[Speaker 0] Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever the
[Speaker 0] case may be. This is Mike, and this
[Speaker 0] is Mike Dell's World number four thirty two
[Speaker 0] for November twenty six twenty twenty five. And,
[Speaker 0] of course, it's the twenty sixth day of
[Speaker 0] NAPOD promo, national podcast posting month, and I'm
[Speaker 0] on track to actually finish it this year.
[Speaker 0] So and I think I got some pretty
[Speaker 0] good content this year. And, you know, some
[Speaker 0] of it I've covered in the past, of
[Speaker 0] course, but, you know, a lot of my
[Speaker 0] listeners haven't been around that long. And even
[Speaker 0] though I've been doing this for twenty years,
[Speaker 0] a lot of people, maybe not even alive
[Speaker 0] twenty years or at least not listening to
[Speaker 0] podcasts that long. Maybe not this one anyway.
[Speaker 0] I don't know. Anyhoo, today, I'm gonna talk
[Speaker 0] about something not Northern Michigan related directly or
[Speaker 0] even indirectly. I lived in Keflavik, Iceland in
[Speaker 0] the early nineties for a entire year. And
[Speaker 0] I just wanna tell you some of my
[Speaker 0] memories of the place now. I'm sure it's
[Speaker 0] changed a lot. It's become more of a
[Speaker 0] tourist trap in, for Europe. But, back in
[Speaker 0] the nineties, it was pretty untouched. I mean,
[Speaker 0] you know, there was obviously people there. There's
[Speaker 0] a big city there. Well, big ish city,
[Speaker 0] Reykjavik, which is the capital. And then, of
[Speaker 0] course, I lived in Keflavik, Iceland, which is
[Speaker 0] the home of the big international airport and
[Speaker 0] the, at the time, NATO base. It was,
[Speaker 0] actually a US Navy, run, air station. You
[Speaker 0] know, Kovvik Naval Air Station, Iceland. And I
[Speaker 0] was, of course, air force, and we had
[Speaker 0] a little, little we had a contingent of
[Speaker 0] air force people there, plus there were people
[Speaker 0] from all the different countries. There were marines.
[Speaker 0] There were obviously a lot of navy. They
[Speaker 0] had a p three wing or squadron or
[Speaker 0] a couple squadrons up there. And, of course,
[Speaker 0] we had a a fighter interceptor squadron, the
[Speaker 0] fifty seventh, the the black knights of Iceland.
[Speaker 0] That's what our squadron patch was. They still
[Speaker 0] have the hat hanging on the wall over
[Speaker 0] here from, the knights. And, of course, I've
[Speaker 0] got my patch collection. One of these days,
[Speaker 0] I'm gonna make a shadow box with all
[Speaker 0] the patches in it and rank and whatnot.
[Speaker 0] But, anywho, I was stationed up there for
[Speaker 0] an entire year, and it was an interesting
[Speaker 0] place to live. Now this, mind you, is
[Speaker 0] before the Internet, and this was before, you
[Speaker 0] know, worldwide almost free calling and, you know,
[Speaker 0] video conferencing and, you know, all the stuff
[Speaker 0] that the Internet brought. This was before that.
[Speaker 0] And, you know, I guess I'll I'll tell
[Speaker 0] you tell you the story from from where
[Speaker 0] it all started. So here I am in
[Speaker 0] Mountain Home, Idaho working on f one elevens,
[Speaker 0] and I get orders to Galena Air Station,
[Speaker 0] Alaska. And Galena Air Station Alaska is right
[Speaker 0] on the Yukon River and, you know, it's
[Speaker 0] Outback Alaska. It is out there. You know,
[Speaker 0] the only way in and out of there
[Speaker 0] is either by the river or by airplane.
[Speaker 0] And it was not even a Galena Air
[Speaker 0] Station. It was Galena Airport, Alaska. It wasn't
[Speaker 0] even an air station, but they did have
[Speaker 0] a fighter interceptor, contingent there. They usually had
[Speaker 0] two or yeah. I think it was two
[Speaker 0] f fifteens, on interceptor duty on call all
[Speaker 0] the time, and that's where I was gonna
[Speaker 0] go. They had put in for a short
[Speaker 0] tour. I always wanted to get out of
[Speaker 0] Mountain Home. I'd been there for seven years,
[Speaker 0] and it was time. And, anyway, for whatever
[Speaker 0] reason, I got those orders canceled. I didn't.
