Saturday, Sept. 23, en route from Copenhagen to the Faroes — Given the difficulty of dealing with baggage on the stairs of the Underground, I took at taxi to Paddington station. There are three ways to get to Heathrow: taxi, for around £80; Heathrow Express (the quickest, at about 15 minutes from Paddington – £20); or the Piccadilly Line from any station on that line. The latter can take half an hour or 45 minutes, but it’s the cheapest way, and you can use your Oyster Card (Underground pass).

Paddington station, at the moment, defies logic. From where the taxi lets you off at Point A, you walk about 100 yards to Point B, where you make a 180-degree turn inside and walk about 100 yards to C, parallel to your first walk, to a spot maybe 50 feet from where you started, only inside.

At the top of the B-to-C hike there is a ramp for the disabled, but with four steep steps down onto the ramp, situated so that if a disabled person does make it down the steps, clinging to the handrail, a suitcase is likely to go out of control and career down the ramp, scattering and maiming fellow passengers right and left. At the bottom, you collect what’s left of your suitcase, apologize to the wounded, and continue the 100-yard walk to Point C, in the main part of the station. There, you buy a ticket, make another 180 degree turn, and then walk back, parallel to your two other walks, to Point D, your carriage. All very simple, and only 300 yards from where you started, which is maybe 50 yards from where you wanted to be in the first place.

Happily, with London being the friendly, helpful city it is, a very kind young woman helped me down the steps with my baggage, and the carnage was avoided.

Once on the Heathrow “Express,” I thought we were on our way, but we stopped for 15 minutes in the middle of nowhere, owing to a “passenger incident” in the train ahead. (Possibly an outraged passenger attacking the person who made all the “improvements” at Paddington?)

Copenhagen airport isn’t as vast as Heathrow (and has lovely hardwood floors), but it’s big enough that I asked for a wheelchair. The help at the airport is very kind, if somewhat unorganized (“disorganized” implies a former state of organization; in Copenhagen I got the feeling that things had never been all that organized in the first place.) And now, aloft in an Airbus 320 – the Faroe Islands in another hour.

Sunday, Sept. 24 – I am stunned by the Faroes and enchanted with Torshavn! Words simply fail. It is magnificent and wonderful and different, like nothing I have ever seen before.

It was exciting arriving here — you fly up a fjord below the mountain tops on either side, both wings seemingly just clearing the cliffs, and yesterday it was bumpy; at one point the pilot gunned the engines and made a sharp climbing turn – gasps all around. There is one runway, built by the British during the war; this is built out into the fjord so the approach, up to the last moment, is just above the water, and at the other end of the runway there is a mountain. We were told that despite the weather, and thanks to a special American-made ground-reading radar system, something like 98 percent of flights so equipped are able to get in and out, regardless of visibility.

It’s a nice, but very small airport building –- most of which is taken up by the large duty-free shopping area.  Just out the door are ranks of shuttles to Torshavn, at a FKR 200 flat rate. It’s an hour’s ride on an amazing road system — “Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped/Through granites which titanic wars had groined” (From Strange Meeting, by poet Wilfred Owen).

The longest tunnel, just over three miles long, ​goes under Vestmannasund and connects the two islands of Streymoy and Vágar. Tórshavn is located on Streymoy, and the airport is located on Vágar, so the tunnels connect the capital to the airport.

We learned later that the three-mile tunnel cost $80 million – about enough to get a preliminary study done in the U.S.! There are tunnels, or projected tunnels, connecting all the islands, and the road surfaces look new, putting I-5 to shame.

The mountains seem huge and glowering, and are “terraced” by layers of exposed rock, and feel rather overpowering. Nothing grows on them but grass and moss — and sheep. (There is a tree outside my hotel window – something of a rarity here). Wherever you look out over the water, which is often as the road winds much of its way along the cliffs, there are huge diagonal islands and more rock, rising at a 45 degree angle on one side, and then plunging vertically into the sea. We were told that the village by the airport is the only village in the Shetlands without a view of the sea!

Tórshavn is lovely, with 13,000 inhabitants and 19,000 in the greater urban area. Solid, vertically boarded houses in the Scandinavian style, small windows — a sign of cold, dark winters — some with turf roofs, and all very clean and neat. My Hotel (Hotel Hafnia – highly recommended) is 75 meters from the harbor down steepish streets and between stone buildings.

Dinner last night was in a pub just down the street, and to my surprise, was loaded with vegetables, a sort of chicken salad with lettuce and red sweet peppers. Breakfast in the hotel was equally a surprise: a smorgasbord with everything from salmon to bacon, fruit and vegetables, wonderful bread, muesli and a mystery quiche which was quite good. The showers are worth a comment: no shower stalls –- the entire (very small) bathroom is the shower stall (a curtain keeps things somewhat contained), with a drain in the floor, and a squeegee on a rack to dry the floor. A wonderful contrast to our showers in London where it took real ingenuity on Jeff’s part to get my shower stool into the cubicle, and sitting on it to take a shower, the door could not be closed and my knees stuck out into the bathroom. Give me Faroese showers any day!

Later – I don’t even know where to start with the pictures I’ve taken; sorting out a few for My Edmonds News is going to be frustrating!

