More of Iceland...

This photo is for Auntie just to show I haven't forgotten about clotheslines. Truth be told, there aren't many here. To date I've only seen three, was only able to grab a photo of two, but did find a postcard of a watercolor of a clothesline so I'm not the only one who thinks they're neat.

 Suspicious the Icelanders are now using dryers, I finally asked one young man today how the utilities worked. Except for remote farms almost all the homes are heated with hot water that's filtered and piped to them underground. Cold, glacier water also comes underground as does electricity that's generated either with geothermal or hydro, and telephone. We've seen no overhead wires around homes. He told me it costs about 10,000 krona ($95) a month for a small home for all utilities. Not bad when you consider dinner out for two can easily cost that much and that's only if you stick with water as your beverage.

This is the Snaefellsjokull glacier sitting atop the old Snaefells volcano. If you believed Jules Verne in his book "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", you can slip under that ice cap and descend into the crater of Snaefells to start your own journey. Didn't they eventually pop up in Italy? Perhaps if Italy gets any warmer and the ice caps keep up their rapid rate of melting, the Italians will start popping up here. Just speculating...

In case you can't identify this straight away, it's a basket of eiderdown. Turns out Iceland is a big supplier of eiderdown... 80% of the world's production. It's collected from the nests of wild eiderducks (the ducks have been protected since 1847 and are still going strong so no need to worry about their safety); 60-70 nests to make 1 kg. Not sure how fast the farmers can collect it but according to the Park service, 1 kg was worth about $1900 in 2014. Japan bought most of it that year, worth over $570 million, to use in their eiderdown duvets. Wow!

And finally, the white building to the right of the ones with the red roofs, is where we're staying tonight. That's a glacier on the mountain on the far left, and John's hiding another glacier on a mountain to the right. We can see both from our bedroom window. The water is not a lake or the sea but the largest river in western Iceland. Joe & Karol... John thinks the trout fishing should be fantastic (but it's not to be this trip...) PS - it's very very very quiet here.

And one last bit of nothing trivia... American jazz seems to be the music of choice. It's on everywhere we go.