A Gold-medal worthy day.

This is Herman. He drives like a crazy-man. Thankfully, I did not come to Reykjavik in his car.

He is a better defenseman than a driver though--my preferred partner on the 'Old Boys', a rag-tag group put together to attend Canadian Hockey Day in Iceland on behalf of Skautafelag Akureyrar.

Despite how they look here, these are stand-up guys, Gardur (orange) and Jon (banana). Gardur builds ships. Jon is a tour guide on glaciers, and is the ski-patrol at the local hill, when it's open. Very Iclandic. Jon told me a funny story about him and some buddies going mountain-climbing, but getting stuck on the mountain. So he called for a rescue squad...only to hear his buddies phones going off--the entire Icelandic Search and Rescue team was stuck on the same mountain. It took them 18 hours, but they finally got down from the mountain. Funny.

This is Sami-Jo Small, a fellow Canadian. But she's a wee-bit more accomplished than I: http://www.samijosmall.ca/

This is her Gold Medal from the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. She is here to pump the female hockey players up about what they are doing. She gave an awesome, awesome speech. Amongst other things, she encouraged people to close their eyes and imagine what their dream is when they hold her medal. Olympians are very inspiring!

This thing weighed about a pound.

This is me playing defense. We lost to the Winnipeg Falcons 5-3...which was not a bad showing...except I am told only two of their players were sober. They were drinking on the bench. I had two assists.

Our next game started minutes short of midnight, and we won this one 3-2. That was against a team from Quebec.

The Iceland Hockey Logo explained!

There is pretty good media coverage of this tournament here. Their equivalent of the CBC, "RUI" was here, and one of our guys gave an interview. Sadly, it was our idiot player who was ejected in the Falcons game for swinging his stick, McSorley style at a poor Winnipegger. Fortunately, he didn't make contact. Scary.

I am happy to be back in Reykjavik! Their rink here is connected to a huge movie theatre.