[Speaker 0] The the air force canceled those orders on
[Speaker 0] Monday. And on Tuesday, I had orders to
[Speaker 0] naval air station Keflavik. So they they were
[Speaker 0] bound and determined to send me somewhere cold,
[Speaker 0] which was fine, you know, and come to
[Speaker 0] find out Iceland wasn't that cold. But, that's
[Speaker 0] a whole another story. I'll keep talking here.
[Speaker 0] So anyway, I had to go to school
[Speaker 0] in Florida to, learn the f fifteen electrical
[Speaker 0] and environmental systems, of which I worked on.
[Speaker 0] And so I got to go to school,
[Speaker 0] at Tyndall Air Force Base in the Panhandle,
[Speaker 0] Florida. The only problem was this was, I
[Speaker 0] think, July twentieth or something like that, and
[Speaker 0] I had to report down there no later
[Speaker 0] than August tenth. So I had to out
[Speaker 0] process Mountain Home, get myself down to well,
[Speaker 0] the other the option was to fly to
[Speaker 0] Florida, do the school, fly back to Idaho,
[Speaker 0] out process, move out, and and then, you
[Speaker 0] know, make all the arrangements to have my
[Speaker 0] stuff stored and shipped and blah de blah,
[Speaker 0] you know, all the normal stuff. Well, I,
[Speaker 0] I kinda flipped the script on them. I
[Speaker 0] said, well, let me out process here. I'll
[Speaker 0] drive to Florida with all my stuff, and
[Speaker 0] then I'll ship stuff. You know, I lived
[Speaker 0] in the barracks at the time and all
[Speaker 0] that much stuff. I had a pickup truck.
[Speaker 0] Had plenty of room to put all my
[Speaker 0] stuff, you know, the furniture. Now that I
[Speaker 0] was renting a place, and like I said,
[Speaker 0] it was just, you know, personal stuff. So
[Speaker 0] that's what I did. So I out processed
[Speaker 0] really quick, in Idaho, drove to Florida, did
[Speaker 0] the school, and then, drove home. I took
[Speaker 0] a little leave in between and drove home
[Speaker 0] and stored my truck. And and I had
[Speaker 0] all my stuff shipped from Florida to Iceland.
[Speaker 0] That worked out fine. And, you know, that's
[Speaker 0] how I ended up in Iceland. So I
[Speaker 0] I left Traverse City on a flight to
[Speaker 0] Philadelphia. And from Philadelphia, I flew to Keflavik,
[Speaker 0] Iceland on a d c eight. Even even
[Speaker 0] then, this was, you know, in the early
[Speaker 0] nineties. Even then, a d c eight was
[Speaker 0] an old airplane. In fact, they just retired
[Speaker 0] the final d c eight that was flying,
[Speaker 0] for Samaritan's Purse, which is a, a charity
[Speaker 0] that goes and, you know, helps out when
[Speaker 0] big storms happen or whatever, but they just
[Speaker 0] retired their d c eight. That was the
[Speaker 0] last d c eight flight. Anyway, so I
[Speaker 0] flew seven hours in an airplane that was
[Speaker 0] older than me, which I guess at that
[Speaker 0] point, everything was older than me, but, I
[Speaker 0] froze my toes off and roasted up top.
[Speaker 0] You know, the thing didn't have a very
[Speaker 0] efficient heating system, but, hey. We got there.
