very pretty.
And Peggy's Cove, classic Nova Scotia landscape.
I also ate Poutine down at the waterfront in Halifax, a classic Canadian dish of fries with gravy and cheese curds. I also had pulled pork and bacon on mine, of course *g*
And in the Maritime museum on the waterfront I found a very cool thing... a Lyle gun!!
It's actually a life saving device, for firing a weight with a rope...
Tada!
We headed out of Halifax for a couple of days, and of course the first stop is a Tim Horton's for a coffee and a donut. Seriously, I have spent 12 years dreaming about Tim Horton's. I once told Chuck Campbell I would lick the wrapper from a Tim Horton's if someone brought me one over :D It did not disappoint *g*
One more thing made the journey worthwhile... A lifesize mastodon at Junction 11 of Highway 102 *g* It's also exactly half way between the equator and the north pole :)
We were headed for the Bay of Fundy, which has the most extreme tides in the world. While we were there, the tide was about 12 metres, which corresponds to the tide going in and out about a kilometre every day! Here's low-ish tide from where we had dinner at Parrsboro.
The next morning we raced up to Joggins to try and catch the low tide. (We made it just before high tide :p) It's another UNESCO world heritage site, fossil cliffs that are the best place to see a particular section of carboniferous plant life fossils in the world. Long before dinosaurs hit the earth, of course, but. Most people glazed over at my desire to see this place *g* But it was AWESOME!
Look! Dave just sitting on a fossilised tree on the beach! You were tripping over fossils here, it was wicked.
Look what I found! Just lying there. I think it is an Artisia pith cast of a Cordaites trunk, but it does look a bit like a cock.
And a Cordaites leaf! They were everywhere. It was fabulous. I could have stayed all day. But the tide was coming in!
The visitor centre (relatively new) was very good indeed, and had some excellent fossils. I only found plant fossils, but other people in our group found fish scales, a tooth, and worm casts.
From Joggins we visited a vineyard, then made our way to Tatamagouche, where an old railways station and cabooses (carriages) had been made into an Inn. This is the dining car.
This is the view from our cupola in our caboose...
And this is our caboose!! I think it was the coolest place in the world to stay! Except for the mosquitos!
We managed to stop Dave from eating the breakfast table train *g*
We then headed back to Halifax for the rest of our stay, passing Oxford to take a picture with the giant blueberry :D
And so, a very varied summer holiday was achieved, with glorious weather pretty much wall-to-wall. How do we do it?? Thanks for looking :D
Sorry about the exclamation mark abuse :)
~
We flew Icelandair, basically because that was the cheapest way to get to Canada and see somewhere else as well :) We picked up our nice little red Polo hire car and headed for Reykjavik, where we were staying in a very nice flat next door to the Finnish Embassy.
You get a nice view of Rejkyavik from the big church Hallgrimskirkja, where the Bristol Bach Choir were due to perform :) Just need to make sure Dave doesn't fall off! Hubby was very keen to tie bits of string to Dave and dangle him places all holiday... Bad man!
This is the church you go up. It is fairly modern and has a lift. Yay! And this cafe came with crocheted flowers on the windows *g* That, by the way, was the worst day of weather we had all holiday... slightly chilly and overcast!!
Here's Dave straddling the North Atlantic and Eurasian tectonic plates!! Clever boy.
The tectonic plates move apart by a couple of centimetres or so every year, but here at Þingvellir they rip apart more violently less often... eek!
It is beautiful at Þingvellir though... You can see the hardened lava...
The same day, we visited the hot geysir *g* His name is Strokkur *veg* I thought I got a video of the geysir blowing, but it seems to have disappeared :( Oh well. Have someone else's. Great fun place, though!
The water was very hot!
Also there was a nice cafe there with a statue of men wrestling. Lovely :D
Here's Dave dangling on another rope, over very much, much colder water! This is Gulfoss.
And another waterfall... you can walk right behind Seljalandsfoss! Brilliant.
Dave is perched on Little Miss's head *g* He then promptly fell off and got muddy :D
That was the day we walked on the glacier at Sólheimajökull. Our guide, Thorstein, was very sweet. I tried my only Icelandic phrase on him - Takk fyrir, Thorstein (Thank you, Thorstein *g*) - and I think he was pleasantly impressed *g* Of course, I had no idea what he said back to me.
