Tag: Iceland
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Icelandic Adventures
Iceland (September 1999) For a country as small as Iceland, the capital city of Reykjavík and its suburbs felt much larger than one would expect. Hallgrímskirkja, a tall church sitting atop a hill, dominated the otherwise low-slung skyline. Corrugated iron protected historic homes near the harbor from cold rain and steady wind. Tjörnin (literally “the…
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Icelandic Diaspora
I thought about a trip I made to Washington Island several years ago. That’s the island found off the tip of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula where most people arrive by ferry. The residents displayed their Icelandic roots with great pride. I wondered at the time and I’ve wondered occasionally since, whether this was true or simply…
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European Latitude Paradoxes
There aren’t any great research efforts or revelations today, just some interesting observations about various lines of latitude in western Europe. I spend a lot of time simply looking at maps, at the patterns, and the logical contradictions that aren’t always apparent in our conventional thoughts. These are a few that have made me smile…
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My Travel Box
It struck me that I’d gone really north and really west when I went to Alaska, perhaps the farthest I’d ever been in either direction. That made me wonder about the most extreme latitudes (north/south) and longitudes (east/west) I’d visited during my lifetime. I was wrong on both counts by the way; Alaska was neither…
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What’s Up With the Volcano?
Every geo-blogger on the planet is covering the Eyjafjallajökull eruption. Well I’m not going to do that, or rather, I’m taking an entirely different approach because you know it’s happening and there are others who can cover this event a whole lot more eloquently than I can. By now everyone is aware of the location…
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Keeping It North
I’d like to focus my attention firmly north a little longer to complete the circle, specifically, the Arctic Circle as it passes through Iceland. The previous articles, in case you haven’t had a chance to review them, involved Deadhorse, Alaska and the FINORU tripoint. The Arctic Circle runs through very few countries, only eight of…
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Vikings in Boston?
I’m in Boston, Massachusetts this week. Maybe I can satisfy my geo-weirdness fixation in between my all-day business meetings. Fortunately Boston has a compact core with several walkable neighborhoods and a great public transportation system. I had an opportunity to spend a couple of hours wandering around the Back Bay yesterday. This area used to…
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Island on an Island
Sometimes an island has a pond or lake that also happens to contain an island. Twelve Mile Circle likes to call that second, subsidiary island an “island-on-an-island.” Beaver Island, Michigan Beaver Island is the largest on Lake Michigan. It contains several lowlands, marshy areas, and ponds which makes it a perfect candidate for islands-on-an-island. We…
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From Britain to Iceland by Automobile
Certainly one of the more pressing questions of our time is whether someone can use an automobile to travel between Britain and Iceland. By “pressing” I mean of importance to me naturally, because the questions that press upon my mind are rather simplistic. Maybe you are feeling a little curious too. Can someone drive from…
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Icelandic Road Sign Map
Iceland is a country of barely 300,000 people with two-thirds of them living in the greater Reykjavík area. That makes for wide open spaces interspersed with small, scattered settlements across the remainder of this island nation. It also results in some of the most amazingly detailed road signs imaginable. I took this photograph on a…