[Speaker 0] But the, the funny thing was that it
[Speaker 0] was on Hawaiian Airlines. So you never never
[Speaker 0] think that you're gonna be flying from Philadelphia
[Speaker 0] to Keflavik, Iceland on the, on on Hawaiian
[Speaker 0] Airlines. Oh my gosh. So that was that
[Speaker 0] was quite the adventure. And we took off
[Speaker 0] at seven PM, I think it was. I
[Speaker 0] I don't remember the exact time, but we,
[Speaker 0] we ended up landing in Keflavik at seven
[Speaker 0] AM. And, of course, you know, the big
[Speaker 0] time change. And they kept us up in
[Speaker 0] processing, you know, till, like, two or three
[Speaker 0] in the afternoon before I got to my
[Speaker 0] barracks room, got signed in there, and and
[Speaker 0] got to go to sleep. But I sleep
[Speaker 0] good on airplanes, so I I had plenty
[Speaker 0] of sleep. My day was definitely screwed up,
[Speaker 0] and clearing customs in Iceland was pretty easy.
[Speaker 0] No big deal there. And, yeah. So I
[Speaker 0] was, assigned to the fifty seventh CRS component
[Speaker 0] repair squadron, which, did all the in shop
[Speaker 0] maintenance on the, f fifteens at the time.
[Speaker 0] And, before that was f fours, I guess,
[Speaker 0] but, I was there when the f fifteens
[Speaker 0] were there. And we did, you know, phased
[Speaker 0] inspections and, you know, all all the stuff,
[Speaker 0] all the electrical, all the environmental, all the
[Speaker 0] all the stuff. And but we weren't, we
[Speaker 0] weren't part of the actual on call fighter
[Speaker 0] interceptor squadron except for once in a while.
[Speaker 0] We would have to take our turn at
[Speaker 0] what we called Fisneyland, you know, fighter interceptor
[Speaker 0] squadron, FIS, f I s. And, the area
[Speaker 0] of the base where the alert barn was
[Speaker 0] was called Fisneyland. Of course, you know, the
[Speaker 0] military, we make up names for for, different
[Speaker 0] things. But, you know, all the military stuff
[Speaker 0] was pretty standard except for, you know, Iceland
[Speaker 0] being Iceland. It was a little harder to
[Speaker 0] get parts and a little harder to, you
[Speaker 0] know, keep things flying, but, you know, we
[Speaker 0] did. We had, like, eighteen f fifteens, and
[Speaker 0] everything kept flying pretty good. And we always
[Speaker 0] had four on call, and they would go
[Speaker 0] out loaded, chase bear bombers through the, through
[Speaker 0] the straits there in the Northern Atlantic. But,
[Speaker 0] yeah, nothing too crazy there. And some of
[Speaker 0] the other things that were interesting, that was
[Speaker 0] about the time that computers were, starting to
[Speaker 0] be a thing. And I went to the
[Speaker 0] Navy Exchange there and bought a a two
[Speaker 0] eighty six PC computer with DOS five on
[Speaker 0] it. And, boy, I was styling. I had
[Speaker 0] one megabyte of RAM and a forty megabyte
[Speaker 0] hard drive. And, I mean, that was that
[Speaker 0] was the stuff, man. I would play flight
[Speaker 0] SIP and, SimCity and, you know, we had
[Speaker 0] this drag racing game that I would play
[Speaker 0] and, you know, had some friends, you know,
[Speaker 0] a navy guy that lived in the same
[Speaker 0] barracks, and another friend of mine lived in
[Speaker 0] another barracks nearby that I worked with. And,
[Speaker 0] you know, we would trade software, and we
[Speaker 0] got a bootleg copy of DOS six. And,
[Speaker 0] oh my gosh, we were we were style.
[Speaker 0] And we could use more than the six
[Speaker 0] hundred and forty k of memory, for primary
[Speaker 0] memory with DOS six, memory manager. Anyway, it's
[Speaker 0] not this isn't a geeky show, but, that
[Speaker 0] was we did a awful lot of, computer
[Speaker 0] stuff, but, you know, no Internet. Whenever I
[Speaker 0] had whenever I made phone calls off the
[Speaker 0] island was, on I would do collect calls
[Speaker 0] or or well, not collect calls. I don't
[Speaker 0] know how that worked exactly, but I would,
[Speaker 0] it was a dollar six a minute, back
[Speaker 0] to the states. And, of course, we didn't
[Speaker 0] make a lot of phone calls because of
[Speaker 0] that, because it was expensive. And, you know,
[Speaker 0] at that time, mail was really important. And,
[Speaker 0] you know, being that Iceland was a pretty
[Speaker 0] boring duty station when you were off duty,
[Speaker 0] we we had a nice club we had
[Speaker 0] nice clubs, and the food was great. Even
[Speaker 0] off base, I I would I would fly
[Speaker 0] to Iceland specifically to get one of their
[Speaker 0] hot dogs. Well, actually, I'd have to get
[Speaker 0] more than one, but, the the Icelandic hot
[Speaker 0] dog is legendary. It's, it's really good. Call
[Speaker 0] it a as I remember it. But, I
[Speaker 0] digress. And what was I talking about? Jeez.
