13/09 & 14/09

Good day everyone - two day's worth of reporting here.......we had a very early start (and a late night) yesterday so I didn't have time to write anything up until now but, better late than never I say......so here we go

13/9 - Isafjordur

We woke up to a fantastic view - after the bleakness of yesterday's landscape, I can say without doubt that Isafjordur is both beautiful and pretty. 

The sunshine & lovely blue skies helped but I think that even without that, it would still have looked lovely.  The mountains surrounding the town reminded me a bit of the Hawaiian coastline (not that I've ever been to Hawaii, I'm just going by pics I've seen), they made for a wonderful backdrop. 

Isafjordur is a tender port so to avoid the rush for tender tickets, we took our time getting ready and sauntered down to the Island dining room around 10:30 to get in line.  It worked out well, within minutes we started to board and were back on dry land around 11.

It was our very first tender experience and, apart from hitting a bit of the wake left by an earlier tender & bouncing around for a few seconds, it was a very smooth ride. 

As with every other port we've visited (apart from Rotterdam), there were no 'locals' dressed in national costume for us to have our picture taken with so we bypassed the ship's photographers and made our way to the tourist office, got ourselves a map and had a very long walk around town.

All the buildings were built with some kind of corrugated metal material (tech term escapes me!) - don't know what the rainfall is like here but if they ever get a heavy downpour, I'd be surprised if they could hear themselves think

I couldn't get over how quiet it was around the town - even the sounds from cars & trucks seemed muted.  I don't know if the surrounding mountains soaked the noise up but, honestly, I've been in little English hamlets with nothing more than a pub, church & post office that have sounded louder than Isafjordur.  It was odd.

Another strange thing was that it wasn't 'touristy', not in the least.  The shops weren't doing a hard-sell & we didn't see any of those just waiting for cruise passengers' "end of season" sales!

It took four attempts to get that pic of us......it's when we realised that the camera wasn't 'writing' every photo we took to the SD card 😲

After we'd walked around the town and (not) taken a load of photos, we thought we'd stop off at a local bar or restaurant and have some lunch but, apart from a couple of bakeries, we couldn't find anywhere to eat......no bars or restaurants. How weird is that?

We made our way back to the tourist info centre to see if we could find out where we could have something to eat & drink and were lucky enough to stand behind a lady who was asking if there was anywhere to eat or drink!  She was told that the only fish restaurant in town was closed due to a family bereavement but apparently, there was another restaurant right next door to where we were all standing.  Well, in a month of Sunday's you wouldn't have guessed.....there wasn't a sign to be seen on the building - no self promotion whatsoever (we actually wondered if the locals even knew it was there 😊).

We paid it a visit and had a lovely pub lunch of burger, waffle fries and Gull beer.  It was really tasty. 

We sat watching the world go by for a while then around mid afternoon, we decided to go back to the ship.

Here's the outside of the restaurant - no clue whatsoever that it was a bar/pub restaurant
The only sign was in the foyer/reception area ⬇ where it couldn't be seen from the pavement/road (how weird !)

The food and the beer were lovely and the view was pretty good too 

Walking back to the tender - despite that long queue, we didn't have to wait long 

We were both shattered when we returned to the ship so we had a couple of hours snoozing then got ourselves ready for dinner.  We weren't in a hurry to do anything particular after dinner so rather than ask for a table for 2 and have the meal over with quickly, we decided to share (table for 6 or less please) and take it easy.  We ended up sitting with a lady we know from Crooners, her hubby and another couple.  They were all great company and apart from my rib-eye being particularly fatty, the meal was good too. 

(Part of our conversation was quite amusing - talk about Chinese whispers!!!!  
We mentioned the guy who'd fallen during our trip yesterday and one of our table companions got that "gossipy" look in her eyes, tapped me on the arm and said "I heard he was out cold for over an hour"....I had to laugh - regular readers will remember my mentioning yesterday that I'd spoken to him half an hour after it all happened.
Just shows how things can get exaggerated, doesn't it? 😉.)

With a very early start in Reykjavik, we didn't want to stay up too late so we watched Xcite's mid evening show & made our way to bed around 10ish but not before asking passenger services for a call if the Northern Lights made an appearance.

At 1:00am, we got the call.  The lights were starboard/aft. 

We had a look see and there they were.....not very bright and not very colourful but bright enough & colourful enough for us to see.....just.  Sadly, they weren't colourful enough for the camera so we've got no pics but at least we did see them and it's another item we've been able to tick off our bucket list.

14/9 - Reykjavik

The excitement at seeing the northern lights in the early hours of Wednesday morning didn't stop us from falling asleep again as soon as our heads hit the pillows and it was a good job too......we had a very early wake up call so that we could get to the Princess Theatre for 7:40 - the meeting point for our "Best of the Golden Circle" excursion which was due to start at 8:00am

It was a marvellous tour.  We saw some amazing sights from geo-thermal power stations to

geysers

and quite a few waterfalls (with Gullfoss being the largest and, by far, the best we've seen in Iceland). 

The most interesting part of the trip for me was seeing the tectonic plates that separate Europe & North America and the strangest part of the trip was sitting down to lunch at 11am!!!!!!

I don't know who made up the time-table but I reckon they need to rethink that part of it - eating so early made dinner time back on the ship seem like centuries away 😏.

It was bitterly cold by the time we returned to the CB and it was absolutely f-f-f-freezing standing on the dock in the sleety rain waiting to re-board.  As soon as we set foot in the Piazza we went straight to Vines for a glass of wine and some tapas and then went to check on the dinner menu to see if we'd need to get ready for the MDR.  Nothing appealed so we stayed in our scruff & went to get pizza and a burger and, as it was too cold to sit outside, we ate it all in the HC then went to Crooners for a chat.

After hearing some really bad reviews about the hypnotist's act, we decided to give his 9:00pm show a miss and went to the late trivia quiz instead.  We teamed up with another 2 couples and won.......yayyyyy, we came first.......wooooooohooooooooo...........go us. 

We won a bottle of champagne but decided that just one couple should have the honours and, by popular vote, it was awarded to Marianne & Ron (mainly because they were also celebrating Marianne getting to the final of the ship's singing competition "The Voice of the Ocean").

A re-visit to Crooners for a couple more drinks and then to bed.