Verona, the city of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet and also the name of an essential Kiwi song. I won't get into which is better, because Mercutio and his plague would rain on all of our houses, but you can't possibly be a kiwi and not sing Verona every chance you get while there.  The train ride wasn't that long but due to large quantities of prosecco and strawberries I slept most of the way. Emma, charming soul that she is, documented the trip for me in a series of snaps. Mostly of me sleeping. But she's creative, and made sure to use snapchat filters. She's good like that.  To View More >>

Pisa, Italy The best way to wait for a train anywhere involves sitting in a bar in the sun/shade with a glass of rosé.  After getting out of the Pisa airport we headed straight to the tower to get the most touristy part of our trip out of the way. It's a tower. It leans. That's about all I can say about it. My OCD doesnt like things wonky so I can't say it was a highlight. I took the token photo of it (with Snapchat no less, dont even think I got my actual camera out) and then we went off to find a place to lunch. Our train to Firenze wasn't for a couple for hours so we found this quiet To View More >>

Spinning up some sunrise We were booked to stay in Guesthouse Gerði in between Jökulsárlón  and the village of Höfn. After being blown away by the Glacier Lagoon, the bar was set pretty high. As the sun set over Höfn, the sky lit up. Not with the Northern Lights, but with the last rays of the day.  The Þórbergur Center is a cultural centre with an exhibition dedicated to the Iceland writer Þórbergur Þórðarson (1888 – 1974) who grew up in the area. The centre is home to a restaurant as well with the To View More >>

A Ghostly Procession After departing the national park, soaking wet and hallucinating moving mountains, we set off to the next accomodation. The one downside to travelling Iceland in the winter is how dark it gets so quickly. We chose winter for a chance of seeing the Northern Lights but this did mean that the days were short. Because of this we had planned to view the Glacier Lagoon the next morning but as we passed by it to get to the Guesthouse the sight of colossal chunks of glacial ice floating in a lagoon as the sun was starting to set was too much to pass up.  Jökulsárlón To View More >>