[Speaker 0] Kinda lost my train of thought there. Oh,
[Speaker 0] yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mail being really, really, really
[Speaker 0] important. I volunteered to work at the, base
[Speaker 0] post office. And the funny thing about mail
[Speaker 0] there is it was contingent on what we
[Speaker 0] called the tater or the rotator, and that
[Speaker 0] was that, Hawaiian Airlines d c eight combi.
[Speaker 0] That was, it had cargo in the front
[Speaker 0] half of the airplane and passengers in the
[Speaker 0] back half of the airplane, and that's where
[Speaker 0] all the mail came in. So it would
[Speaker 0] come in from the States on Wednesdays. So
[Speaker 0] on Wednesday afternoon, I worked second shift. So
[Speaker 0] Wednesday afternoon, I'd go over to the post
[Speaker 0] office and sort mail for a while and
[Speaker 0] then go to work. And then the next
[Speaker 0] day, finish sorting the mail. I wasn't the
[Speaker 0] only one working there, but it took a
[Speaker 0] day or two to do that. And, of
[Speaker 0] course, that post office was the busiest place
[Speaker 0] on base on Wednesdays and Thursdays. And then,
[Speaker 0] the rest of the week, nothing was going
[Speaker 0] on there, really. People could ship stuff out,
[Speaker 0] but it wouldn't leave until the rotator left
[Speaker 0] on Wednesday afternoon. Or was it Thursday morning?
[Speaker 0] I forget. But, anyway, it was once a
[Speaker 0] week. We do had mail coming in and
[Speaker 0] out, at least from the states. We had
[Speaker 0] another airplane that went back and forth to
[Speaker 0] London that, you would get some stuff that
[Speaker 0] way too. But, for the most part, it
[Speaker 0] all came from Philadelphia. And and another thing
[Speaker 0] that was really, really, really, really valuable up
[Speaker 0] there was magazines. And and current magazines were
[Speaker 0] even more ridiculously important because it really wasn't
[Speaker 0] a lot of reading material. The library on
[Speaker 0] the base was was busy all the time
[Speaker 0] because, you know, not much else to do.
[Speaker 0] We did have cable TV in the barracks,
[Speaker 0] and we would get, we call it a
[Speaker 0] farts. Yeah. Okay. You know, military. They love
[Speaker 0] to have it, but it was armed serve
[Speaker 0] or armed what was it? Armed services radio
[Speaker 0] and television service or whatever. And and that
[Speaker 0] was you know, we had the a couple
[Speaker 0] of AFarts channels. One of them that would
[Speaker 0] play the Today Show, The Tonight Show, and,
[Speaker 0] you know, a few other things, and then
[Speaker 0] they would always have the live sports. Of
[Speaker 0] course, live sports when you're on GMT time,
[Speaker 0] was at oddball times of the day. But
[Speaker 0] I, you know, I work second shift, so
[Speaker 0] I'd get home in the morning, and The
[Speaker 0] Tonight Show would be on. And then about
[Speaker 0] noon, The Today Show would come on, something
[Speaker 0] like noon, one o'clock. So if I was
[Speaker 0] still up at that time, I would watch
[Speaker 0] The Today Show. But, yeah, it was, you
[Speaker 0] know, TV and radio. And then we had,
[Speaker 0] like, two or three other stations. We had,
[Speaker 0] BBC out of England, and we had RTL
[Speaker 0] four out of the Netherlands, and that was
[Speaker 0] in Dutch mostly. And then we had Sky
[Speaker 0] News and Sky Sports. So, you know, there
[Speaker 0] was, like, four, five channels, something like that.
