Month: November 2022

Today, we’re flying from Reykjavik to Chicago, and then we’ll be with family over Thanksgiving. Afterwards, we’re taking a few days to drive to Austin, Texas, to house sit for friends. We’ll be back to blogging at that point in early December.

As with every place we visit, we have definitely more ground to cover here, but at least we have a more accurate image in our heads of this lovely and interesting island. A couple more photos.

Cheers! Hopefully, a December blog will be about Bob’s successful hip replacement and retina surgeries!

Iceland offers up a number of guided explorations to help you see more of the island, but they are not cheap so you have to do some choosing. Bob and I opted for a full-day small group journey to the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, which was billed as Iceland in miniature due to the variety of landscapes to be seen.

We had a great guide, learned a bit more about Iceland, and saw some of this country’s wild but beautiful scenery. From our guide we learned that Iceland has a total population of about 365,000, with 2/3 living in the capital region, a series of 7 connected towns including Reykjavik. The remainder live near the seafront with very few people in the middle of the island. There are no reptiles, cockroaches, or bears, but Iceland does have between 4,000 and 6,000 reindeer roaming free.

We left in the dark this morning about 8:45 and returned tonight about 7:15. During the tour itself, the day was mostly overcast and very windy, with a feels like temperature in the low to mid 30s. On the way back, we hit a bad patch of rain and stronger wind that felt like it picked up the van at one point, but our guide managed it well.

Bob and I have only two days in Iceland. Today, we spent the day walkin around Reykjavik. We loved it, and even had another Richard Osman sighting. Here are some of our photos.

Yesterday ended our Cambridge housesit with a great reunion with our homeowners and their son who had had a fantastic trip to New Zealand. It was lovely to catch up before Bob and I headed off to catch a bus to our hotel near Heathrow.

We will definitely miss Hugo. He is obviously a gorgeous cat, but he charmed us with his personality. He was especially fond of Bob. He mostly hung out with us when we were around but also went out to check out the neighborhood.

The bus to Heathrow was great, although not a lot of room. It was about a 2.5 hour journey from Cambridge. At Heathrow, we caught an airport hopper bus to the Renaissance Hotel for the night. That was a very easy connection— especially since Bob had researched exactly where to pick it up.

The Renaissance was great. We had a free dinner since they offered a free happy hour for Marriott club members, and they served some great appetizers as well as cheese and crackers, nuts, etc. The hotel also had a fitness room, so I got to get my run in this morning.

We left the hotel on the hopper bus today at about 8:45 for our noon flight to Reykjavik. Since we had upgraded seats we had access to a lounge, and were thrilled to see Richard Osmond walk in. He is a game show host and author. We know him from the game show Pointless, which we enjoy watching when we’re in the UK. He also ended up a few rows ahead of us on our flight.

The arrival into Reykjavik was a little more dramatic than we would have liked, as we were nearly landed when the pilot pulled up and we were off again for a circle and another shot at landing. He apparently felt a wind gust that we hadn’t felt.

To avoid paying nearly $100 for a taxi ride into the city once we landed, Bob had booked us on a FlyBus. The bus ride was fine once the bus arrived, but the queuing was a mess with people cutting in line since the wait had been so long.

A couple of weeks ago, when I reserved us a slot for a visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum, I also booked us tickets for a guided tour of the correspondence of Charles Darwin ( a Cambridge grad, of course) at the Cambridge University Library. Today, was the day for our 10:00 am tour, and it gave us a chance to see a little bit of the library as well as some of the Clare College campus that we walked through to get to the library.

The exhibit is called Darwin Conversation and is being staged to celebrate the end of a 48 year effort to collect, date, identify, and publish correspondence both to and from Charles Darwin. There is a lot! There are 15,000 known letters exchanged by Darwin with nearly 2,000 correspondents between 1821 and 1882. The 30th volume of this correspondence is now in print. Any new material will just be digitized and placed on the Cambridge University Library website.

Just a note that while Cambridge University Library has the largest collection of Darwin’s manuscripts, the correspondence collection effort actually began in the States headed by Frederick Burkhardt who served as a Trustee of the New York Public Library.

The tour was interesting, and our guide, who serves/served on the Darwin Correspondence Project was very informative.

As today is also Remembrance Day, we thought that stumbling on the site below was fitting, and we heard the bugles being played somewhere when we walked out of the library at 11.

Bob and I then headed into the city center where Bob grabbed a sandwich for lunch, and I continued on to Hill Road for a massage.

Tonight, Bob and I went into the city center to see the Cambridge Carnival, a video and music presentation on the side of the Senate House, across King’s Parade from Great Saint Mary’s Church. The projection uses artwork produced by pupils from Castle, Arbury, St Matthews, and Galfrid primary schools. The artwork moves along with a recording of Saint-Sean’s Carnival of the Animals. It was all new to us and very enjoyable.

After the short, 15 minute show, we walked to the lovely University Arms Hotel for a drink before heading back to the house for dinner. It was lovely, and we had a great chat with the very knowledgeable bartender.

Bob and I added to our Graduate Hotel experiences tonight by having a glass of wine at the Graduate Hotel Cambridge. It’s about a 25 minute walk from the house and sits along the River Cam. This is our 4th Graduate Hotel that we’ve experienced, having stayed at one’s in Iowa City, Iowa, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Columbia, South Carolina.

They are known for tailoring their decor to the local university area. We thought this one was super cute and captured a lot of what Cambridge is known for.

Awhile back I had picked up a Cambridge Concert Calendat pamphlet in one of the souvenir shops. This appears to list all of the concerts held in the various colleges that are open to the public for the Michaelmas term of October through December. Some of the concerts require a paid admission, but many are free. We thought this might be a great way to see a new campus as well as listen to music that we might not normally listen to.

We dipped our toe in the water today and made the short walk to Homerton College for a 40 minute free lunch jazz piano recital by Gabriel Margolis, who we assume is a student at one of the colleges. There were a total of 10 people there to watch, which was almost as many chairs as they had set up.

He played a total of seven songs, some of his own and some of friends, mentors, or people he is inspired by. It was a great outing. We enjoyed seeing some of the campus as well as his music.

Bob and I took advantage of a much rarer sunny day yesterday to head to the nearby community of St. Ives. We wanted to visit the town anyway, but it also gave us an opportunity to actually ride on a guided bus to get there.

We caught the bus near the Cambridge rail station, and it was about a 55 minute journey both off rail (through town) and on rail/guided between the Cambridge North rail station and St. Ives.

Last night we were surprised with fireworks for Guy Fawkes Day (the celebration of a failed bomb attempt on King James in 1605). We knew there was a Bonfire Night today but didn’t realize there would be fireworks in the neighborhood on Friday. Pretty cool to be able to see them from the house.

Can’t believe we are already in November. Bob and I have been out a bit over the past couple of days but haven’t blogged. Monday morning we had a late breakfast at a lovely bakery near the train station, called Gail’s, before heading off to explore the many international groceries (and restaurants too) on Mill Street and do some shopping. Last night, we had a great night out with dinner at Al Pomodoro before going across the street to see “Nothing Compares,” a documentary about Sinead O’Connor.

Today, we headed to another Free Cambridge University museum, the Whipple Museum on the history of science. Not surprisingly, the museum is not named for the Mr. Whipple of “Don’t squeeze the Charmin” commercials fame from our childhood but rather Robert S. Whipple, a former Director of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company.

In 1944, he presented 1,000 scientific instruments and related rare books to the University of Cambridge. That collection continues to grow and now has 7,000 objects. The items shown were spread among five galleries. Below are some pics from the visit.