Off On Another Adventure!

Hi, we’re JELLEN (that would be Jeff & Ellen) and we’ve always wanted to visit Scandinavia, particularly Iceland.  In conversations with some of our good friends from Canada and Minnesota, who also have houses near us in Arizona, we all decided that a Viking Cruise from Iceland to Norway in 2025 was a wonderful idea.  This particular cruise starts in Reykjavik, but we’re only there for 2 days before we sail off to Norway.  However, that doesn’t really allow us the chance to explore all that Iceland really has to offer.  So, we thought the best way to really see Iceland would be to go there early, before the cruise, and do some exploring on our own. While our friends from Canada couldn’t go early, our friends from Minnesota were a go! We organized our own excursion for just the four of us, driving the 800-mile ring road around Iceland for 11 days prior to the start of the cruise.  We are so excited for that!!

Being retired, our original idea was to simply travel all throughout Europe after the cruise ends in Oslo, Norway. Our plans were WAY OPEN; just meander from country to country with no fixed return date. Only then did we realize our time in the “Shengen Area” was limited to 90 days in a 180 day window. That meant we had to scale back our list of countries we wanted to visit. So, after exploring some of southern Norway that we will not get to on the cruise, we settled on visiting Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal to take full advantage of our 90 days in the Shengen Area. Thankfully, Ireland, while part of the EU, is not part of the Shengen Area, so we will still be able to visit ‘the cousins’ (actually, they’re Ellen’s cousins, but they all make me feel like I’m family!).

Because we’ve opted for a non-cycling mode of transportation for our upcoming adventure, we decided to start a new blog. And, since we’ve decided to travel extremely light for a 6 month trip (just a carry-on and a backpack each, we’re not taking a computer or tablet), all our blogging will be done on our iPhones. It’s been a while since we did any web/blog development/posting, and it’s not something we have much expertise at, so this blog will be as simple as possible. Please be patient as we develop this site, and feel free to let us know if anything is not working out as you think it should. We also want to stay in touch and would love any comments you have about what you read and see here. The best way to do that will be to bookmark this page in your browser and email us at JELLENSADVENTURES@GMAIL.com with your comments 🙂

So let the planning begin and before we knew it, it’s almost departure day!!!  We leave for Iceland on May 19, 2025. We hope you come back to the blog often and catch up on our (planned) daily blog posts and pictures of JELLEN’s Adventures in 2025!