[Speaker 0] So that was another pastime. Plus, you know,
[Speaker 0] we had day rooms in the barracks, and
[Speaker 0] we had, on the second floor was a
[Speaker 0] full kitchen. So if you wanted to cook
[Speaker 0] your own stuff, you'd go over the commissary,
[Speaker 0] get stuff, and cook it down there. But,
[Speaker 0] of course, that was always crowded, and I
[Speaker 0] didn't do that much. I just eat a
[Speaker 0] chow hall. Chow hall was good. We also
[Speaker 0] had a Wendy's on the base of all
[Speaker 0] things. Or I would go over to the
[Speaker 0] barbershop. There's a little barbershop there, and, there
[Speaker 0] was also a hot dog stand. Well, guess
[Speaker 0] what I eat a awful lot of was
[Speaker 0] Icelandic hot dogs. That, but, you know, for
[Speaker 0] breakfast, I'd go over to the chow hall.
[Speaker 0] And the navy food wasn't as good as
[Speaker 0] the air force food, but it was okay.
[Speaker 0] I didn't mind it. When I was pulling
[Speaker 0] alert duty over on the air force side,
[Speaker 0] you know, at Disneyland, they they had a,
[Speaker 0] chow, air force chow hall over there, so
[Speaker 0] the food was better. You know, again, military
[Speaker 0] food, not terrible, but, not, you know, not
[Speaker 0] top notch. And then, of course, you know,
[Speaker 0] eat at Wendy's, and there was also a
[Speaker 0] well, in the air force, we call it
[Speaker 0] AFE's. Army Air Force Exchange Service had a
[Speaker 0] snack bar, but I forget what the navy
[Speaker 0] called it in the navy exchange. But it
[Speaker 0] was, you know, a snack bar. You know,
[Speaker 0] you can get a slice of pizza, hamburger,
[Speaker 0] hot dog, or whatever. They didn't have the
[Speaker 0] Icelandic type hot dog, so I never ate
[Speaker 0] hot dogs there. But, again, are you sensing
[Speaker 0] a theme? I like the Icelandic hot dog.
[Speaker 0] But, yeah, it was, it was cool. Iceland
[Speaker 0] was one of the few places on the
[Speaker 0] planet I remember that had handrails on the
[Speaker 0] sidewalks. And the reason for that, we would
[Speaker 0] have crazy straight line winds across the North
[Speaker 0] Atlantic. We were kind of right in the
[Speaker 0] jet stream or the, what do they call
[Speaker 0] that? Not the jet stream, but, where the
[Speaker 0] ocean currents come north. And that kept the
[Speaker 0] island a little warmer than you might think.
[Speaker 0] The winters here in Traverse City, especially in
[Speaker 0] nineteen seventy eight, but, in the nineties, it
[Speaker 0] was often warmer in Keflavik, Iceland near the
[Speaker 0] Arctic Circle in the winter than it it
[Speaker 0] was here in Traverse City. You know, I
[Speaker 0] had my weekly call with my folks, and
[Speaker 0] and, you know, they were always saying, oh,
[Speaker 0] well, it's twenty degrees here, and, you know,
[Speaker 0] it'd be thirty five degrees and windy and
[Speaker 0] really windy, but those handrails on the sidewalk
[Speaker 0] keep you on the sidewalk. It was not
[Speaker 0] unusual in the middle of the night. You
[Speaker 0] know, I lived in a, you know, barracks
[Speaker 0] building, and there was another barracks well, a
[Speaker 0] three story barracks building, and then there was
[Speaker 0] dumpsters in between. It was not uncommon for
[Speaker 0] the wind to blow the dumpsters over at
[Speaker 0] night. You just hear this big crash. And
[Speaker 0] I remember one time we had a high
[Speaker 0] wind warning, and that's really odd for up
[Speaker 0] there because it's always high wind, but this
[Speaker 0] was really high wind. It was a hundred
[Speaker 0] and three miles an hour sustained for over
[Speaker 0] two hours. And it literally it had snowed,
[Speaker 0] and there was a little ice on the
[Speaker 0] parking lot at the barracks, and all the
[Speaker 0] cars blew to one end of the parking
[Speaker 0] lot. It blew the cars around in the
[Speaker 0] parking lot. It was, yeah, crazy wind. Jeez.
