While we were in New Orleans last week, we saw many beautiful flowering plants (they still were experiencing what I’d call summer temperatures, but which I’m sure they wouldn’t). Many I could identify, but not this one.

Do any of you know? (Julie and Amanda, I’m looking your way in particular…)

Rudi and I will be heading south to Louisiana next month, when a former student of mine will be getting married. It will be my first trip to the state and a much needed vacation for us both.

My friend will be getting married in Baton Rouge, and we’ll be flying into and out of New Orleans.

Obviously we’re aware of Bourbon Street and know we should eat beignets and listen to music in clubs in New Orleans, and several people have recommended that we see the historic plantations that are en route between the two cities. But short of that, we’ve not yet done any research into what we should see/do while we’re there.

What would you, dear readers, suggest we catch during our week in the Deep South? Nothing is off limits, provided it’s within a reasonable drive of either city.

Thanks for any tips you’ve got!

There are still updates and photos and a book review to share, but I have been up for many, many hours today and have traveled from one continent to another. Now I need to sleep.

Just a quick note with a few highlights from Friday in Reykjavik.

First thing: I found yarn. A few skeins may have jumped into a bag for me.

Then we headed out for a bite to eat. The cookie was quite good, as were our sandwiches.

We took in some more modern art at National Gallery and then crossed the street to look at the birds at the Tjornin. We had a bit of a challenge finding the Althingishusid (Parliament House) because, honestly, it’s a little unassuming (although we had unknowingly admired its gardens our first night in town). No guards, no security (outside), no ostentation. It was refreshing, particularly because if anyone had a reason to boast about its parliament, it would be Iceland, who has the world’s oldest. (It was founded in roughly 930 A.D. and has been in this building since 1881.)

We then went to the Culture House to see the nation’s medieval manuscripts, “borrowed” for many years by Denmark. No photos were allowed of the ancient documents (understandably), so I contented myself with capturing these giant illustrations from a children’s adaptation of some of the stories.

Rudi and I returned to our hotel to spend an hour in its spa, where we soaked in a hot tub and got neck rubs (more luxury built into our package). It would be nice to be doted on like this regularly!

We headed back downtown for a fancy dinner at The Fish Company. Rudi was ultra-excited about this meal and I admit that I may have been less exuberant about it than I had been about some other aspects of the trip (apparently I am more in favor of fancy baths than fancy food). However, that said, it was a fantastic meal and I enjoyed every aspect of the the restaurant and our experience there — from my amuse-bouche to the skyr (an Icelandic yogurt-like cheese usually eaten at breakfast)-based dessert and pot of tea we split.

We ended up walking back to the hotel as the night was comfortable and so were we. En route, we passed several street performers (including a gifted singer) and Reykjavik’s food truck scene, three of which can (barely) be seen in the plaza below.

Check out a few more shots of the day here.

On Thursday, we managed to find ourselves a restaurant frequented by Icelanders, rather than aimed at tourists. You can tell because the menu was entirely in Icelandic, which necessitated asking the woman at the counter to help us decipher it. (English is mandatory in Icelandic schools, so everyone speaks it here.)

After a delicious, healthy, and vegetarian lunch, Rudi and I ventured down into Langardalur Park to explore. We passed by the nation’s Olympic training facilities and headed around back, where we wandered through the Botanic Garden. We saw flora from around the world, a pond where one could feed ducks, and then stumbled through a garden to discover this sod house.

Short of a round door, doesn’t it look like a hobbit house? No wonder this is a nation that still believes in magical peoples.

Then it was off to the zoo/petting zoo/farm animal collection. The Iceland zoo is a tiny little place and it’s probably fair to say it’s cramped and old-fashioned in the space it gives its animals. However, we were there and it’s hard to diss adorable animals.

We saw seals, who, when they dive, like to swim upside down.

The highlight was definitely the arctic fox exhibit. Arctic foxes are one of only two mammals native to Iceland. All others have been imported through the years. One fox was a bit spooky and eventually sought refuge behind some rocks, but this guy looked up, checked out the weird people speaking gibberish to it, and then put his head back down. Doesn’t he look so soft?

We found the zoo cat in the cow and pig barn.

What? Every zoo doesn’t have a cat?

Well, they should. This cat and one of the calves were clearly pals, as the calf just could not keep its eyes off her. I’m sure she was disappointed when the cat wanted to escort us to the sheep and goat barn.

