More Adventures: Venice and Florence

It has been a beautifully hectic few days! Our apartment didn't provide us with a wifi code last night so today crunches a few days into a single post again.

We started out yesterday with our last morning in Venice - once again sunny and beautiful. We took a walking tour (which ended up being private since no one else showed up!), so the tour was even private. Our guide was great and very proud of being Venetian, so we heard a lot about the history of the city and all the wonderful things that Venice had invented (and conquered!) While we had seen many of the places she took us, she knew and showed us lots of little things we had missed, from the department store that is actually a remodeled palace or the perfect shop that is still furnished as a 1700s pharmacy to little spots with great views of the canals. 

The secret door into the Templar church for clandestine meetings!

A great view of the Rialto Bridge from a hidden little dock for gondeliers

Just a beautiful view of an old time building

We hauled our luggage back along the little narrow streets and over the bridges for our next adventure to Florence! Our hotel was nice and close to the train station, and although we ran into some hiccups (like the no wifi code), it's a cute, comfortable little apartment. It overlooks a square with a very enthusiastic accordion-playing busker each night so far, too, which is less cute and comfortable at 11 pm...

By the time we were checked in it was too late to do any of the museums or churches, so we hiked around the city a bit and up to the top of a very large hill with a great view of the city.

Streets on our way up the big hill

A bridge lined with fancy shops

This morning we had good intentions of waking up early...and instead slept in and continued our new, delightful tradition of pastries and at least two cappuccinos for breakfast!

From there we hiked over to see the Duomo, or the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. It's a very old cathedral with a huge dome. The inside is strikingly simple for a cathedral, although still huge and beautiful. The outside is extremely striking, though, with red tile roofs and white and green marble (I think) exterior walls. We unfortunately didn't get to go up in the dome - they were booked solid for the next week when we checked several days ago.

Next, a very important afternoon iced coffee stop!

Finally, we spent our afternoon exploring the Pitti Palace and attached Boboli gardens. The palace has largely been converted into an art museum, which combines the art gallery/museum with the original royal apartments. Each room tells the history of what it held through multiple different owners, as Florence was managed by people from the Hapsbergs to Napoleon to the Medicis.

One of the rooms that is closest to its original state in the Pitti Palace

The gardens were not what we expected of gardens - almost no flowers, but lots and lots of paths among hedges and cypress trees, with the occasional flat bit of grass with sculptures. We saw a few little flower beds that you couldn't get to, and one little orange tree oasis in the middle of a fountain surrounded by some very cute statues.

Finally, yet another delicious pasta dinner followed by dessert. I can proudly report that today we did NOT have gelato. (We did intend to...but the restaurant brought us two chocolate lava cakes rather than one to split, so we decided to be very adult and have only the chocolate lava cake instead of both. Particularly as tomorrow is our wine tour day, which promises many more deliciously bad decisions!)

A Smooth Start to a Sisters Trip to Italy

I hope I'm not jinxing anything by saying this publicly (and on the internet, no less) - but so far this sisters trip has gone really remarkably smoothly! Our flights arrived on time less then 20 minutes apart, baggage claim and customs were fast and easy, and we met up just as planned for an easy train trip up to Venice, after a stop at a coffee and pastry shop. (We even stayed awake for the whole train ride!)

Train coffee and pastry snack!

We spent our first afternoon wandering around Venice, getting lost a lot (which is hard to avoid), but walked through some of the big areas like St. Mark's Square near the Doge's Palace and the cathedral. So far the city has been friendlier than I remember, which has been nice! We started our tour off properly by visiting two different gelaterias (one before and one after dinner), and even managed to stay awake until 8 pm. Our hotel is in an extremely quiet corner of Venice, which is nice. On our first day Google Maps took us to the tiny back door of the hotel, which is about 10 feet away from falling in a canal off a tiny alley, and completely confused the front desk person who had to let us in. On leaving the hotel, we figured out that we'd walked right by the front door on our way to the alley - we just hadn't seen it since their sign is set about 6 feet in from the street! We have a nice view our our hotel window, though.

This morning was focused on exploring the islands - Murano and Burano. We both fully enjoyed the hotel's delicious cappuccinos before catching the water bus over to Murano. We watched a glass making and blowing demonstration.

We wandered through the many, many cute little glass shops throughout Murano, seeing everything from stereotypical trinkets to some incredibly beautiful (and accordingly priced) works of art.

We enjoyed a nice break in the sunshine at a cafe right on a canal for our "lunch" of cappuccini, a glass of wine and tiramasu before heading off to Burano.