[Speaker 0] We talked about that yesterday with the blizzard
[Speaker 0] of seventy eight, but, yeah, similar wind conditions,
[Speaker 0] but a lot less snow. We didn't get
[Speaker 0] a lot of snow there, which, like I
[Speaker 0] said, being near the Arctic Circle, you would
[Speaker 0] think you would, but, we didn't. Being that
[Speaker 0] it was in the well, Gulf Stream, that's
[Speaker 0] what I'm thinking. Not not the not the,
[Speaker 0] oh, was that is that what I said
[Speaker 0] the first time? Oh, Jet Stream. Yeah. Jet
[Speaker 0] Stream's in the air. Gulf Stream's on the
[Speaker 0] ground or in the water. And we were
[Speaker 0] right in the we were in probably both,
[Speaker 0] but, yeah, it was it was crazy. But,
[Speaker 0] another thing that that I remember was really
[Speaker 0] popular was the USO club, and that happened
[Speaker 0] to be, you know, kind of in between
[Speaker 0] the two barracks buildings where I lived. And,
[Speaker 0] they used to have fish fry over there
[Speaker 0] on Friday nights. And that Icelandic cod was
[Speaker 0] swimming earlier that day. Yeah. So it was
[Speaker 0] probably the best fish fry I've been to.
[Speaker 0] I'm traveling on my food on my, I'm
[Speaker 0] traveling on my stomach here. I do remember
[Speaker 0] eating there. They also had a really good
[Speaker 0] half pound hamburger, so I did eat a
[Speaker 0] lot of meals there at the USO or
[Speaker 0] the USO. Of course, you know, military gotta
[Speaker 0] have names for stuff. And, another thing that,
[Speaker 0] you know, most people didn't bother with getting
[Speaker 0] a car up there, but I wanted to
[Speaker 0] do some exploring. And there was a gal
[Speaker 0] in my shop that, was rotating back to
[Speaker 0] the states, and she had a car called
[Speaker 0] a Skoda, Skoda one twenty. It's a really
[Speaker 0] weird looking little, square box car, like some
[Speaker 0] sort of Fiat, but the engine was in
[Speaker 0] the back, but it had a radiator up
[Speaker 0] in the front. It had, studded snow tires
[Speaker 0] on it, and she sold it to me
[Speaker 0] for six hundred dollars. I drove that thing
[Speaker 0] for probably eight or nine months. And then
[Speaker 0] when I got ready to rotate out, I
[Speaker 0] sold it for six hundred dollars. And it
[Speaker 0] was really interesting in Iceland with the cars.
[Speaker 0] You had to leave your headlights on all
[Speaker 0] the time. And if you were on an
[Speaker 0] international driver's license instead of an Icelandic driver's
[Speaker 0] license, your car had to be modified to
[Speaker 0] have the lights on all the time. And,
[Speaker 0] of course, that wasn't common back then. It
[Speaker 0] is now. But, back then, you had to
[Speaker 0] have it modified. And, of course, this one
[Speaker 0] was already. So anytime you started the car,
[Speaker 0] you know, the headlights were on. That car
[Speaker 0] was pretty good. And, you know, it got
[Speaker 0] me around, and it was a little better
[Speaker 0] than riding the bus. They did have a
[Speaker 0] bus service on base, and, plus, we could
[Speaker 0] go off base. The weird thing, when you
[Speaker 0] went off base, you had to go through
[Speaker 0] Icelandic customs. And then when you came back
[Speaker 0] on the bay base, you would, go through
[Speaker 0] navy security, and they were really weird about
[Speaker 0] certain things coming off the base. You couldn't
[Speaker 0] bring any gas cans. You could just have
[Speaker 0] the gas that was in your car. You
[Speaker 0] couldn't you could have one pack of open
[Speaker 0] cigarettes and one pack of not opened cigarettes,
[Speaker 0] but no more than that. And for some
[Speaker 0] weird weird reason, you couldn't bring cassette tapes.
