07-01-2026 Preparations

We had been looking forward to this Viking Neptune cruise for months, and now that we are home I'm finally beginning to sort through thousands of photographs and all the memories they stirred.

Rather than writing one long travel summary, I've decided to tell the story the way we experienced it. Over the next several weeks I'll be posting each day's adventures as separate entries, backdated to the day they actually occurred during the trip. Think of it as opening a travel journal one page at a time. If you follow the blog chronologically, you'll be able to travel along with us from Boston to Nova Scotia, Canada, Greenland, and Iceland, just as we did.

Although these posts are being published after we returned home, they are backdated to the day each adventure occurred so the journey can be followed in chronological order.

So let's go back to the beginning...

---

We had been looking forward to this cruise on Viking Neptune for several months; however, there still seemed to be countless last-minute things to attend to. The list was getting smaller, though, and that was encouraging.

Mo's case is much more organized than mine

The large suitcases were mostly packed. Carry-on only wasn't an option when dealing with the wet and windy conditions we expected in Iceland. Arrangements had been made for boarding Mattie since we would be away longer than any relative should be expected to care for her. Once again, daughter Deborah would be staying at Sunset House, managing the summer sprinklers and anything else that might come up while we were away.

still trying to figure it all out

I decided I would blog the trip after we returned. Carrying the laptop simply wasn't worth the extra weight, and while I can manage the tablet, I'm not very good at typing on its keyboard. Instead, I kept a daily journal on FindPenguins, enough to capture each day's experiences while they were still fresh.

lists, folders of papers, chargers, "my personal item" sans camera and laptop

I also made another decision that felt strangely liberating. The heavy camera stayed home. I trusted the Samsung S25 Ultra to record the journey. With well over 140,000 photographs already stored in my online and offline galleries, I finally admitted to myself that I don't need professional-quality images to remember where I've been. These days my photographs are really memory keepers.

A lovely June sunrise reminded us that Iceland's skies might still be glowing near midnight by the time we arrived. We were looking forward to experiencing the land of the midnight sun.

I wondered, too, how the gardens at Sunset House would survive the July heat while we were gone.

The grass is still green on this first day of July

July 1

Preparing. Checking lists. Rechecking lists.

Mattie's boarding instructions. Mo's checked suitcase and mine. Carry-ons edited yet again to satisfy Icelandair's famously restrictive dimensions. Electronics. Chargers. USB cables. USB-C cables. The mysterious cords that always seem to multiply overnight.

Cooking the custard prepping the starberries

Of course there had to be one more batch of homemade strawberry ice cream tucked into the freezer for Deborah while she was taking care of the house. Fresh sheets on the bed. One last spray for the deer. Dead flowers trimmed. Containers hand-watered. 

We had always said we'd never leave Sunset House in the middle of summer. And yet...Off we went.

Who knows what else found its way onto that very last Friday morning list?