Walking on the glacier was warm, sunny, and beautiful, and using crampons and an ice axe was a lot of fun! The dark ash on the glacier is from the volcanic eruptions last year and every other year the volcanoes erupt there!
And one last waterfall in Iceland! This is Skógafoss, and it gave us a lovely double rainbow.
It was big! Or big enough! Little miss was the only one willing to get wet...
While we were in Iceland I also went horse back riding with Little miss. It was amazing, with wonderful volcanic landscapes, and the fantastic little Icelandic pony that has a unique gait - tölt - it was so cool, I cannot tell you. Fast and comfortable. Amazing.
And of course can't be in Iceland without going to the Blue Lagoon. I don't care if it's a tourist trap, it's freaking awesome.
And don't think Dave didn't get his feet wet. This water wasn't heated though *g* His feet were cold and he got his scarf wet!
And then we were off to Canada!! Flying over Greenland, woo! You can just about tell that some of the clouds are actually mountains and glaciers *g*
We had a lovely time in Canada staying with my lovely friend (I've known her for 37 years!) and her lovely family in their lovely house with their lovely cats!
It was much hotter in Canada, 10 degrees centigrade hotter on average! Very nice, maybe too hot :)
They also have a lovely back deck, from which we saw a raccoon on the bird feeder one morning!!! That's quite unusual, and of course they discourage the raccoons as they can bite and damage things, but they graciously let this baby one stay for a while until we'd seen it! Isn't it adorable?!
We had an automatic car over there, much bigger than we paid for *g* Kind of weird, but cool, too. Give me stick shift anytime, though.
We visited Lunenburg, a UNESCO world heritage site, very pretty.
And Peggy's Cove, classic Nova Scotia landscape.
I also ate Poutine down at the waterfront in Halifax, a classic Canadian dish of fries with gravy and cheese curds. I also had pulled pork and bacon on mine, of course *g*
And in the Maritime museum on the waterfront I found a very cool thing... a Lyle gun!!
It's actually a life saving device, for firing a weight with a rope...
Tada!
We headed out of Halifax for a couple of days, and of course the first stop is a Tim Horton's for a coffee and a donut. Seriously, I have spent 12 years dreaming about Tim Horton's. I once told Chuck Campbell I would lick the wrapper from a Tim Horton's if someone brought me one over :D It did not disappoint *g*
One more thing made the journey worthwhile... A lifesize mastodon at Junction 11 of Highway 102 *g* It's also exactly half way between the equator and the north pole :)
We were headed for the Bay of Fundy, which has the most extreme tides in the world. While we were there, the tide was about 12 metres, which corresponds to the tide going in and out about a kilometre every day! Here's low-ish tide from where we had dinner at Parrsboro.
The next morning we raced up to Joggins to try and catch the low tide. (We made it just before high tide :p) It's another UNESCO world heritage site, fossil cliffs that are the best place to see a particular section of carboniferous plant life fossils in the world. Long before dinosaurs hit the earth, of course, but. Most people glazed over at my desire to see this place *g* But it was AWESOME!
Look! Dave just sitting on a fossilised tree on the beach! You were tripping over fossils here, it was wicked.
Look what I found! Just lying there. I think it is an Artisia pith cast of a Cordaites trunk, but it does look a bit like a cock.
And a Cordaites leaf! They were everywhere. It was fabulous. I could have stayed all day. But the tide was coming in!
The visitor centre (relatively new) was very good indeed, and had some excellent fossils. I only found plant fossils, but other people in our group found fish scales, a tooth, and worm casts.
From Joggins we visited a vineyard, then made our way to Tatamagouche, where an old railways station and cabooses (carriages) had been made into an Inn. This is the dining car.
This is the view from our cupola in our caboose...
And this is our caboose!! I think it was the coolest place in the world to stay! Except for the mosquitos!
We managed to stop Dave from eating the breakfast table train *g*
We then headed back to Halifax for the rest of our stay, passing Oxford to take a picture with the giant blueberry :D
And so, a very varied summer holiday was achieved, with glorious weather pretty much wall-to-wall. How do we do it?? Thanks for looking :D
Sorry about the exclamation mark abuse :)
~
