First leg of the adventure …to the starting point

26 12 2009

We have been staying in Florida for the past couple of months but are now back in Iceland. We really enjoyed the slow pace in Florida and loved the weather up until late December, when it started to cool down a bit. The highlights were:

  • Going to St. Augustine, which is a really beautiful town just north of Orlando. St. Augustine is the oldest town in the US, dating back the 15th century. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to properly explore the town but will be back for sure.
  • Going to the MGM Park (Disney Hollywood Studios) and testing our nerves in The Tower of Terror and The Aerosmith Roller-coaster and calming our selves in The Puppet Show 3D cinema.
  • Seeing the Orlando Magic play the Utah Jazz in the Amway center. The game was not that great, the players seemed to be worrying about what to get their wives and mistresses for Christmas rather then playing basketball, but it was fun to experience the atmosphere and seeing the fans.

We also got to see two of my classmates from the MBA. We met Laura in dueling piano bar in downtown Disney. We had never been to a dueling piano bar before (or even heard of one) but it was great fun and a great concept. The entertainers made fun of us being from Iceland, which never seems to get old. Preston took us on a tour through Cocoa beach. We saw almost the original Ron Jon shop, surfers surfing in the cold see and Elínborg was almost eaten by a pelican.

On the 23rd we flew to Reykjavík for the holidays. Christmas eve is the main day for gathering in Iceland when we have a family dinner and open the presents. We spent the evening at Elínborg’s sister’s house where we ate a wonderful traditional Icelandic Christmas dinner – smoked pork loin, brown sugar potatoes, cream and fruit salad, red cabbage and canned green pies. After wards we opened the presents where my sister in law and her husband took center stage by carefully disguising their presents by wrapping them in multiple layers of paper. On Christmas day we went again to Elínborg’s sister, Ásta, for a family dinner party with her in-laws.

It was kind of strange being back home and a couple of things that I had forgotten about or not thought of for a while. Firstly the darkness was darker and longer than I remembered. It isn’t properly bright until just before lunchtime and sunset is around 15:00. I also felt that people are pretty fashionable and current over here but perhaps most places look fashionable compared to Orlando :)

Now we are in the small air-plain on the way to Egilsstaðir where my mother and her husband live. We will meet up with my brother and his son over there. Egilsstaðir is an hours flight from Reykjavík and is the biggest town in the eastern part of Iceland with almost 3.000 inhabitants – so pretty big in Icelandic terms. The plan is to stay there until the 29th.

I’ll put in some pictures on facebook to match…

The bird that Threatened to eat Elínborg

The bird that threatened to eat Elínborg


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : South East Asia

First post…

1 12 2009

Hi all

As you might know, Elínborg and I are going on an almost four months back-packing trip to Asia in the New Year.

I plan to use this venue to blog about our trip and write about the places we see, people we meet and the memories that we create. I hope this blog can be entertaining and hopefully a great channel to communicate with people that want to comment on the things we experience, offer tips or ask us questions.

So where do we stand now?
We have just bought flight tickets that kind of form the main structure of our trip. We bought the tickets through AirTreks (www.airtreks.com) and they were very helpful. The tickets are for Reykjavik-Bangkok-Hong Kong-Beijing-Reykjavik cost only $1.677. We will be heading off on the 10th of January and are back again in Reykjavik on the 30th of April. We will have almost three months to explore Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam before flying to Hong Kong for three days and then we will have three weeks in China.

We are still reading a lot of blogs and travel guides to work out more details so all tips and suggestions are welcome. We will probably stay in the southern (hotter) part in January and February and explore Southern Thailand, Cambodia and Southern Vietnam and head to northern Thailand, Laos and northern Vietnam in March and April.

We don’t have anything scheduled after arriving in Beijing but we’ll probably go to Xi’an for a few days but apart from that we haven’t really looked at China.

We are trying to figure out what to pack and what to skip and I think that we have managed to buy or borrow everything except fast drying towels and underwear and a wallet that you carry inside of your clothes so we are still on the lookout for those items :) I’ll hopefully at some point post what we took with us, what we never used and what we severely needed and should have taken with us.

We have already managed to get all the necessary vaccinations except our last rabies shot. I never imagined that vaccinations would be so expensive!!! We got most of what we didn’t already have in Switzerland except that rabies shot, which we planned to have here in the US but at the cost of $270 per person we are having second thoughts. Hopefully we can have it in Iceland where it “only” costs around $120, which is about the same as in Switzerland.

So the plan is to buy a Netbook (we’re looking at the ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1005HA-MU17-BU for those that are interested) to write down our travel journal and then (fingers crossed) upload it here weekly or so including some pictures and videos. I hope that our friends and family will post comments, questions or what ever they want here to enrich the blog.

Until next time…
– Ö r n –


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : South East Asia