Heimaey, Iceland and the start of our 9 day Hurtigruten cruise Sept. 19-20, 2023

 We are going on our first ever “cruise”.  There really are two types of cruises…the one most people are familiar with….the resort cruise, where the boat acts as a floating resort with nightly shows, lots of drinking, and incidentally descending on port towns in huge hordes to grab a few photos and souvenirs.   Over the last ten years or so, another type of cruise is a growing segment of the cruise industry, and that’s the expedition cruise.  Smaller  boats (usually 500 passengers or less, as opposed to 1000, and even more passengers on the resort style cruises), that are taking folks to remote locations like the Arctic, Antarctica, Galápagos Islands, with daily excursions often to remote areas to hike, observe wildlife, etc.  You get great food too, but the on board “entertainment” are lectures and talks by on board scientists and experts.  Our Hurtigruten cruise was an expedition cruise.  We will be seeing the Faroe Islands, Shetland Islands and Orkney, areas that we are interested in and a cruise like this is a great way to take them in.

Anyway, it was a stormy night when we left, and we had some heavier seas our first night out.  We arrived in Heimaey, Iceland a small group of islands off the south coast of Iceland.  There was a volcanic eruption here in 1973, that buried around 400 homes…no lives were lost however.  We ended up doing two hikes, since I went the wrong way when we left the ship and we climbed straight up to a dramatic cliff/ridge where we could look across the town to the other ridge and caldera we were supposed to hike….which after coming down we did.  I knew nothing about Heimaey, and we really liked this first stop.

This house was buried in ash, and later unburied and refurbished.