[Speaker 0] So if your car had a tape deck,
[Speaker 0] you're SOL. You could not bring cassette tapes
[Speaker 0] off the base. I I have no idea.
[Speaker 0] Well, that was their three big bugaboos. And
[Speaker 0] the reason being is, you know, gas prices
[Speaker 0] off base was, I think, at the time
[Speaker 0] was two dollars a liter or the equivalent
[Speaker 0] of that, which would make it, like, eight
[Speaker 0] dollars a gallon. And, you know, in the
[Speaker 0] early nineties, that was ridiculous. I think, on
[Speaker 0] base was a buck forty five the whole
[Speaker 0] time I was there, and that was that
[Speaker 0] was a bit higher than than what was
[Speaker 0] average at that time in the states, but,
[Speaker 0] you know, it was a lot cheaper. So
[Speaker 0] that was that part. Same thing with the
[Speaker 0] cigarettes. You know, I could buy a carton
[Speaker 0] of Marlboros for six dollars at the exchange
[Speaker 0] and sell them for twenty dollars a pack
[Speaker 0] off off base, but, you know, nobody did
[Speaker 0] that or I didn't do that. You know?
[Speaker 0] And I didn't smoke that much. You know,
[Speaker 0] I did at that time, I believe I
[Speaker 0] was smoking, but I've been quit for many,
[Speaker 0] many years. But back then, everybody smoked. That
[Speaker 0] was kinda normal. So, again, you know, showing
[Speaker 0] my age here. But let's see. Some of
[Speaker 0] the other cool things about Iceland, we went
[Speaker 0] to the Hard Rock Cafe in, in Reykjavik.
[Speaker 0] It was in a in a mall down
[Speaker 0] there. It it's gone now. I'm I understand.
[Speaker 0] But, at the time, they they were collecting
[Speaker 0] US license plates to tack on the ceiling.
[Speaker 0] Well, I had customized, Idaho amateur radio license
[Speaker 0] plates with my call sign on it, and
[Speaker 0] I had my dad, take one off my
[Speaker 0] truck and send it to me and go
[Speaker 0] into Hard Rock Cafe in Reykjavik, and, they
[Speaker 0] give you a free meal for donating a
[Speaker 0] license plate. So for the longest time, my
[Speaker 0] call sign license plate was, nailed to the
[Speaker 0] ceiling in the Reykjavik, Hard Rock Cafe. But
[Speaker 0] like I said, I do believe that's gone
[Speaker 0] now. They had a really cool door or
[Speaker 0] a thing around the door. They had a
[Speaker 0] fifty nine Cadillac standing on its nose, and
[Speaker 0] the door going into the place was through
[Speaker 0] the Cadillac. I you know, they had just
[Speaker 0] had, you know, had it cut out, and,
[Speaker 0] you know, it was a normal door, but
[Speaker 0] that was, I do I do remember that.
[Speaker 0] You know, of course, it was inside a
[Speaker 0] mall. So you know? And the other thing
[Speaker 0] I remember the most about it was driving
[Speaker 0] in Reykjavik. It was the first time I'd
[Speaker 0] ever seen a traffic circle or a roundabout.
[Speaker 0] Now they're all over the place. I should
[Speaker 0] do a whole episode about roundabouts here in
[Speaker 0] northern Michigan, but I probably won't. But, that
[Speaker 0] was the first place I'd ever dealt with
[Speaker 0] roundabouts. And then in London, a Piccadilly circle
[Speaker 0] or Piccadilly Circus, of course, that roundabout there
[Speaker 0] is, way bigger. And, you drive the wrong
[Speaker 0] side of the road and the wrong side
[Speaker 0] of the roundabout, and I never did drive
[Speaker 0] through it, but, saw it. Pretty crazy. But,
[Speaker 0] anyway, and, you know, when I was telling
[Speaker 0] you about that airplane that flew back and
[Speaker 0] forth to London, you could, hop a flight
[Speaker 0] on that airplane. It was a p three
[Speaker 0] Orion, which is is a navy aircraft, but
[Speaker 0] it was set up like an airliner. And
[Speaker 0] you could hop a flight on there. I
[Speaker 0] think it was twenty bucks round trip, and
[Speaker 0] they'd, you know, leave Kevlovic at seven in
[Speaker 0] the morning and get to London about you
[Speaker 0] know, it was an hour and a half
[Speaker 0] maybe, something like that, and, stop in Shannon,
[Speaker 0] Ireland. And then, somewhere near London, I don't
[Speaker 0] remember what base it was, Milton Hall maybe.
