Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Also, happy Halloween! I kind of decided this year to ignore the whole thing, but hope you all have fun! Here's the link to post #1 of the 2-week trip.  Day 3 (Sept. 13): Snaefellsness Peninsula Visiting Iceland in September has some advantages over a summer trip: fewer other tourists, darkness that means you may see the Northern Lights, and lower prices for many things. But there's no denying that the weather is a great deal less stable than it might be in July or August, and it takes more luck than I had to have good weather all the time. I learned fast to take advantage of sun when I had it, so that sometimes I did things that weren't on my plan in order to do something interesting while the weather was good. Other things got skipped because the weather was wet and windy. My third day in the campervan turned up sunny and "breezy" after the windy night. I was already learning that wind is what you get. I drove into Snaefellsjokull National Park and immediately ...

I'm doing mini-reviews here of a couple of books I read recently about women explorers. I picked up an actual paper copy of  Off the Beaten Track  last fall when I was visiting Banff National Park.  A Woman in the Polar Night  was a library book, one of those that pops up in the "if you're looking at this book, you might like these books" lists.   Title: A woman in the Polar Night Author: Christiane Ritter. Translate by Jane Degras, read by Rebecca Gallagher Publication Info: Tantor Media, 2024. 7 hours. First published in German in 1938. Source: Library Publisher's Blurb (Goodreads): This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime. In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a c...

If you enjoyed my hike through Iceland's Highlands on the Laugavegur trail ( here , here , and here ), wait till you see all the places I took my rental campervan! Day One: Gullfoss, Geysir, Brúarfoss   I started my day early (painfully so, after my late dinner and evening out with the hikers the night before), catching the bus back to the airport for pickup by the campervan people. Of course, I had visions of picking it up and being on my way by mid-morning. In fact, it was nearly 1:00 before I had the van, had bought groceries, and was on my way. Since I liked my van and thought I got good service and a decent price from Happy Campers, they can have this bit of advertising :)  It was a Nissan NV200 or something of that sort, for those who know such things. I got the "EX" package which is an older van (2017-19) and manual transmission, which saved me about $20/day. Sometimes being old isn't all bad--I learned to drive on a stick shift, so this was no problem for me. ...