It’s finally time to make our world travel post-rona debut (thanks vaccines). Nearby Iceland is a perfect candidate, boasting a high vaccination rate (>70%), relatively short flight (just under 6 hours!), restrictive entry rules (also sort of a curse), and sparse population (of humans, not sheep!).
For the next ten days, we will be dipping our toes in the geothermal spring waters of ejecting from our homeland for the first time since 2019.
Dealing with the uncertainties of the rona with a restrictive travel destination means excitedly navigating the waters of changing entry requirements. Just a little over a week before our trip, Iceland started requiring negative tests for entry, so we had to go get our noses swabbed for science 3 days before our flight left. The government also requires pre-registration on their website to be presented alongside a completed vaccination card or you need to test & quarantine on entry. As of two days ago, they returned to an indoor mask mandate, citing a spike in cases earlier this week.
(Please stay open, country, I beg of you.)
At last, it was time for pre-travel anxiety’s time to shine! Thanks to my obsessive checking of covid.is, we were well-prepared with all of our forms, barcodes, and negative tests by departure. I overheard the flight attendants talking about how they had to rebook a group which had missed the email and shirked their destination research duties, as they had no negative covid tests to present at boarding.
My personal nightmare.
Negative tests presented at our gate, we escaped the hot, smoke-laden Minnesota air for the frigid north, eagerly welcoming the 60 degree weather for just over a week. The smoke plume extended all the way til we flew over Lake Superior, looking like a vaguely aggressive and persistent fog covering the entirety of northern Wisconsin.
Upon landing we were greeted by lines for days in the airport! They hadn’t opened up all of the desks nor the zig-zag pacman lanes near passport control yet, so we got to stand and wait in an eternal line that took up a good portion of the gate area. Most of the airport shops were closed (because of covid or maybe because it was so freakin’ early) so there weren’t really many places to get a snack or a drink.
After waiting forever and enduring some confusion which required turning on my roaming data (boo hiss), we were united with our rental car company. There’s a rental car shortage right now (thanks rona, and it’s also high season) and the man setting up our rental was shook at how good of a rate we had managed to get. Yes sir, that’s because I remembered the woe this was last time and we booked our cars immediately upon booking our flights this time. I am also very good at obtaining The Deals.
But….they were out of SUVs – which we had rented for our group of four. Fortunately for us, we got a vehicle that was automatic without paying a thousand dollars more (yeah! I can drive it too! In a gear higher than second!). We have a strangely roomy 4×4 peugeot which has yet to be named (my sleep-deprived brain gravitates towards Pew! Go! but that’s weak) and we rumbled on towards the Blue Lagoon!
We were tragically NOT united with SIM cards until we could visit a gas station after getting our cars. I either cannot follow written instructions from the SIM card information website (likely, given my success rate at making Hello Fresh meals with 0 errors is extraordinarily low) or because the airport has changed since covid (even more likely since the article was from 2019 – why did I trust an article from the before times?) so I had to give the pirates at Verizon ten bucks for roaming service til we could hook ourselves up with some cards at a gas station.
But first, Bonus, because I needed caffeine AND to visit this cracked-out pig or I was going to perish.
The Blue Lagoon was the perfect way to pass time until we could check in at our hotel. Somehow, past me was exceptionally intelligent: I had my swimsuit in my carry-on, as well as a pair of contacts. Amazing! I was so ready for the lagoon. Soaking in its silica-laden murky blue waters was the perfect antidote to Not Sleeping On The Flight (sort of). It wasn’t too crowded and it’s roomy enough to allow people to spread out except near the bar and the mud mask station. Plus, we could stare at the erupting volcano’s smoke plume. Neat.
Lagoon! 
Volcanic plume to the left! 
My hand is a claw
The lagoon had space dedicated to Iceland’s #1 rule: don’t walk on the moss. Justin Bieber got into trouble in 2015 for dancing on the moss. Don’t be like Bieber. You can make the moss of your trip by admiring the moss with your eyes only (much like my tortie cat).
We headed back up from the lagoon to check in to our hotel in Reykjavik. They had unfortunately not finished their deep-clean (the lady was very apologetic about not making 1pm check-in time work) so we powered through the last hour of feeling like the walking dead by grabbing some Icelandic food at the nearby Cafe Loki. Icelandic food is lots of root vegetables with pepper and other spices on them – delicious after such a long day.
The last time we were here, we had not stayed so close to the city center. We are just behind Reykjavik’s iconic church, Hallgrimskirkja, for the evening, which makes for very easy post-nap excursions.
Like the little zombies we were, we slowly roamed around the city center, checking out the lively shops, cafes, and restaurants. I had read about how many of the shops had closed up and I was really happy to see that it was lively and relatively hoppin’! I love the street art around Reyjkavik – so many building are colorful or have beautiful murals painted on them.
Obligatory Leif-fie
At any rate, I have managed to stay awake until 10:30 pm and it’s nowhere near dark outside. Time to rest up before we head up to Akureyri tomorrow! Most of our trip will be spent up north, with a few days in Reykjavik on our return, partially so we can obtain our covid tests close to the airport…