Our view for our afternoon snack

Burano is as beautiful and colorful as I remember it! I read this time that the houses have been traditionally painted like this because people wanted to show exactly how much of the building was THEIR house, and it's stuck since then. It's a very quiet island, in spite of all the bright colors - there are some shops and restaurants, but far fewer than in Burano, and not many people living there.

We took the water bus back just in time for dinner, and found a cute little wine bar with a reasonable selection of vegetarian dinner options and a really great wine list....before heading out for some more gelato. On our way back we got to enjoy the atmosphere of Venice at night, with its beautiful lit up canals and bridges.

Quiet to Bustling: Waterfalls, F-Roads and Akureyri

Today we gave ourselves a bit of "culture shock" (sort of) as we drove from the middle of nowhere to a bustling city. Today our luck also sort of ran out, and for the first time we woke up to rain and wind instead of beautiful sunny skies - however, we still had plenty of luck, because by the time we drove to our first destination, the rain had given up and we just had clouds for most of the rest of the day.

After spending the night across the street from Godafoss, we decided to brave the gravel roads down to two more waterfalls on the same river, neither of which I can pronounce: Hrafnabjargafoss and Aldeyjarfoss. The catch was that when we say "brave the gravel roads," it meant about 40 kilometers of regular bad gravel road, followed by what Iceland calls an "F road" - a gravel road that is in theory impassable to all except 4WD vehicles. This might mean it just has a lot of potholes, or it might mean an unbridged river that you need to ford in your car. We chose not to spend four times as much on our rental car, and so had a 2WD vehicle that included in the contract a clause about not driving on F roads. So, we drove as far as we could, pulled off to the side of the road and proceeded to walk about 4.5 miles each way to see the waterfalls - while grumbling the entire way since the roads we walked were no worse, and in many spots better, then the regular gravel road we travelled until we hit the F road.

On the positive side - Aldeyjarfoss is I think my favorite waterfall we've seen yet. It didn't hurt that since we walked there just after the rain and it's on an F road, we were the only people there for the 45 minutes we spent staring. But the combination of the brilliant blue water, the shape of the waterfall, and the rock fixtures surrounding it were just stunning. We've seen other waterfalls with columnar rocks like this around it, but none where the top of the columns looked almost like sculptures like this one.

Hrafnabjargafoss was a very different waterfall. It was beautiful and very interesting, but not nearly as photogenic. Where Aldeyjarfoss is a single, beautiful falls with most of its nice features all kept together, Hrafnabjargafoss  is very spread out. It has a little, U-shaped falls right at the beginning, and the water from those falls promptly swirls around and disappears into a tiny cave, to pop out the other side and be joined with water from a bunch of other tributary falls. As I said, it's very interesting to watch and see the water swirling around, coming from and going to so many different places and disappearing into caves - we stood for awhile and just stared.

Throughout the entire walk to both waterfalls, we saw 3 other people, all of whom were leaving Aldeyjarfoss as we arrived - this was about 3 hours for us between the time spent walking. As we left Hrafnabjargafoss, we ran into a group of people, and saw a couple more on the way out, which felt a little strange after so long wandering through the Icelandic countryside without seeing a person, car or even a sheep. But as soon as we finished our long hike back to the car, we set out for a very different cultural experience - we are staying tonight in the capital city, Akureyri.

Akureyri is a cute little city right on a fjord in the north. It's arranged all along the steep hillsides surrounding the water, and it's full of old timey wooden buildings that look like they popped out of 18th century Europe. We stopped at the botanical gardens here - the most northern botanical gardens in the world. They were surprisingly beautiful and full of more familiar flowers than I would have expected.

We also enjoyed some fantastic food (I liked the langoustine so much that I had "surf and turf" sushi with langoustine and local beef), a few more local beers and then headed off to visit "the best ice cream shop in Iceland." The ice cream, sadly, was very, very disappointing - particularly after a few days ago when we had some of the best vanilla ice cream I'd ever had in our hotel restaurant, which had the reputation of being bland and over expensive. But along the way, we got to see a beautiful church up on the hillside!

Finally, we got to end our day properly for an 8.5 mile walking day: our hotel has a lovely hot tub overlooking the fjord, and we soaked our sore muscles in preparation for tomorrow.

Myvatn: Lava, Sulfur and More Waterfalls

Are you sensing a theme to Iceland yet? Before we got here, we read advice telling us that if you stopped to take a photo of every waterfall in Iceland, in a week you'd only make it a few miles. It really is true...we have a whole lot of car window photos of different waterfalls, but we still stop at one or more every day.

