Our route to Iceland was rather less direct than you might expect: since Icelandair’s only US cities are Boston, New York (JFK), and Seattle, we could not leave from Newark, our usual point of departure for Europe. So we hit on the brilliant idea of imposing on the Greene RI family to pick us up at the Providence airport, put us up for two nights, and give us a lift to Logan airport, where we’d finally be on our way to the North Atlantic on a 9:30PM flight.

The elegant RWP Botanical Center. (Big image, small.)

From Greene, we made a leisurely pro­gress through the Roger Wil­liams Park Botan­ical Center and then the Zoo, then a quick supper at Chili’s, scene of a memorable meal we had had fifteen years earlier with Virginia Sloan and Mimi Siersema, and from there to East Boston.

We got through security by 6:45, and found a well-lit place to sit that had an electrical connection. It’s suprising that there are few of these in the International Departures hall at Logan. In the picture heading this page, Mark is checking his boarding pass and passport; on the table are cups of coffee for both of us, our respective iPhones, and in the foreground, a stack of books of mine: two partially-filled journal books, and a copy of “Teach Yourself Icelandic”, something I bought several months earlier in full spate of enthusiasm, but in which I managed to get only to about Chapter 5.

Even though the Logan International Departures doesn’t seem to have many electrical outlets, it’s bright, open, and attractive, as you see in the upper picture to the left (big image, small), which was taken with my new inexpensive fish-eye lens. This is of limited photographic utility, but I was expecting some vistas in Iceland that could be captured best in extreme wide-angle. I used the same lens for the picture below that—in the big version, you can see Mark under the green Starbucks disc, may be harder to spot him in the small version.

Earlier, while we were standing on the (very short) line for checking in with Icelandair, we had met Paul Moreno, the representative of Country Walkers, who was doing the tour to see how the prototype would work out. So we already knew someone on the tour, well before it started. Then as we took our seats on the plane, the folks behind us turned out to be John and Diane Herman, two of the other walkers. When we got off the plane the next day, we discovered that Margie Van Tuyl and Shirley Chen had been on our plane as well. So there were seven of us arriving at that time.

Our flight was uneventful for the most part, but since there was a couple of young people in front of me who chatted practically the whole time, I didn’t get much sleep. The arrival was smooth, too, but there’s more about that on the next page.