R. Doug Wicker's Blog, page 101

Transatlantic — Iceland Golden Circle; Geysir Hot Springs Area 2

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Geothermal hot springs

As we tour the Geysir Hot Spring Area, let’s take a look at an interesting statue. The figure doing all the heavy lifting in this piece represents Sigurður Greipsson, who was Iceland Glíma Champion five years running, from 1922 until 1926. He retired undefeated in 1927. So, what is Glíma? It’s a form of Nordic folk wrestling, in this case a variant known as “trouser grip” wrestling in which the opposing wrestlers must remain standing at all times, and can only move arou...

Transatlantic — Iceland Golden Circle; Geysir Hot Springs Area Part 1

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Litli (Little) Geysir

Continuing on our Golden Circle journey with GeoIceland Tours we eventually arrived at one of several tour highlights. This is Iceland’s Geysir Hot Spring Area, complete with bubbling pools of boiling water and shooting geysers.

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Geysir Hot Spring Area

The most famous geyser here is the Great Geysir, but eruptions are sporadic at best. Fortunately, the nearby Strokkur spews forth every six to ten minutes and, while it doesn’t attain the heights of the Great Geysir’s 230 f...

Fun Photo Friday — Iceland; Golden Circle Favorites 1

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Gullfoss Falls

Today I present some favorite views from our Icelandic Golden Circle tour:

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Thingvellir — Where the North American and Eurasian Tectonic Plates meet

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Thingvellir — Where the North American and Eurasian Tectonic Plates meet

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Geysir Hot Spring Area

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Thingvellir — Rift valley at the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

Transatlantic — Iceland Golden Circle; Faxi Waterfall

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Icelandic steam vents

Our tour group left the port city of Reykjavik and headed east. This drive is Iceland’s famous Golden Circle, and this day’s tour was with GeoIceland. During this trip we would pass some very interesting terrain on the way to our first major destination:

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Iceland’s Golden Circle

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Iceland’s Golden Circle

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Golden Circle, Iceland

Our first major destination was the Faxi Waterfall:

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Faxi Waterfall

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Faxi Waterfall

And while the Faxi Waterfall was a nice break in the drive, the rea...

Transatlantic — Iceland preview of GeoIceland Tour

Over the next several weeks we’re going on a tour of Iceland out of Reykjavik. Vision of the Seas arrived here on August 28, 2017. Ursula had us booked for a GeoIceland Tour’s incredible Golden Circle Tour, which took us to Thingvellir, the Great Geysir, Gullfoss Falls, Faxi Falls, and the Hveragerdi geothermal area. Today we’ll take a quick preview of what’s ahead, including a short video I put together of Great Geysir erupting and Gullfoss Falls falling.

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Thingvellir, Iceland

So, to whet you...

Fun Photo Friday — Invergorden & Inverness Favorites (and a Monster?)

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Green Bench at Beauly Priory

Okay, you’ve been waiting for this all week, I’m sure. First, some background. I was standing at about this spot at the northeast end of Loch Ness:

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Loch Ness

I had my camera set to  manually focus for some closeup images when out of the corner of my eye I spied something swimming in the loch. Now, having read many of the stories of trying to capture this elusive creature, I suspected I only had perhaps seconds to react before Nessie, or whatever, would dive beneat...

Transatlantic — Clava Cairn; Battle of Culloden; Loch Ness

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Balnuaran of Clava

On our bus tour out of Invergordon we made three more stops beyond Beauly Priory. The first was a site containing Bronze Age burial mounds known as Clava cairn. This particular Clava cairn is Balnuaran of Clava. And here is the largest of the cairns:

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Balnauran of Clava

After that we moved on to the site of the famous Battle of Culloden, April 16, 1746.

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Battle of Culloden

Culloden is a small town located about 3 miles/4.8 kilometers east of Inverness. The name derives from t...

Transatlantic — Invergordon and Beauly Priory

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Beauly, Scotland

When we first signed up for this transatlantic voyage, Vision of the Seas was slated to make a rather exciting (to us, anyway) call into Lerwick, Scotland, located in the Shetlands. Ursula and I were really up for this one, as we’d already done a self-driving tour of Scotland many years before. We even primed ourselves by binge watching the British television series Shetland, starring Douglas Henshaw. Alas, Royal Caribbean cancelled that destination on the pretext that the po...

Fun Photo Friday — Stavanger Favorites 2

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Reflections of Red

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Giants in the Mist

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Silhouette Against Blue and White

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Symmetry

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Old Timer

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Still Waters

Transatlantic — Touring Old Town Stavanger, Norway

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Stavanger, Norway

By the time our tour boat returned us to Stavanger from Lysefjord, the overcast had given way to mostly sunny skies. Thus, my afternoon photographs of Stavanger were much more satisfying than the ones I presented to you last week.

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Stavanger, Norway

We took advantage of the change in lighting by staying in the more colorful Old Town section of Stavanger.

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Stavanger, Norway

Here I had a lot of fun with even the more mundane, everyday stuff one finds in any city, such as manhole...