Some notes: There are cash machines seemingly everywhere, with instructions in English -– and everyone so far speaks very good English. Currency is either Faroese (FKR) or Danish Kronor, which are of the same value, the Faroes being an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Tórshavn is small enough to be thoroughly seen on foot, though beware some of the narrow coarsely cobbled lanes, which might be tricky in rain or ice. The “feel” is of a very modern, even fashionable town with back streets that probably haven’t changed much in several hundred years, though the modern houses in the upper town are quite nice and modern.

If you speak any Scandinavian language, some Faroese words can be recognized, though pronunciation is quite different; the closest related language is Icelandic. The letter “ð”, though liberally scattered everywhere, is never pronounced. The language dates as far back as the 9^th century, but there was no spelling system until Venceslaus Hammersheimb, a Lutheran minister and folklorist, created one in 1846. Danish was the only official language until 1938, when Faroese received equal status in schools and churches. In 1948 with the Home Rule Act, Faroese became the official language of the Faroe Islands. “Tórshavn” is pronounced “Torsh-hawn”

Tuesday, Sept. 26 – Nancy has rented a car, and we have been trying to explore: we set out after breakfast to visit an 11^th century monastery and unfinished cathedral at the south end of Stremoy (the island where Tórshavn is), but fog closed in to some 50 yards visibility, if that. We managed as far as the cutoff to our destination at Kirkjubønes, which led onto a very narrow one-lane road, with a steep drop-off of undetermined depth to the right, into the increasingly dense fog. These narrow roads have a pull-over every quarter mile of so, so other vehicles can get by, but our luck failed. A mile or so in we came across a car in the ditch –- opposite to the drop-off -– being towed out by a large truck. The road was far too narrow to allow passing or turning, so we backed up maybe 200 yards, in deep fog, with no idea how far the drop-off actually dropped off. In the interests of longevity we decided to return to the hotel and wait for the fog to lift. They say it can last for days.

Renting the car was interesting: You are required to take out sheep insurance, as there are few fences, and you are instructed that in all circumstances sheep have the right of way. If you hit a sheep, and there are about 30 percent more sheep than people in the islands, you are expected to dispatch it with the knife that comes in almost all cars, and report it to the police, who will identify the owner and work with the insurance people to reimburse the farmer. No mention was made of pedestrians, who appear to be fair game. Or at least there are no knives supplied for finishing pedestrians off, should you hit one.

The guide for my friend Nancy’s group (she came here with a knitting group, which left yesterday) was very informative. The majority of electricity here is either wind or hydro, with the latter all underground. Power lines are also buried. It’s clear that the Faroese treasure their unspoiled landscape and ecology. Most garbage is incinerated, and the heat is used to heat homes or for other public uses. There is no crime, though there seems to have been a recent outbreak of driving without a seat belt — something the police are cracking down on. There is no home without electricity, and the Faroese government is committed to building roads, tunnels and bridges to all inhabited islands in the group. There are four stop lights in the island group, all in Tórshavn, one of which is only activated when children are on the way to and from school. Parking is free, but parking time is limited. It’s all on the honor system: there is a “clock” at the bottom right-hand corner of the windshield: you set the hands at the time when you park, and tickets are only given if you exceed the 30-minute, two-hour or eight-hour parking limit in a given area. You can park as long as you like from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. We forgot to set our “clock” and got the standard FKR200 fine, which, along with tunnel tolls, can be paid when we return the car to the rental agency.

The police are unarmed, and there has been only one shooting in memory: A mentally unstable alcoholic was shooting up street lamps with his single-barreled shotgun. The police waited until he was reloading, then tackled him. We were told that he is now getting the care he needs.

There is alcoholism and a lot of smoking, but the biggest danger comes from tourists: Recently an American couple were arrested for cooking on a gas stove on the wooden floor of an empty, wooden church. Go figure.

Lest anyone think Tórshavn has no fine dining, we had dinner last night at Áarstova, a restaurant just down the street, specializing in lamb and seafood. There are two menu choices, a five-course and a three-course meal, each with choices for each course. We both had the langoustine bisque, which was superb; better even, I thought, than the lobster bisque at Wilton’s. We then shared a shoulder of lamb served with boiled baby potatoes; the lamb cooked slowly for 24 hours in beer and herbs. This was more than enough for two, and it was outstandingly tender and good. Dessert was a wonderful rhubarb compote, all accompanied by a 2013 Meursault. Tórshavn may be small, but O! can you eat well!

Everywhere we go, people are extremely friendly, the views (when the fog clears) are dramatic and unlike anything I have ever seen before, the town is clean and walkable, the houses look wonderfully snug. We were lulled to sleep last night by distant fog horns, after a walk from the restaurant where we viewed the ships in the harbor surrounded by golden auras of light from their lamps, glowing in the fog. We never want to leave -– and I seriously want to return, as one German couple Nancy learned of, who come every winter to rent a house where they can watch the enormous winter storms that come roaring off the North Atlantic. Winds reach 200 kph.

Tomorrow we pack, and leave (fog or radar permitting) for the Shetlands, via Edinburgh –- there is no direct connect by air from the Faroes to Shetland, though I believe there are ferries.

— By Nathaniel Brown

Edmonds resident Nathaniel Brown taught and coached cross-country running and skiing for 16 years before joining the US Biathlon Team as wax technician, switching to the U.S. Cross-Country team in 1989. He coached at three Olympics and 14 World Championships, edited Nordic Update for nine years and Cross-Country Skier for two. He has written three books on skiing and training. He owned and operated Nordic UltraTune, an international freelance ski tuning service, until retirement six years ago