Velkomin til Íslands

Well, here we go again.  We're off for another trip, another adventure.  This time we actually have to limit our time to about 8 days.  Which is a great trip, but it's actually pretty short by our standards.  6 weeks here, a month there... and now 8 days.  Huh?  Well, life happens, new jobs happen and here we are.  That fact actually played quite a bit into how we decided on where we were going this time.

Given our history, we tend to have the attitude of: "Well, it's close enough and I want to see it, let's make it happen."  So given our limited amount of time to travel, we decided to lock ourselves in geographically.  We also wanted something a little different, so we ended up in Iceland... in November.  I guess time will tell how good of a choice that is, but when you're experiencing new things and cultures, it's really pretty hard to go wrong.

So, our trip began easily enough.  We caught Uber to the airport and walked through the terminal to find our gate.  I've never been to the bus terminal in LAX, but it exists.  So they loaded everyone on a bus, and bused us all the way to the back realm of the airport and dropped us off at a little building whose sole purpose was a ramp to the airplane.  Huh interesting, never did that before.  I think you can see parts of this in Sarah's post.

On to the 8 hour flight, well... 9 hours on the plane, we sat for an hour while they did who knows what, but for a non-stop flight to Iceland, I'll take it.  It really wasn't that bad.  So we landed at 4:30 AM local time and we wander through the airport trying to find the bus.  The main airport is about an hour bus ride from Reykjavik.   I tried to get some sleep, since I didn't sleep well on the plane, and Sarah apparently wrote her post for this blog.

There wasn't really much to get a first impression of, it's dark.  It's definitely colder than the 90 degrees we left in LA (it's in the low 40's)  and its pouring rain.  This is definitely different than what we just left, but oddly similar to our experience that kicked off this whole travel bug, the cold and rain in Ireland.

So where do we get dropped off at 7AM?  I booked a rental car for us so that we can go outside the city, and I booked the pick up at noon, not thinking I guess.  So we go to the domestic airport that is in the center of town.  And nothing opens until 8, so we figured we'd sit there until it opens and see if we can talk them into giving us the car early.  Luckily, the guy agreed, we just have to have it back a little earlier, which is fine, since we were going to drop it off early anyway.

First, renting a car always comes with warnings.  But renting a car in Iceland was a whole other game.  He made sure to let me know that the wind is what causes most of the damage from opening the doors and having them bend backwards?! So we're supposed to open the window a little bit so that it's basically not a kite when we open the door.  Also, we have studded tires on our tiny little car.  And I've never had a rental car guy give us a full weather report as we walk out the door.  Very ominous.

We drive downtown, which almost has a very familiar feel to it, it's actually quite small, but there's a pretty good energy flowing through it with restaurants and people all around.

So, we park and head to a coffee shop.  Mind you it's almost 10AM and still dark out.  But now the sun is starting to come up.  We grab a cup of coffee and a snack and start wandering around town.  We were thinking about doing a walking tour, which is one of our staples, but we didn't want to be out in the cold and rain for 2 hours.  So, in our infinite wisdom, we wandered around on our own for two hours, basically looping downtown twice.

We walked up to the main church in town, Hallgrimskirkja, which is designed to resemble the basalt columns we are hoping to see later in the week.  We grabbed lunch, some mighty delicious Lamb stew, and figured we'd head out of town to try and see some of the Golden Ring, which is a variety of waterfalls, and geysers.  What we didn't realize is that it is a about a 100 minute drive out of the city.  So we made it about half way, and we both started fading from the jet lag, so we turned back.   Rain, Dark, Cold and exhausted do not make a great mix driving around a new country. We'll make it out there on some of our other excursions, so we decided it was in our best interest.  We checked into our airBnB and went to the grocery store.  It's actually like 1:30AM as I write this.  I was in bed at 6PM, mind you the sun set at 4:30.

I'm excited to see a variety of things here and experience the culture.  So far it's been great.  I really hope we get to see the Northern Lights, with the weather, it might be a challenge, as you need it to be super clear, and as you can see from the pictures, it's anything but at the time being.  I don't want to spoil some of the other things we have in store, but I'm excited about this trip, as it's going to be pretty different than some of the others we've done.

The Icelandic words certainly are hard enough to pronounce and there are some fun new letters in the alphabet.

And with that, I'll leave you with a picture of the moon shining on Sarah that we took at the church:

  Really?  You don't feel that draft?!