For my thirtieth birthday, I declared I wished to go to a tiny, expensive island nation and hike on some stuff. I dislike traveling in the summer as it is generally expensive and hot, but I plan on leaving my 20s as I entered: on an adventure. And this means traveling in August. Fortunately, Iceland is just expensive at peak travel times and not at all hot, which is half-ok with me.
Ten years ago, it was off to study abroad in Japan for a year. This year, it’s to Iceland! I hope to learn how to say crazy words made up of letters that don’t exist in English, see puffins, ride tiny horses, and touch some icebergs. I will also attempt to drive a manual car (I have practiced for a whole twenty minutes, making me an expert) and eat fermented shark, Hákarl.
Our itinerary takes us around the island in the first week on the ring road, stopping to whale watch, go to the cave sex cave, ride ponies, and visit hot springs and waterfalls and icebergs. The second week, we swap friends and head up the west coast slowly, climbing a mountain and enjoying the westfjords, before returning to the Reykjavik area.
Our adventure began with free pizza in our gate. Free pizza from the airline is never a good sign of anything. I have only seen them dole out food when flights have been seriously delayed, like that time Sun Country gave us snacks while waiting for our very delayed flight surrounded by 60 middle-schoolers returning to Minnesota from their spring break trip to NYC. This was the very definition of hell but I got some free nuts.
Why are you giving us free pizza, airline? Nothing has gone wrong. Our flight was only slightly delayed. I am suspicious of this pizza and your motives.
Then they started asking for volunteers to take tomorrow’s flight as the flight is over a weigh limit. Oh. The pizza is clearly a bribe to endear us to you. Pass. They start offering more and more money as people aren’t willing to switch and we became so engrossed with waiting to hear what they’ll announce next that we miss our boarding zone and end up going onto the plane pretty far towards the end.
They are up to 1500 dollars by the time we get on the plane (with only a few takers). If I wasn’t with a group, maybe I’d take it…that’s a lot of money to change plans for a day! The world’s best lady switched seats with me so I could sit near Rhett for the flight while we waited to take off.
Finally, the sum of $2000 gets enough people to get off the flight. So tempting. That could be so many more trips or funding for this entire trip and then some. Maybe on the way back, they’ll ask for volunteers to switch again…
By now, we are far past our departure time and have to wait an extra hour for the luggage to get off the flight and we are set to get in to Reykjavik an hour and a half later than we would have. No time for the Blue Lagoon on landing for us 🙁
After a smooth flight filled with much uncomfortable sleeping for me (and none for Rhett), we descended over brown plains and rocky cliffs into Reykjavik. It was mostly flat. And windy. And some green!
There were basically no lines in customs and no cards to fill out (yay!) and the lady just asked me where I was staying. Somehow she accepted my tired answer of “um, everywhere?” and stamped my passport for entry.
The rental car company picked us up from the airport, and Despacito was of course the first song we heard in this country, throwback to Costa Rica in March.
We picked up our rental 4×4 from the car office, which was plastered with signs about the quickly changing climate and offered a pagelong handout on driving conditions in Iceland. About ten bullet points were dedicated to hammering home the fact that Iceland is windy. There are no trees here to buffer the wind. It’s just rocks, wind, and volcanoes. And wind. And expensive gas.
Like a bunch of noobs, none of us can figure out how to open the trunk. We tried looking for buttons. We tried incantations. Kari went to go ask for help just as I thought to poke the lock button and the trunk magically opened. Also like a bunch of noobs, none of us could figure out how to get it into reverse so we decided we will just not ever drive backwards for two weeks. Seems reasonable.
Our Air B&B was near the harbor and close to downtown and after some restorative naps, we went exploring central Reykjavik.
The houses here are all made of metal and concrete, and are brightly painted to combat the long winter nights. They’re a mix of charming European-y houses and utilitarian (yet colorful) concrete structures, and many have large windows. There was a lot of street art and graffiti at every turn.
We visited Hallgrimskirkja, the tallest building in Iceland, and a giant church with a statue of Leif Erikson out front. Leif Erikson! How could I forget about his greatness? The real discoverer of America, and he also did not murder the natives. He has his own day, which should really be celebrated with more fanfare.
Inside Leif’s church (ok, it’s not his church – pipe down) was a pipe organ with over 5,000 pipes – ridiculous! How do they clean it? Donations, of course…and money from visitors going up the top of the tower. You can pay 900 krona to go up and see out the top but the line was long and I was tired and cranky so we passed on that.
We stopped at Sólfarið (that crazy letter at the end sounds like “th”), the sun voyager viking boat sculpture, on the water. You can climb on it and small children can get in the way of your pictures while they climb on it, but we luckily got to explore it before the children jumped in.
Our dinnerish spot (what time is it? My body has no idea, but it hungers) was Sægreifinn, famous for lobster bisque and tasty eats. They also served whale steak, which was a must-try and also delicious. For the non-seafood-farers, we also stopped and got some hot dogs covered in amazing sauces.
We retired to our humble abode to play games and watch the neighbors paint the house until 10:30 PM. It’s still light here – there is no true night until September. It enters ‘nautical twilight’ for several hours, which just means that it’s dark enough to require the usage of light when you’re outside.
Our humble abode’s bathroom water smells really sulphuric. Much of Iceland is geothermally heated and a lot of this is used as hot water in the house. The sink water isn’t as bad, so it must be filtered or something. My childhood home’s well water was slightly sulphur-y so hey…smells like home! And farts.
Tomorrow, we start our ring road drive. We are heading out to Akureyri in the north, as our whale-watching northern base.