We explored the family amusement park, which was a little spooky in its deserted, childfree winter state. However, we still took the chance to play.

On our way to the pool, we came across this site.

Turns out it’s where the hot spring used to surface. It used to house the pool and also served as a laundry facility.

The visitor passes we purchased gave us free entry into the city’s geothermal pools, so that’s how we spent the rest of the afternoon. No photos allowed there, but trust us that hot pools — whether for lounging or for paddling around in — are absolutely lovely. (They also have a fantastic three-story slide that was totally awesome.)

After a vegetarian dinner in this fantastic restaurant run by two lovely women, Rudi and I caught a cab across town for some storytelling.

This fall, Icelanders invited visitors to explore the non-touristy side of the country via Inspired by Iceland. One of the options while we were here was to hear bedtime stories read by a local actor.

We were delighted to discover cookies and mugs of cocoa waiting for us when we arrived. We settled in and Felix soon took his seat and began reading to us.

He read a children’s story to us, then one of the Sagas, and concluded with the first chapter from a novel by Haldor Laxness (Iceland’s lone Nobel Prize for Literature winner). It was a perfect way to pass an evening.

We concluded the evening at a low-key cafe/coffeehouse across from where we had dinner, the most adult thing we’d done all day.

Check out some more pictures from our day here.

Wednesday got off to a bit of a slow start for us as apparently all the fresh air and exercise (and late night blogging) made us a wee bit tired.

Once we arose, we headed off to check out Hallgrimskirkja, Iceland’s biggest church. First, though, we headed across the street from the church to Loki’s Cafe, touted by every guide book we looked at as well worth a visit. They were right — her pancake platter was delicious. They’re crepes, really — one rolled up like a cigar and filled with cinnamon sugar, and the other folded into quarters and stuffed with jam and cream. Vacation food from heaven.

Fortified, we headed back across the street to check out what Rudi refers to as the Lego church, as it is very geometrical and does look as if it could easily be replicated by a skilled youngster with the right collection of toy bricks. Outside, keeping watch on the harbor stands a statue of Leif Eriksson, noted, as I’m sure you all recall from your early history lessons, for being the man credited with discovering America. The statue was a gift from the U.S.

Inside the church, it’s all pale wood and light blue cushions and clear windows. Very little stained glass to be seen here. I assume it’s so as not to prevent any of Iceland’s precious winter sunlight from getting in, but that’s totally a guess on my part. The church also has a striking organ in the back above the entrance. I understand the concerts are magnificent, but no one was playing it the day we visited. We decided not to go up in the tower because it was a gray day threatening the town with rain. We may try to head back on a finer day to check that out.

The city center is straight down the hill, so we window shopped our way down. We stopped in a woolen goods shop and I considered yarn purchases, but none of it demanded to be taken away that day. We also stopped in a cd shop, but it’s hard to gauge music by the covers, so we postponed that purchase as well.

Downtown and looking to escape the drizzle that had begun, we decided to check out the Settlement Exhibition. Several years back, someone wanted to build a hotel in downtown on the site of an old house. They agreed to preserve the house, but after they dug it out, they found that it was sitting on the site of a much older house — one that dates to something like 870 A.D. The foundation of the house still exists and the museum they’ve opened in its spot (underneath the hotel whose construction precipitated the discovery) uses motion-triggered sensors, light beams, and other technological advances to its advantage in showing off the ruins.

After that, we went looking for the photography museum we’d seen the night before, but instead we ended up at the Reykjavik Art Museum, a gallery showing an assortment of modern art pieces. Let us say that Rudi enjoyed it more than I did and leave it at that. We did see a great mural depicting the harbor on the building next door, so that’s something.

In need of a bit of a pick-me-up, we walked up the main shopping boulevard downtown (Laugavegur), did some more windowshopping, and found a great yard that had been given over to street artists. There was some truly outstanding work, before ending up in a lovely subterranean teashop where we passed a quiet and rejuvenating hour.

By the time we left, the shops were closing (Reykjavik keeps the traditional European closing time of 6 p.m. most weekday nights), and we wandered through a grocery store looking at local foods before ultimately figuring out what we wanted for our own dinner — Thai food. We followed that up by returning to the bookstore we’d visited Monday night for tea and coffee, after a quick visit around the Volcano Museum’s exhibit.