[Speaker 0] But, we'd we'd land there, and then you
[Speaker 0] could, you know, grab a bus into London
[Speaker 0] or train or whatever it was and spend
[Speaker 0] the day there. And then if you were
[Speaker 0] back, to the airplane by ten o'clock at
[Speaker 0] night, they would head back. So it was
[Speaker 0] pretty cheap to, travel to to, London and
[Speaker 0] or shot Shannon. You know, sometimes jump off
[Speaker 0] at Shannon and spend the day there or
[Speaker 0] spend a night there usually and then come
[Speaker 0] back. But, yeah. So it was it was
[Speaker 0] definitely a a cool place, and, you know,
[Speaker 0] cool and as in cool, man, not cool
[Speaker 0] as in cold. Although it was cold, it
[Speaker 0] it never got above sixty five degrees and
[Speaker 0] never really got below twenty degrees the entire
[Speaker 0] time I was there, not counting wind chill.
[Speaker 0] And the sun, that was the other one,
[Speaker 0] is this time of year up there, the
[Speaker 0] sun may may come up just slightly above
[Speaker 0] the horizon and then go sideways for a
[Speaker 0] couple hours and then drop right back down.
[Speaker 0] So it was mostly dark, and we weren't
[Speaker 0] above the Arctic Circle. So the sun did
[Speaker 0] actually come up for a little bit. And
[Speaker 0] then in the summer, you know, like in
[Speaker 0] June and July, the the sun never really
[Speaker 0] set. It would go just slightly below the
[Speaker 0] horizon, and then you could see it kinda
[Speaker 0] go sideways across the horizon and then pop
[Speaker 0] right back up. It was very weird coming
[Speaker 0] out of the bar at two in the
[Speaker 0] morning and have to put your sunglasses on,
[Speaker 0] but, you did. And, you got used to
[Speaker 0] it. I did I don't remember much of
[Speaker 0] the language. I did learn enough of it
[Speaker 0] to get by, but, Icelanders at that time
[Speaker 0] even, and it's probably even better now, had
[Speaker 0] a higher literacy rate in English than the
[Speaker 0] US. So, you know, that was a required
[Speaker 0] language, although they they spoke more British English,
[Speaker 0] but close enough. You know? But, anyway, that's
[Speaker 0] just my remembrances of Iceland in the nineties.
[Speaker 0] I did, do an episode of all about
[Speaker 0] Iceland or oh, no. All things Iceland. I'll
[Speaker 0] have a link in the show notes over
[Speaker 0] at mike dell dot com. This post, there'll
[Speaker 0] be a link to my episode there, which
[Speaker 0] was in May of twenty twenty. I was
[Speaker 0] interviewed, about being on the NATO base in
[Speaker 0] Iceland back then, and, you know, who knows
[Speaker 0] if I contradicted myself? That was, you know,
[Speaker 0] almost six years ago. So or at least
[Speaker 0] five. That was six. Anyway, math again. But
[Speaker 0] go check that out. She's still doing that
[Speaker 0] show. I understand she's gonna become a mother
[Speaker 0] here soon. It's just I haven't listened to
[Speaker 0] it in a long time. But, anyway, check
[Speaker 0] that out. All things Iceland, May of twenty
[Speaker 0] twenty. And, I'll be back tomorrow. And what
[Speaker 0] forget what I'm gonna talk about tomorrow. Let
[Speaker 0] me see. Oh, yes. Thanksgiving. I'm gonna talk
[Speaker 0] a little bit about how Traverse City is
[Speaker 0] kind of a small town still. So, I
[Speaker 0] look forward to that, and hopefully, you'll listen.