A Stitch in Haste

Apparently I was too smart for my own good and some people interpreted the "*" in "I*eland" as a snowflake and simply thought I was talking about Iceland all along. (For the record, I've been to Ireland twice and love the place and would gladly go again with anybody at any time.)

And a salute to all those who recognized the white building as the "Peace House," where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held an impromptu summit to discuss nuclear disarmament in October 1986.

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Anyway, here's a travel tip: If you ever have the opportunity to explore a cave formed by a prehistoric lava tube -- don't.



I'm not saying it wasn't fascinating; it definitely was.



It's just too much work. The brochure said "must be able to walk on coarse ground." Okay, I reasoned, sounds like a typical Brooklyn sidewalk. Well, something certainly got lost in translation because "walk" does not mean crawl on your hands and knees on ice-covered rocks for two hours.

For the excessively spritual types who see the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches and such:


"The Lord is my icicle, I shall not want..."

Of course, the Lord promptly smote me for thinking that by intelligently designing a loose rock in my path that maketh me and my blasphemy to lie down in fall down onto tumble over and crash into green pastures coarse ground ice-covered rocks. And I have the stigmata to prove it. Ouch. I'll spare you the picture of that.

Anyway, Reykjavik is pretty cool (and cold too). Tomorrow I've off to Akureyri, which at 15,000 people is the second largest city in Iceland. I think more than 15,000 people live on my block on the Upper East Side. My destination there is the volcanic crater called Viti.

"Viti" is Icelandic for "Hell."

I'm sensing a pattern here...