Yesterday, we took another lazy morning, for two reasons: the first was that our hotel had the most impressive breakfast buffet (including good coffee) that we've seen yet in Iceland. The second is because we hadn't been able to enjoy this view yesterday, which we got to see both out of our window and out of the breakfast room's window.

Once we finally got going, the first order of business was to head to the biggest (by water volume) waterfall in Europe, Dettifoss. This was a pretty massive waterfall! I made Patrick drive the safe tarred road rather than the gravel road that the reviews complained about being terrifying, since we've driven a few gravel roads in Iceland that were more pothole than road and our nice little rental car looks like we've been taking it offroading through the mudpits already. (The heated seats and steering wheel still work fine, although the backup camera now just shows us a nice view of dried mud...so the priorities are all right!) We had to walk a ways to the waterfall, through this very barren landscape of weird black volcanic rock structures. Interesting looking, but a bit eerie. When we got there, it was to see a giant waterfall where we couldn't see the bottom of the water vapor.

From there, we kept going to the Lake Myvatn area. We drove through such a variety of landscapes on the way here, the most interesting of which was the mountains where the sulfur pits are. We didn't stop, as we heard a few too many horror stories of people whose shoes melted 10 minutes after walking into the parking lot because of someone who had carelessly tracked sulfur across the pavement, but the mountains were bright red with weird yellow and white splotches, and steaming continually. It was a cool sight!

The lake itself is surrounded with a huge variety of scenery, from more weird black rock columns and formations to miles of ground cover turning its beautiful fall colors (imagine a whole Minnesotan forest in October, but all those colors spread across ground cover 12 inches tall) to a little forest that we took a hike through that felt just like being at home, although when we got glimpses of the lake we could see beautiful blue-green water with some of the same cool lava formations sticking out. This lake is famous in summer for having little midge flies that continually buzz you and try to fly in your ears and eyes and nose - we were very happy to be here in mid-September, when they have died off and we didn't have to wear mosquito nets over our heads!

We made a few less impressive stops for short walks in Myvatn, before ending up at our hotel directly across from one of the very impressive waterfalls in Iceland, Godafoss. The water really is as blue - or more - than you see in the photo, even on a cloudy afternoon. It is definitely colder up here in northern Iceland, and as usual the sun went away later in the day, so we took our photos at Godafoss quickly before running back to the hotel for a warm dinner, including "Icelandic meat soup" and ice cream with toppings and a shot of a local liqueur set on fire - great ways to stay warm in spite of the wet and the wind!

Icebergs, Lobster and More Waterfalls

First of all, after reviewing the blog, Patrick would like to set the record straight: he would like you all to know that the Viking-themed hotel we stayed at in Reykjavik was in no way cheesy, it was awesome.

Today was a slightly lower key day (no twelve mile hike!), with a lot more driving. Our first stop was close, though - the iceberg lagoon, Jokulsarlon. This is a little inlet from the ocean where the glacier is frequently dropping icebergs, and it is beautiful! Another sunny day certainly contributed, bringing out the blues in the water, sky and icebergs. We also got to watch a couple of seals playing in the lagoon. We saw a small iceberg flip and heard a new one break off the glacier and splash into the lagoon, which sent the seals into a whole bunch of new backflips and racing around. As the tide was going out, when we stopped by the ocean side of the lagoon we saw some of the icebergs floating out to see. This site also had a black sand beach (and much nicer sand than the famous one in Vik!) and it was a beautiful contrast with the icebergs that had washed up.

Next, a quick stop for lunch (something we don't often do in Iceland - people weren't kidding about food being expensive). There was a restaurant on our way that is famous for their small lobsters (langoustine) and we stopped in. They were delicious, and a nice addition to a day of slow moving around as our muscles tried to unknot from the hike!

Finally, our last stop was just a bit away from our hotel for the night - another waterfall, called Hengifoss. This was a quick mile-and-a-half hike, which unfortunately was pretty much straight up and down. Our tired muscles made it, and it was an impressively tall waterfall to end the day! Best of all - our hotel has a hot tub waiting for us after all the hiking.

Iceland Hiking

Yesterday was the day we had planned for the most hiking of our trip - and I'm posting this morning rather than yesterday because it turns out that a 12 mile mountain hike isn't very conducive to staying awake past 10:30 pm! I spent a portion of yesterday really, really wishing we were close enough to visit the Blue Lagoon again - it would have been worth every penny after yesterday.

