Category: photography

June 26th 2005, our plane lands at London Heathrow just after 6am.

Since all four of us would be coming back through London at different times, we split up to make the trip out to London Stansted. Matthew and I took the tube into to London and then caught the train out to Stansted whilst Mum and Pabbi caught a direct bus from Heathrow to take them to Stansted.

Matthew and I hopped on the tube at Heathrow and then got off at King’s Cross/St Pancras at roughly 7:30am on Sunday June 26, 2005, to say the station was dead would be an understatement. Since we only had one trip tickets and had already passed through the turnstiles trying to find a map we decided that since we had plenty of time to kill why not just put our bags on our back and walk to Liverpool St Station, because what a great way to see the sights and to save money! Right …

We exited King’s Cross and walked across the street and picked up a bite to eat in the McDonald’s, we then found a street map of the local area and planned our route.

We walked up Pentonville Road, before coming down Goswell Rd, then along London Wall till we reached Old Broad St and then Liverpool St Station was right before our eyes.

Some of the interesting things we saw on our walk included a mastectomy wear shop (Nicola Jane at 150 Goswell Rd, London EC1V 7DU), a strange looking ATM and way too many Starbucks and McDonalds.

Whilst we did not have many streets to travel on, it was still quite an adventure, at each bus shelter we would check our progress on the map and we would stop every so often to readjust my bag which is not designed for carrying on your shoulders for great lengths. It is a large duffle bag and the straps on it are just seatbelt webbing so when your bag has 20kg plus in it, those straps really start to dig into your shoulders! The pain in my shoulders from the straps would stay with me all day as we waited at the airport.

Matthew was luckier as you can see in the picture above, he has an actual hiking pack but his daypack was not nice to him and one of the straps broke which meant that we had to do some running repairs on the road.

Matthew just near Liverpool St Station outside The Railway Tavern.

The whole walk ended up at about 3.2km and took us about 1hr or so with us each porting at least 20kg.

We arrived at the station at the right time as a couple of minutes after we had bought our Standsted Express tickets, our train departed 🙂

The train ride was quite a nice ride, Matthew fell asleep fairly soon after we took off which left me to have my eyes glued to the passing scenery and as we left Greater London and entered the Essex countryside it was super cool to see rabbits hopping through some of the fields we passed!

Whilst Matthew was sleeping I took this picture of his reflection.

Once the train arrived at Stansted, we disembarked and started our way up the endless sets of stairs to get up to the entry of the airport. It is when you are travelling up/down stairs with luggage that you really appreciate having a backpack as you just power up the stairs whilst everyone else struggles pulling their suitcase up the stairs.

By potluck a couple of minutes after we arrived inside we saw Mum and Pabbi walk past and were greeted with awful news, our plane had been delayed. I was ready then to leave my bags with my family and hop tail it back into to London to see some sights or hit up some shops and as we would later find out, that would have been a really good idea.

Because with our plane been delayed and delayed we ended up sitting, lying or walking around Stansted for 13+hours.

The delay did mean however that we were given food vouchers 🙂 and as the plane was delayed for a second time we ended up getting a second set of food vouchers. The food vouchers I think were each worth £7 and had to be used in full each time, so we spent a considerable amount of time before we used the vouchers scouting all the food shops to see where we could get maximum utility value.

We spent our time waiting, waiting, waiting by reading, reading, reading, sleeping, window shopping and walking around aimlessly. Later on in the afternoon when most of the passengers on our flight were sitting in the same area awaiting our next update we spent some time chatting with the passengers around us exchanging travel plans and offering tips etc.

We ended up arriving in Keflavík just after midnight on June 27th and thanks to the wonderful thing called midnight sun it gave my heart the biggest smile when we passed over breaks in the clouds and I could see the lava, moss, roads and lakes below and when we stepped off the plane and had were greeted by the Icelandic air my heart started doing back flips 🙂

Once we had passed through immigration, received the stamp in our passports, collected our luggage and visited the toilet, we were greeted by one of the most heart-warming sights in the world of three brothers with large smiles on their faces and then lots of hugs. The bummer was though because our plane was delayed and delayed only Karl, Tóti and Hafþór came to collect us as the young children were all tucked up in bed fast asleep. This was the cause of much heartache for Soley and in turn for me, as she was looking so forward to seeing me and if our plane had arrived when it was due she could have made the trip out to the airport with Hafþór. As a consolation however she drew me a picture and wrote me a letter which Hafþór brought to the airport with him which said that I am her favourite aunt 🙂

We then piled into the cars and made the trip to the flat where Karl and Anika lived which is where Matthew and I would be staying, Hafþór picked up his car to return to his flat and Mum and Pabbi headed off with Tóti to his house.
Then after a bit of chatting amongst the four youngest Pálssons we hit the sack after a very long day.

Well just a little over a year ago, the four members of the Palsson family “stranded” in Brisbane, Australia started off on a trip bigger than Ben Hur to go to the quinquennial clan gathering in Reykir and to see the land. I didn’t blog as much as I wanted to whilst on the trip as I was to busy living it up, so I have decided to blog about it a year on 🙂

Day 1

Sean drove us to the airport (BNE) and by the time we got to the check-in desk for Singapore Airlines we were already bickering overs omething – who had the frequent flyer numbers, who should go first etc etc, which gave the desk attendant a good laugh. After checking in we broke up to have a look round the duty free shops and we then met back up with Mum and Pabbi to grab a bite to eat. After sitting round for a while we finally able to go through Customs/security and down to the gate. So we bid farewell to Sean and made our way down stairs. Where we were greeted by this fantastic fountain.

Once we were all through Customs/security we looked at even more duty free shops, mainly just marvelling at all the different types of alcohol which we do not see in our regular bottleos and of course at the price (cheap), after a while though this of course got boring so we made the short trip to our gate and broke out our entertainment.

As we made our way onto the plane we were greeted by our delightful stewards and stewardesses and the complimentary newspapers which I grabbed to have a read of the news from the SE Asia perspective, it was quite nice to read the Straits Times and some others which I can’t recall.

Air travel with Singapore Airlines is very, very nice, just after take off the warm face washers came round which would then again come round just before we landed and before the meals. Very, very nice. We also had quite a range of entertainment with Movies and TV shows on demand, Nintendo games, puzzles, radio stations and a wide range of albums which meant that you could program your own radio station.

Flying north over Australia was amazing and I spent a fair bit of time at the back of the plane looking out the window at the land below, it was just great to see the landscape.

After about 8 hours of flying we landed at Changi Airport Singapore (SIN).

One of the first things we had to do here was to make a hurried call to Sean to get him to pick up Mum’s notebook that she had left behind with all the plans and addresses in and post it to Aunty Margaret in Tasmania who would be joining us a week into our trip.

No one could say that Matthew is an average person, he rocked his way around SIN in the above get-up and the toothpick in his mouth was there almost the entire time. Matthew and I split off from Mum and Pabbi and browsed the duty free shops, looked in the 7-11 to see if they had slurpees (no :)), had a blast on the free internet access and I ended up buying a bottle of Lemoncino.

When we got on the plane again, we had the same service as before, so no need to go in to that. I loved watching our plane make its way over Eurasia and again spending more time looking out the window to see the land below, though since we were flying through the night it was just limited to the lights which were still amazing. Flying over India we could see the long strait highways which were covered with trucks making their way across the land.

Eventually we saw this on our screen and that meant that the first leg of our trip was almost over, we were almost at London Heathrow Airport (LHR).