Escaping Phoenix: NYC, Iceland & the UK

Every July we look for a reason to be anywhere but Phoenix, and this year the reason was a three-week run through New York, Iceland, and the UK. What started as a simple heat-dodging strategy turned into beluga whales, a volcano crater, standing stones older than Stonehenge, and a lot more sunburn-free walking than we’re used to in July. Here’s how it went, stop by stop — a couple of photos along the way, with links to the full albums so you can see the rest.

NEW YORK CITY
We never miss a chance to spend time in Brooklyn with Ginger & Chris, and this visit came right on the heels of theirs hosting our oldest daughter Christie and granddaughters Emmy and Parker — so we mostly followed the itinerary they’d already perfected. Highlights were the Broadway show Schmigadoon, and a dinner at ABC Kitchens under the Brooklyn Bridge that might be the best meal I can remember having. Roasted carrots, sautéed corn, maitake mushrooms, beets, squash — I’d fly back just for one of those dishes. We also caught the Harry Potter show with Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy himself, on stage) and spent an afternoon getting properly lost in the Met.

 

Quick aside before we get to the beluga whales: is this the kind of update you want to keep getting from us? A YES, NO, or MAYBE tells me how much effort to put into these going forward — I’d genuinely appreciate the feedback.

[Link — Full Trip album]

ICELAND
Reykjavik was supposed to feel familiar — we’d spent two and a half weeks there back in 2019 — but it didn’t, not really. Staying near a small harbor on a different side of the city changed the whole picture, and the neighborhoods around our hotel bore no resemblance to the Reykjavik in our memory. A small museum nearby has life-sized models of nearly every major whale species, including the sperm whale, and it completely reset my sense of scale for these animals.

[Full Trip album: https://tinyurl.com/3zmcrm25]

HEIMAEY ISLAND, ICELAND
This is where we met Little White and Little Grey — two beluga whales being reintroduced to the ocean at the SEA LIFE TRUST Beluga Sanctuary. Both are teenagers, captured off Japan back in 2011 and put to work performing at Ocean World in Shanghai before finally being retired and shipped 6,000 miles to Heimaey. They now split time between a landside pool and Klettsvik Bay, a 32,000-square-meter netted-off sea inlet, 10 meters deep. The full transition to open ocean has been rockier than hoped — years with humans may mean true release into the wild never happens — but at minimum, they’re trading a fish tank for a very large bay.

From there we took an ATV up into the crater of Eldfell, the volcano that gave Heimaey its worst night. Standing in a ring of black lava that erupted out of nowhere is genuinely eerie. The volcano had shown no activity for 5,000–6,000 years until just after midnight on January 23, 1973, when residents felt the tremors start. By 2 AM a fissure tore open only 300 meters from the edge of town, throwing red-hot lava and gas into the sky. A gale the night before had, by sheer luck, kept the island’s entire fishing fleet — about 70 boats — in the harbor, and they evacuated all 5,300 residents in five hours without losing a single life.
Below is a link (TVVR…E346) that will take you to a short video of the two beluga whales, Little White and Little Grey: TVVR9046 IMG_E3476

[Full Trip album]

Seyðisfjörður, Iceland

A tiny, wildly colorful town full of artists, with a rainbow-painted street and waterfalls tumbling down every hillside. We also got some of the best light of the whole trip here — we wouldn’t see sun like it again until an afternoon in Killybegs, Ireland.

KIRKWALL, SCOTLAND
Whatever picture you have in your head of a small coastal Scottish town, Kirkwall probably matches it — winding streets, shopfronts, churches, and alleys, exactly as advertised. We tracked down a proper, non-touristy pub for dark ale and excellent fish & chips, which is really all you can ask for.