We started the day in Vik with the black sand beach, Reynisfjara. This was a quick stop but very pretty! We had a beautiful, sunny morning and the black sand stretched out to some beautiful rock fixtures. This is definitely not a swimming beach - you have to stay a long ways back from the water, as lots of people are killed here each year because the beach has "sneaker waves" every so often that will reach 20-30 feet further up the beach than normal waves and will drag people in. It's still a beautiful sight as long as you stay back, though! We saw a few, but people were aware and ran back in when one was coming.

From there we drove through some more amazing landscape. I think one of the fun things so far about driving through Iceland is that the landscape frequently changes drastically every 10-15 minutes driving. We went from mountains to wide open prairie fields to long fields of these cute green boulders (I fully expected to see one of those little round trolls from Frozen pop up) to wide open, black sand flats throughout the day.

Our first drive took us to one of the most beautiful things we've seen here yet, Fjardrarglufur. (And yes, one of our entertainments on this trip so far has been listening to Google Maps try to pronounce Icelandic. And listening to ourselves try to do the same.) This was a short little hike, but absolutely worth it, especially since our sunny day was continuing.

Finally, we drove to our last and longest hike, in Skaftafell National Park. We knew we wanted to come here for one of the most famous waterfalls, Svartifoss, which is surrounded by the same sort of rare rock fixture as Giant's Causeway. We chose to do the long (S3) hike instead of just the short one to the waterfall, though - and although every muscle in my legs is still very, very angry at me, and the hike ended up being 2 miles longer than we thought, it was incredible.

A little ways into the hike, we were able to see these incredible colored mountains - I'm very disappointed that we lost the sun by this point, because the photos here just can't capture the colors. They were multicolored and absolutely stunning.

A little bit further and we were able to see one side of the glacier in the park. Can you see the waterfall? It's freezing as it hits the ground, making the cool ice shape underneath it.

At this point we were finally mostly done with going up....although we got a whole lot higher on this hike than we expected to! As you can see, we had quite the incredible vista.

A little further in the hike and we were able to see the other side of the glacier, which was flowing down the valley. At about 8 miles in at this point, we took a break and stared at the glacier flowing, the striations and the tiny icebergs at the base. 

Throughout the hike, we were lucky to see beautiful fall colors across all the ground cover plants - still some green, particularly the moss, but tons of oranges and reds and yellows and even pinks in the grasses and shrubs.

All in, as I said, we hiked about 12 miles through the mountains. It was one of the most challenging hikes I've done physically in quite awhile, ranking right after Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, although there were no extremely hard portions of the trail, or chains to haul yourself up and down steep bits - just continual steep slopes, steps and some shifting rock fields. This wasn't a hike where I worried at any point I wasn't going to be able to make it past a portion of the trail - just one where by the end, all of my muscles were threatening to stop going. It was also up there with Cradle Mountain as one of the most beautiful and rewarding, as it's not every day you get to see a flowing glacier or a freezing waterfall or incredible mountains like those. So, although we could hardly walk to our table for dinner that night, and we both slept a solid 10 hours before waking up this morning, it was absolutely worth it! (It also didn't hurt to have the chocolate cake covered in the best ice cream I've ever eaten, native Icelandic berries and, oddly, pop rocks with not even a little bit of guilt.) Luckily today will be less hiking and more driving and sightseeing, but so far Iceland is astonishingly beautiful and fully living up to all its hype.

Northern Lights

When it comes to the northern lights, we were LUCKY.

We talked to a handful of people who have been here for 10-14 days, and hadn't yet had a clear day to see them. We not only had a clear night on our second night, but we happened to have booked a hotel about 20 minutes from the nearest town, so rather than driving 15-20 minutes and sitting in a cold car to try to see the lights, we sat in our warm beds and then wandered on outside and stood in the back yard of the hotel. When we first got back from dinner, we could see a tiny bit of the aurora on the horizon - enough to say we had seen it, but not enough to tell apart from city lights or clouds. We decided to go back in and come out in another hour or so. We came back out to a much bigger show - and I think we picked about the best 45 minutes we could have been out there, because we watched them go from relatively still to a very impressive show. They were colorless (the green is how the photo captures them) but flickering and dancing continually all across the sky. It looks like someone lit a candle over the sky and there's a light breeze - like clouds dancing in the wind like a fire. After or 45 minutes, the dancing had mostly stopped and they had receded - so we were very, very lucky in our timing!

But I know the photos are really the only important part here!