We finished up the night back at the hotel periodically running out to the floor’s north-facing elevator lobby windows to see if the clouds had cleared so we could see the Northern Lights. No luck so far, although the evenings are getting less foggy, so keep your fingers crossed…

A few more shots of day three here.

Tuesday was our planned adventuring day. When we bought our tickets to Iceland, included in the package was an Icelandic Mountain Guides tour offering a glacier walk, a lobster soup dinner, and a viewing of the Northern Lights (weather permitting).

We boarded the bus from our hotel at 11:30 a.m. and set off south from Reykjavik. Our guide was entertaining, offering us a nice blend of cultural understanding, history, political insights, and personal stories. We learned about Icelandic horses (Their horses have a unique walking style that allows them to have a competition where horses walk a course while their rider holds a full glass of beer; whoever has the most beer left in their glass at the end wins.), the Icelandic Sagas (I’m guessing locals would be upset that Barnes & Noble in the U.S. files their national history book in the mythology section), and the Vestmannaeyjar eruption of 1973 (when an entire island was forced to evacuate via the town’s fishing fleet when its volcano suddenly erupted in the middle of the night) among other things as we rolled through the agricultural belt of Iceland.

We paused for lunch at a rest stop and a few of us ran across the road to check out the tiny town’s farmers’ market (which mostly sold local arts and crafts) and the grocery store, complete with its aisle of yarn!

Then back on the bus for another bit of driving. As we got closer to the area where Eyjafjallajökull erupted, its presence became apparent. Icelanders are still working hard to combat the effects of the ash, which fills the rivers. Construction crews work through the night to dredge the ash to the banks to cut down on the pollution.

We passed one set of waterfalls but stopped at the next. This is Skogarfoss, one of the larger waterfalls in the country:

You can no longer see the soil for the ash.

After admiring the waterfall briefly, we had to hurry back to the bus because daylight only lasts six hours or so in Iceland at this time of the year and we were getting on there.

I have no pictures from when the bus left the main road to take the access road out to the glacier, but trust me when I tell you that a lesser bus driver and a lesser bus would have us stuck out there still. I wanted to hold my breath, but honestly, it went on for ten minutes, so it’s good I didn’t.

We each were fitted with a pair of crampons to attach to our boots in order to keep our footing on the ice and an ice axe (to help us keep our balance, rather than for climbing).

Our tour guide gave us a few encouraging words and then split us off into two groups. We hiked a bit over frozen ash and lava rocks first before we reached the ice.

Here are some of the highlights from the Solheimajokull glacier:

Holes and blue ice and air bubbles and frozen ash and fissures and … It was just impressive. There’s no getting around it.

You should click through to Flickr to open this shot. In it you can see the note I put in about where the ice used to reach less than a decade ago. No one in Iceland doubts the existence of global climate change.

On the way to dinner we stopped at Seljalandsfoss waterfall, which is lit by floodlights, and we not only got to look at the front of it, but also got to see the back side of it, as there is a pathway that hugs the cliff behind the falls.

We scrambled down rocks lit by the guides’ flashlights and got quite damp from the mist of the waterfall and the steady drizzle falling down.

Luckily the bus was warm as was the restaurant we stopped at which served us nice soup (vegetable for me and the non-shellfish eaters, local lobster stew for everyone else) and bread for a tasty supper.

Because of the ceaseless rain and clouds, seeing the Northern Lights was definitely out, so the guides took us instead to the Seltun Geothermal Area, which used to be a geysir until it suddenly exploded back in the early 1990s. It was dark and wet and sulfurous and although it was cool to see, it was universally decided we should not linger long.

Even without the Aurora Borealis, it was an amazing trip. Rudi and I just had enough energy to toddle down to the hotel bar for a couple of bedtime drinks (tea and a cappuccino) before we retired back to the room for the night and some well-deserved rest.

Check out the many, many more shots from our Iceland road trip on Flickr.

Greetings from Reykjavik!

Rudi and I took off from Dulles late Sunday evening for Iceland and arrived here six hours later at 6:25 in the morning. The plane ride offered a chance to watch a view short films and tv shows from Iceland and to nap a little bit in preparation for the day ahead.

I am always surprised by customs in European airports. I didn’t speak a word to the guy who looked at my passport and kept waiting for us to go through the “real” immigration gate. I remember thinking that in Paris, too. Can you imagine that happening in the U.S.?

