The Lonely Svalbard Islands Reveal Their Desolate Terrain

Much of our cruise up the coast of Norway has included visits to islands. Our final experience would also be on an island, a large island some distance off the coast of Norway and much farther north. We would be crossing the Barents Sea to reach the Svalbard Islands and the town of Longyearbyen The crossing of the Barents Sea was the challenging part. First we experienced more rocking of the boat during the crossing. Fortunately we had pretty good…

2021: Travel Adventures in a COVID world

The saying is that, “Timing is everything.” I started my blog shortly after retirement from teaching in 2019. I was looking forward to sharing some of my past experiences initially and then moving on to new adventures. While my wife is still working, she has generous vacation days so I expected we would travel a lot. However, about seven months later the world shut down as COVID took over the world. How was I going to write a travel blog…

Iceland Interlude: Glaciers by Land and Sea

Friday morning we decided not to push ourselves for an early start. We had a glacier tour scheduled for 3:30 in the afternoon, and we felt we had plenty of time to make it there. It was nice to relax and not feel in such a hurry in the morning. Trips like this, where there is so much to see and do, can become tiring. Once we got going we didn’t go too far at first. Just a few miles…