40 hours after leaving home, we arrived in Palermo, a mammoth effort interspersed with a 4 hour break in Perth and then direct to Rome and a longer break of 8 hours before the 45 minute flight to Palermo. The transit through the recently introduced EES was seamless and a lot quicker than Melbourne Airport, even with the machines inability to deal with Jean's fingerprints, not that it was a problem, she was directed to the "manual entry" gate and went s...

One more time ag

So ends our 57 day tour of the 4 **lands, Eng, Ire, Ice and Green. Countless miles & kilometres of driving, walking and seaborne adventures that took us to places and sights that have to be experienced to be believed and a host of interesting people along the way. After a short post-arrival recovery in Chester it was off to Ireland to explore the coastal route around the country for a couple of weeks on the aptly named Wild Atlantic Way. Whereas the Atlantic wa...

As you might be able to see from the photo, the sea is not so calm as in the fjords. As we head south, into a 40 knot head wind, seas 3m and with the ship pitching and rolling, there are a few more empty seats up on the observation deck. Probably it will be the same at lunch as well. So we are now heading south down the west coast and back to Reykjavik, but not before a few more stops and no doubt, some more incredible sights along the way. At bit of a bumpy ni...

So Greenland, the largest non continental island and the oldest land form in the world. Baffin Island ( Canada) to the west and Iceland and Scandinavia to the east. Despite being so close to Iceland, the land of fire, and therefore close in tectonic terms to the Icelandic hotspot, there is no geothermal activity in Greenland, the last volcanic eruption is thought to have been more than 500,000 years ago. The country consists of 3 large islands, covered by a si...