After getting our passports stamped, we headed out to the lobby to buy our bus tickets to the Blue Lagoon. I’m not sure if the girl who sold them to us was surprised we were willing to hang around the airport for three hours until it was time for the bus to depart or because it was raining, but she seemed to be.

We passed the time in a cafe, with hot drinks and reading material. (I’m now a hundred pages into Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City, a police procedural set in Reykjavik.)

Eventually, though, it was time to climb aboard the bus. Dawn was just barely beginning to brighten the clouds (at 9:30) as we drove first through the deserted American naval base, past a car engulfed in flames (no idea what happened there), and then through otherworldly lava fields en route to the world-famous Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is overflow from the local power plant. Okay, that’s not quite true. The local geothermal plant uses the water first to create electricity and then the water ends up at the Blue Lagoon, where people believe the therapeutic powers of its silica-rich waters will help to cure a variety of skin ailments. I’m not sure about that, but it sure helps to make you feel relaxed!

Okay, that’s not entirely true either. It might make you feel relaxed if the gale-force wind weren’t kicking up waves in your calming pool waters! It actually was kind of funny, because they warn women to try not to get long hair wet because it does funky things to it, but I don’t think there was a single woman in the pool with dry hair. Or a dry face. Or who hadn’t swallowed bucketsful of salty water. And I can tell you that the deckside lifeguard was decked out in full-on storm gear, like a fisherman. And the lifeguard stationed in the building’s second floor (so he can see all parts of the pool) has a window equipped with a windshield wiper. But the water was roughly 50 degrees warmer than the air temperature, so it did still feel luxurious to be able to paddle around in it, even as the equivalent of a Nor’Easter swept over us. Rudi and I stayed in more than two hours before climbing out and scrambling quickly inside.

The bus ride up to Reykjavik was a little harrowing between the winds and the unpaved, curving roads. I was really impressed with the bus driver’s skills.

We checked into our hotel just as sun was arriving in Reykjavik, so we only stayed long enough to put our stuff down before we were back out the door and following a footpath that led to a road that ran into the harbor.

Although we did not find a cafe along the water as we were hoping to, we did find a multi-use trail and we walked along it heading toward town. We passed some sculpture and a lot of lava rocks.

I had gotten a few yards ahead of Rudi and I turned around to see what he was shooting, when I noticed something else cool:

Yup! A rainbow! Can’t help but be a good omen for our trip, right?

We walked along the water as far as the Solar Voyager, the statue designed to recall the nation’s Viking heritage.

Then we decided it was time to find a hot beverage and a bite to eat. The wind was strong and we were tired!

We ended up in a nice little chain cafe where we could eat croissants and drink tea and coffee with a view of the water.

As the sun was setting, we figured we’d better head back to the hotel. As we were walking along, though, we passed this cool-looking, but obviously empty house:

Turns out, this is Hofthi House, where Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated the end of the Cold War. How cool is that?!

We rested for a while and then headed back out for dinner later in the evening. We went to Icelandic Fish and Chips where we had — you guessed it! — fish and chips. Quite tasty! We then walked a bit around town, found the Occupy Reykjavik park (far less impressive than Macpherson Square, but still nice to see), and ended the evening at the big bookstore in the center of town which was open late to serve us tea, coffee, and dessert. We’ll be heading back there to pick up some reading materials and cds, I suspect, before the trip is over.

And so concluded Day 1 in Iceland.

The thing about vacations is that they tend to spawn the need for more time off. I’m glad that the weekend is only one more sleep away. But before I toddle off to bed, I thought I’d share three beautiful things from my past week with you:

1. Spring has been slow to arrive in Salt Lake this year, and to its surrounding mountains even more so. We drive up into them for the afternoon and wonder at the wash of velvety yellow-green coats the aspens are wearing as far as the eye can see (at least until you hit the snow line).

2. A sudden afternoon thunderstorm is gone nearly as quickly as it arrives, but in its wake it leaves behind a triple rainbow arcing over the mountains to our east.

3. The pool next to our room opens early and stays open late. We spend an hour paddling around under the watch of a waxing moon.

Those are just three of the beautiful things from my world this last week. What’s been beautiful in yours?

Rudi and I returned home this morning via a red eye flight and rush hour public transportation and then preceded to squander our last day of vacation and gorgeous weather by sleeping all day. However, we did finish up our week off with a fun, fun, fun Katy Perry concert.

More vacation shots later, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with this one …