September 4 - 17, 2004.
Before we left I tried not to volunteer the information that we were planning to visit the Faroe and the Shetland Islands. Inevitably my friends or acquaintances would take this opening to inquire whether dotage and the associated diminished mental capacity were the main causes to make us want to go to these uncomfortably sounding places. The more polite ones don’t say it, but you can see they are just think along these lines. We were actually also going to Iceland and a small part of Scotland.
Now Iceland sounds familiar to most people, but half of the people in this world do not know where the Faroe Islands are. Even the spellchecker will consistently show an underline, suggesting that this name is surely misspelled. Which is a shame, because they actually field a soccer team in the European championships. And surely Shetland must be somewhere close to the North Pole, where they have very nice wool on their ponies. There is no oil in the Faroe Islands, so there is little chance Cheney will get Bush to invade these islands to overthrow the ruling party and install the democracy the inhabitants of the islands so badly need. So the media generally disregard these places.
This tour, “In the Footsteps of the Vikings”, we had purchased from the Great Canadian Travel Company in Winnipeg in Canada. The title was so intriguing. Hundreds of years ago, courageous and hardy souls in simple wooden vessels were braving the weather and the elements to explore unknown territories. And now we were given the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of these Vikings from the comforts of a Boeing 737 and an air-conditioned mini-bus. Summers are short and there was a significant price break after Sept 1, so we opted to go in early September. For that we needed to take our rain-gear along.
Although Iceland, Faroe Islands, and the Shetland Islands are located close to each other, they have distinctly different cultures and geographical features. They do share the lousy weather. It is much worse north in Iceland, and somewhat better more to the south in the Shetlands. What was nice to see is that these places have not yet been overrun by tourists. Tourists are OK; but the commercial blight that follows after there are too many tourists around is disheartening. Give them a few more years and Grand Circle Tours will have package tours going to all these places. As it turned out, I think we would have done just as well by arranging things ourselves. We could have planned to stay a bit longer in the more interesting places. At this time of the year there were no problems with lodgings, so we could have just moved along at the spur of the moment and the weather. But, the first time around it is always a bit more comforting that everything (almost) will be taken care off. Well, maybe next time.
