Jun 5, 2010

A dash of ash

Remember Eyjafjallajokull? Yep, that’s the volcano in Iceland that messed up air traffic just a few weeks ago. And then turned quieter and fell out of our attention. I too ended up a victim of this travel disruption, albeit in a modest and eventually even photographically rewarding way.

In the middle of the air travel disruption, I was scheduled to fly from Belgium to the US East Coast. Our departure got delayed by roughly five hours, and once in the air we were told to enjoy an extra one hour and forty minutes of flight time.

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Now for the good news: our route took us way north of Iceland,  skimming along Greenland. That’s quite unusual, and thanks to excellent weather (and an alert captain) I could take some iPhone snapshots from Greenland’s coastline and its beautiful pack ice.

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A good week later, business called me to Birmingham. The d*** volcano was still acting up and as the UK was pretty sensitive to its activity, I decided to play safe. I planned my trip by train: first the Eurostar to London, and then Virgin Trains onwards.

I was very happy to discover once again how pleasant (and productive!) long distance rail travel can be. And given another very sunny day, I had ample occasion to enjoy the vibrating rapeseed fields passing by at high speed.

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See: even the most annoying events can bring along unexpected moments of pleasure.

Gear notes: iPhone 3Gs, Panasonic TZ1

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

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