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On the morning of the second full day of our Iceland trip we went to Grímsey Island. It is on the north coast and straddles the Arctic Circle. It has a populatioin under 100.

I got to stand on both sides of the circle (I've done that at the equator as well - I doubt if I will evey do it at the Antarctic Circle, but you never know,,,).




  

  

Walking around Ísafjörður (ice fjord) a town in western Iceland in addition to the small village we saw a rustic area with nice waterfalls and streams. We did get some entertainlment when we went into a church.

The area was first settled by Helgi Magri Hrólfsson in the 9th century. In the 16th century, the town grew as it became a trading post for foreign merchants. Witch trials were common around the same time throughout the Westfjords, and many people were banished to the nearby peninsula of Hornstrandir, now a national nature reserve. The town of Ísafjörður was granted municipal status in 1786.



  

  

  

In the afternoon of our first full day on the Le Champlain we went to Ísafjörður, a fishing village on the northwest end of Iceland. It has a declining fishing industry and various other industries.
It is a port so our boat docked there.

Among other things we got an informative and amusing guided tour from a local fisherman.
  
Note his shoes:
  
And some fish that had been processed:
  

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Might be a couple of errors here - since some of these were a long time ago

After breakfast on the first morning on the boat we took a tour to Vigur, an island off the coast of Iceland. We went from our boat on the pair of tenders it carried - we had to have life jacket lessons as part of the excursion.

Vigur has one family permanently residing on it and our guide was a member of that family. But there are other people and buildings there. There is an ancient windmill.




  

There are lots of birds on this island: puffins, black guillemot, Arctic terns, eider ducks among others. We were attacked by terns as we walked around - no one got injured - it is amusing and annoying; some people waved sticks to ward off their attacks.

    

I like browsing through collections of old stuff seen in museums and historical collections in old houses. Here is some from one of the first of many we saw.

(Sometimes I think I could turn parts of our house into such a collection.)






    

One of the museums in Reykjavik we visited was the Phallological Museum. It is a collection of phallic specimens from many mammals (209 specimens from 46 species of mammals)- plus some humor. And yes, it is also called the Penis Museum.





  

  

Here is a model of Iceland in its early days seen in the Settler's Exhibition:


Reykjavik is now a big city and port. It is the northernmost capital in the world. It has some interesting museums and is worth walking around in.




Some musicians:

After resting a bit in our hotel room to help recover from jetlag we started walking around Ryekjavik. We had flown over a day before the cruise was supposed to start - conveniently we were able to get into our hotel room at 7:30 am.

One of the first places we visited was The Settlement Exhibition, a museum with lots of exhibits about the early Viking settlers in Iceland. It is titled Reykjavik 871± 2 because 871 or so was the year when there was a volcanic eruption which deposited some materials which were used as part of the construction of a hall that was occupied from 930-1000.

There was a model of the settlement that was hard to photograph because there was no way to get the camera high enough (I should have had my monopod - left in the hotel room - which would have helped.)


There were models of the building which was a pretty elaborate structure (but I apparently didn't take a picture of it) and lots of information that they had figured out about the settlement.
  

And some items from later times - at many places there were collections of stuff like this which I always like looking at:

Another event for Motss.Con XXXII was a visit to the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden located on the Stanford University campus. It was entrancing to wander around in it. I definitely recommend a visit there if you go to Palo Alto.

In 1994 a grad student in the Stanford Antropology Department arranged for some groups of men to come to Palo Alto from Papua New Guinea to carve a bunch of scultpures. They sit in a wooded area that was arranged to look like their home territory. Many of them were just carved out of large trees - several were painted with bright colors. Some were carved out of pumice. Included was a version of the Thinker - to complement the nearby Rodin Thinker.