Having been woken up by the sound of the terminal apparently crashing down around me, I adjusted my suitcase to shift as many of the books as I could find into my hand luggage and headed to the Heathrow Express to take the shuttle over to Terminal 1. Heathrow at 8.30 in the morning is very different to the deserted Heathrow of 11 at night. I was a bit early. I checked in at the machine, which took all of thirty seconds because this time, it recognised my passp...

The final blog of the trip. I had breakfast, packed and went out into Reykjavik at dawn. It was a clear morning and felt far too warm for my usual five layers and I was very tempted to run back to the hotel to abandon my mittens and a couple of jumpers. I went down to the seafront. The snow on the way was deep and crunchy and very winter-wonderlandy. On the seafront, I stood and took more photos of Esja and the white mountains in the distance and then it struck ...

Having had another nice breakfast of rolls and apple juice, I was picked up at dawn (that is, 10.30 in the morning) and taken to the Blue Lagoon, the big geothermal spa and ultimate Iceland must-do. My favourite thing about the Blue Lagoon is that it's waste water from the power station next door. Svartsengi is a geothermal power station. The sea water comes up from below the ground at 200-300 degrees under high pressure, is used by the power station to generate...

I wrote this once and the stupid machine ate it. I am not pleased at having to write it again. Day three and I finally made it down to breakfast - bread rolls and apple juice. I didn't do anything this morning - vague plans to go into town were scuppered by darkness and then snow - a rarer thing than you might expect in Iceland, or so I'm told. At 12.30 I was picked up by a kind of armoured minibus and we went through the routine of driving to the IE office...

Today started quite late, as I didn't get home until 2am last night and there didn't seem a lot of point in going into town before the sun was up. I followed my map to the main shopping street, then got distracted by the view down a side street - blue sea, pink and white mountain and pink sky. Reykjavik has one of my favourite sea views - the bay is surrounded by real Arctic white mountains and it's spectacular. A little further along was a sculpture of a Vikin...