After yesterday and looking at today’s agenda, I can well and truly say that vacation is over. We are in the midst of a very busy time. I was swamped with work while Bill was away, then the reverse. Now we’ll both be very busy for a time. This is a very different situation to what we faced during parts of last year. A better one. My sleep schedule is more or less back to normal. That took two nights longer than I’d hoped it would take as it is normally much easier to come back from Europe than to go to Europe in that regard. Overall, coming back has been more jarring than I wanted it to be. I was forced into a slower rhythm and appreciated it, but now that is over.

As I predicted in last week’s newsletter, seeing the puffins was the highlight of my trip. I spoke with several other tourists during my stay who were unable to go to Mykines to see the puffins due to choppy seas cancelling the ferry. That means I had a stroke of travel luck on this trip. And there was another when my flight back to Iceland actually took off as that flight was cancelled each of the previous few days before my scheduled departure. I made my tight connection without difficulty even if I was unable to get anything to eat in the airport and had to wait for what became a very late dinner on my body clock when I got home.

The other highlight was an 11 course tasting menu at a seafood restaurant (though the final two courses were chocolate desserts and so wasted on me). It was very expensive though not much more expensive than meals that were not nearly as good. I did not eat at the cousin restaurant that just received two Michelin stars as that would have involved an even greater expenditure. The breakfast at my hotel was also very nice each morning as I loaded up on salmon and rhubarb juice. This was a critical benefit given how limited lunch was on several days on the various tours driving to different parts of the archipelago.

And I cannot conclude writing about the Faroe Islands without mentioning their undersea tunnels. They’ve built several tunnels that go underwater between the more populated islands. They even have an underwater roundabout in one of them, to my knowledge the only such roundabout in the world. You can look up more about that on YouTube if you want. It’s also a pretty wild image on digital maps if you’re into that sort of thing.