For a year now, we’ve all been dealing with the Covid pandemic. This deadly virus has affected almost all of our activities – work, school, travel, shopping – just about everything.

To combat this disease, we’ve been asked to change our habits. As a result businesses had to drastically change their operations or close altogether to comply with government mandated health rules.

Being involved with restaurants, I’ve watched closely as the food service industry has responded to forced dining limits or closures. In many localities, on-premise dining was prohibited so many restaurants started or increased take-out and/or delivery service. Some places allowed outdoor patio dining as long as the establishment’s seating arrangement allowed for social distancing.

As the weather turned colder, the popularity of outdoor dining dropped so restauranteurs looked for other ways to keep customers coming back.

Below you can see some of the clever ways that are used to keep winter outdoor dining safe and warmer.

From Detroit, you can reach Iceland in about six hours. That makes it a shorter flight than one to either London or Paris. Ahead of time, I understood the weather to be quite variable but on the wet, cold and windy side. When I arrived in early October the temperature was about 40 degrees but the strong winds made it feel much colder.

I was prepared for the rain but wasn’t for the cold and wind so ended up purchasing a warm winter parka before setting out to explore Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital and main city. Its population of 125,000 represents about 1/3 of the entire country. It sits along the western coast and is surrounded by beautiful mountains.