This is going to be a pretty short post. Our flights are booked! It’s a good thing we booked them now, there we almost no flights to Reykjavik on the day we wanted to leave. We’re going to have to be really nice to people to convince them to let us sit together. Only 60 days!
o On the archeology front, Rannveig found this article about the possibility of a new Viking site being excavated in Newfoundland. They must have stopped along the way from Scandinavia, and Skalanes seems like a nice place for that. Who knows what we’ll find.
o Nic has made some progress with LIDAR, although the gear is proving to be a bit delicate. We’ll probably order a second unit to work with. Here is an early image taken during today’s meeting. The unit is on the round table, on Nic’s screen is the developing point-cloud of the room and contents. If you look very closely you can see people on couches (/very/ closely…)
o We need to sort a magnetometer before long, hopefully Patrick can loan us one.
o On the logistics front we need to make plane reservations fairly soon. All the lodging and transportation is sorted modulo the ferry to Grimsey, we’ll just wing that early in the morning of the day we travel.
o I started working with our Yocto altimeter recently, we’ll use this as part of the kit that provides more accurate x, y, and z geo-coordinates than consumer grade GPS chipsets alone do.
o Kristin and I worked through most of the details of the interface between FieldDay and the Arduino based sensor platforms. Here is a schematic of it, off to the left is the Postgres database where FieldDay pushes readings in CSV form.
o I think it’s time we started the Iceland16 playlist, it looks like Spotify is currently the most popular platform for doing so.
Since my last post, I have successfully booked all of our accommodations up to Akureyri. In the South, there was one Airbnb that was directly in the middle of the two large places we want to go (Laki and Solheimjokull) and is also in the town Kirkjubaejarklaustur (a.k.a Klaustur) that is in the Island on Fire book and talks about the Reverend Jón Steingrímsson and the sermons, later to be called ‘the Fire Sermons’ that were given when the Laki volcano erupted. So, we decided that we would book that for the three nights we are in the south and then something else for the southeast. In the southeast, I found an Airbnb that is an old farm house on the coast with an organic farm. It looks really nice and from the description it looks like we’ll get to have quite a few interactions with the host. After that we are on our way to Skalanes where we already have accommodation. Akureyri was another Airbnb for three nights. I’m still working on where we are going to stay for the two nights in the West. I’ve found some Airbnb’s, I just have to confirm those with Charlie. It’s difficult to find places close enough that we don’t feel like we’re moving constantly, but close enough to attractions in the West that we won’t have to drive that far to see. I’ll have those figured out and booked this week. So far, we’ve stay significantly under budget! We had budgeted 60 per person/per night and with 7 people and 22 nights that comes to around $9240. Without the West booked, we are at $3613. Even if we were to use the 60 per person/ per night for the two nights in the west, we’d still only come out at $4453. This does not include Skalanes. We don’t know how much that is going to cost, but Oli is really hoping we won’t have to pay anything. We haven’t had confirmation on that yet, though.
Other logistics: I also booked our ferry to and from Heimaey, and we’ve figured out our car situation. We are going to get a 7 seater SUV and bring rope to strap down our luggage on the top. It’s more practical for some of the roads we travel on. We had some trouble in the highland roads wit the 9-seater on our last trip. This SUV is a 4×4 car and is suitable for the highlands. It’s also less expensive! I also started working on a map, just placing points that are our accommodations or places we’ll stop.
Most of the work I’ve done this week has been with the logistics aspect — calendars, flights, accommodations, etc. Charlie and I met on Monday to start working on the calendar for the months until our trip. We are trying to set dates for when we want specific projects completed — Field Day, soil sensors, flights booked. I can’t remember everything we talked about in that meeting (we wrote the calendar on the white board in hopper), but I’ll transfer that to the Drive calendars soon.
We decided that accommodations, flights and vehicles should all be done before spring break starts, but it turns out they need to be done now. I started working on booking our accommodations this week. I’ve booked the first two places and the last one. It turns out almost everywhere on the south coast is booked for the days we need, or they only have one room with one bed available. Starting for the next trips, we’ve put down that we need to book hostels as soon as we know the dates and the number of people. I’m still looking for a place on the south coast, but it’s looking like we’re going to have to stay in two different places. One place for the first two nights and another place in the southeast for the second two (most likely).