Full Trip album

STORNOWAY, ISLE OF LEWIS, OUTER HEBRIDES
This is where people seem most connected to their ancient roots. We toured a rebuilt “black house,” but the real story is the hundreds of foundations still scattered across the landscape — walls largely intact, just missing a roof. Even more striking were the Callanish Standing Stones, erected long before Stonehenge and laid out with real astronomical precision, tracking an 18.6-year lunar cycle. Buried under peat since the Bronze Age, they weren’t excavated until 1857, which is the only reason they’re still standing to their original height. Unlike Stonehenge, you can walk right up to them, even touch them. The visitor center had a quote on the wall from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing around 50 BC:

“…there is also on the island a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a remarkable temple, adorned with many votive offerings and spherical in shape… They also say that, from this island, the moon appears to be only a very little distance from the earth…and that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same position in the heavens is completed.”

Two thousand years ago, someone already knew about a 19-year lunar cycle. Sit with that for a second.

[Full Trip album – https://tinyurl.com/3zmcrm25]

KILLYBEGS, IRELAND
Maggie peeled off to watch sheep’s wool turned into fabric, sample tea alongside Jameson and Glenfiddich, and come home with a locally made scarf she loves. I headed for the Slieve League cliffs, among the highest sea cliffs in Europe, rising almost 2,000 feet straight up out of the Atlantic on the southwest coast of Donegal — three times the height of the Cliffs of Moher. Photographing them from the water would have been spectacular, but there wasn’t time for both, so these are from the top.

DOUGLAS, ISLE OF MAN

We loved the Isle of Man, for so many reasons.  We had forgotten that the BeeGees were from here and, instead, I had focused almost entirely on the famous TT Motorcycle race. This is a very independent island, not part of the UK and its very own idendtity, government, and Manx language. We found the Manx museum, which had dedicated its entire lower level to a collection of memorabilia, motorcycles, and history of the famous TT races.

 

LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND
One visit was all it took to completely rewrite what I thought Liverpool was. Forget the bleak old coal-town image I’d carried around for no good reason — it’s a genuinely bustling city, all old statuesque buildings next to new glass towers. The Beatles are, unsurprisingly, everywhere, but the real high point was climbing the Liverpool Cathedral tower: past enormous bells, up steep stairways and narrow halls, with two separate tiny elevator rides thrown in along the way. The view from the top was worth every step.

 

HOLYHEAD, WALES
We arrived with zero expectations and left surprised by how much a single-day stop could teach us. Holyhead is small, but it played an outsized role in both World Wars. Sailing into its 400-acre deepwater harbor, our ship passed a 1.3-mile breakwater built between 1847 and 1874 — more than 40 workers died over those 28 years of diving, blasting, and heavy stonework, and seven million tons of stone were cut from a purpose-built quarry to make it happen.(Below)

The town’s Maritime Museum walked us through Holyhead’s role as a major medical hub during wartime, with models of the four Holyhead-crewed ships that were sunk, including the RMS Leinster, which killed over 550 people — among them the grandfather of our own guide. The port itself was bombed nine times, and we toured an air-raid shelter that’s now part of the museum. And, as had become something of a running theme, we struck gold with the weather again.

[Link — Full Trip album here]

WATERFORD, IRELAND
Beyond knowing Waterford Crystal, I had no real sense of this town, which made it one of the nicer surprises of the trip. We chose “The Museum of Time” and found an incredible collection of clocks and watches from around the world — I took an embarrassing number of photos just to show our friends Jim & Clayton, both serious watch collectors. Like most UK towns, the historic center is compact — here, roughly triangular — packed with museums, shops, and buildings and walls dating back to the Romans, alongside replicas of the Viking ships that once called on the town. “Visit” might be generous, though: one museum sign read, in no uncertain terms, “GET THEE A SHIP AND GO ON THE SEA AND KILL MEN.” Back near the port, we wandered the harbor and cliffs and found some of the best photo opportunities of the whole leg.

HEADING HOME
After Waterford we had a day at sea aboard the RSSC Mariner, then an overnight sail into Southampton the following morning, which marked the end of the cruise. From there, a 90-minute coach ride to Heathrow, a flight to JFK, an overnight in the TWA hotel at JFK and this trip is officially over — with Phoenix in August still waiting for us.

[Link to Full Trip Album: https://tinyurl.com/3zmcrm25]