We planned this for over a year and made all the arrangements, and called our program “Iceland: Land of Fire and
Ice”, at that time, it was just a name. We knew the Ice part was real but the fire part was just history. But now it is real – there is an active volcano and this program is essentially about Fire and Ice. 
After all the delays related to the ash plume and nearly abandoning this program, we miraculously made it through a long and tiring journey to Iceland. I really have to tell about how we got here. We drive to Charlotte in two vans (thanks to Bill for driving us) and were separated into three groups to take three different flights to New York. First two groups were fortunate to get a direct flight but the third group (of which I was part of) had to go through Boston to get to New York. We certainly enjoyed the strange and unusual hospitality shown by JetBlue crew in the flight to Boston (it was their 10th anniversary!); it was not the same case in the second flight. Once we all grouped together at JFK, we got on a British Airways flight to London Heathrow, from where we took an Icelandic Air flight to Reykjavik. The pain of long journey, less sleep, tiredness, etc., are now in the background, and excitement of beating the odds and getting here to Iceland took over. We just couldn’t control our happiness.
Here students are waiting at the NY-JFK airport for our flight to London.
Left one – we are waiting for the transit train to go from arriving terminal to Icelandair terminal in London. Then a long bus ride took us to the gate. It is mid-night here, and I will post more tomorrow. Look for the snapshot of the erupting volcano taken from our flight. Hopefully we will get a close-up shot some time in the next week.
View May 2010 – Iceland in a larger map
The map above shows where we are staying for the first few days. Notice a nice hot-pool, a geothermal swimming pool, right next to our hostel. Look for us there tomorrow! 🙂
The sun set was at 11 PM, and sunrises at 3 AM here. Drives me nuts to go to bed with daylight. Long days are good for us – more to see. We are 4 hours ahead of east coast time.
Good night for now.
The Surficial Processes class went to Kentucky before the spring break for a weekend field trip to study the Karst processes and landscapes in and around the Mammoth Cave National Park area. The focus of this field trip was to understand the geological, hydrological, and environmental conditions that lead to formation of more than 400 miles of interconnected cave passages making this the world’s longest cave system. We also learnt about the environmental issues that are unique to karst terrains such as groundwater pollution, sinkholes, etc. This field trip was lead by Dr. Suresh Muthukrishnan.
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