The European leg of our journey started with an early domestic flight from SFO to Minneapolis before grabbing the international red eye into KEF (Reykjavik). We were impressed with Sun Country Airlines (which none of us had flown before) and Iceland Air, both of which had service-oriented pilots and attendants.
The sun was bright and warm through the windows on initial descent before we passed through a thick layer of fog and wind. The fog was so dense that I couldn’t see the ground until touchdown. All around us were low flat-top buildings reminiscent of an abandoned WWII airbase. After border control and customs, we met our driver who was to provide us with a tour of the area and a visit to the Blue Lagoon before delivering us to our apartment in Reykjavik’s central city.
The driver gave us our first taste of Icelandic pride – a young nation with a long history, a lot of which he shared with our jetlagged selves. He also talked extensively about Iceland’s exceptional water quality, and he was absolutely right. If you buy bottled water in Iceland you are wasting your money.
TRYING TO STAY AWAKE
Our goal was to power through the day then go to sleep early to help manage the jetlag. That plan began to unravel when we stopped for a soak at the famous Blue Lagoon. It is a large set of geothermal pools set amidst black lava fields on the outskirts of town. We could see the steam rising on the horizon long before arriving at the gates.
Nothing helps you stay awake and alert like a hot soak in mineral water, right?! That said, it was a unique experience to sit together in super-heated sulfurous water that smelled like the inside of the earth. The minerals in the water had calcified like an oyster in reverse to cover the sharp rocks in an opalescent porcelain, and were very slick to walk on. After about an hour, we were ready to get out, get some food and go to sleep… except for Asher, who could have stayed in the pools all day.
The soak gave us our first introduction to the Icelandic economy. The exchange rate was roughly 120:1 (IKR:USD). As we went through the line to Blue Lagoon and the attendant asked is we wanted towels (yes, everybody was getting them) and robes (sure, I guess), and then charged us 9000IKR for them, we calculated they cost us about $75! The boys and I had a funny moment in the locker room trying to help some elderly tourists with the confusing locker system, and we all found the strict pre-swim shower regimen a bit strange. But hey, at least we had robes.
By the time we settled into our simple and spare Reykjavik apartment, we were starving. A short walk in search of a café or fish & chips didn’t work out so we headed to Devito’s Pizza around the corner. It turned out to be a pretty authentic NY-Style pizza joint – slices, beverages out of a cooler, standing room only with paper plates and plastic utensils. The only things missing were red pepper flakes and Parmesan cheese.
And then, the key mistake. Asher and I (the early birds) fell asleep at 2:30p, about three hours too soon, which came back to haunt us the next day. Ronan and Angela (the two night owls) made it to 6:00p. I awoke at 8:00p thinking it was the next morning, then Asher and I bumped into each other at 1:00a ready to grab breakfast. We ended up being awake for 24 hours followed by asleep for 17, so somewhere in there we got straightened out.
A quick note about showering in Iceland: the hot water is pumped into each dwelling directly from heat converters that receive the water from the ground. So, there are no hot water tanks in Iceland. A hot shower can in theory last until your entire body is a prune. The tradeoff is that it contains a fairly high concentration of sulfur…so there’s that smell no matter how much soap you use.
EXPLORING REYKJAVIK
The next day we met with our Iceland travel agent Linda for a briefing on the next two weeks of driving the Ring Road. She was really nice and walked us through our itinerary and answered questions from the boys. I noticed a small tattoo, “Bjork” on her right wrist which I mistook for being homage to Iceland’s most famous artist/musician. Angela later informed me that it was Linda’s real last name.
After we left, we needed a quick treat and stopped at a bakery nearby for long-johns and coffee (for me) before heading to the Viking Museum on the other side of the harbor. Although it was chilly and windy, we decided to walk after having missed the tour bus that circles the city. It was a rather uninteresting trek – industrial with commercial buildings in miscellaneous states of development, and ships unloading fish, goods or tourists.
A quick look over the museum wasn’t impressive, but we discovered a small playground in the midst of the construction sites – poorly marked and fairly dangerous looking. The centerpiece of the park was an old wooden trawler, maybe 30 feet long and up on stands that put its deck 18 feet high. The only way up was a rickety crowd-sourced scaffold that had been built using miscellaneous planks. The park also had old tires, fishing nets, buoys, life preservers, and old timber which had been shaped into boardwalks and bridges. For those in the Bay Area, you’d recognize this place as a less organized Berkeley Adventure Playground.
Our walk back to the apartment took us through central Reykjavik and past plenty of restaurants and ice cream shops. We stopped at Uno, supposedly one of the city’s up-and-coming hot spots and found it mediocre, but the ice cream cones we picked up for dessert were a hit. Via a crisp and windy walk to the waterfront we visited the Solfar (Sun Voyager) sculpture by Jon Gunnar. The setting sun shined a brilliant orange on the metallic “ribs” of the beautiful piece.
Back at the apartment, Angela and Ronan eased into sleep as they’d properly re-set their clocks. Asher and I stayed up watching a BBC documentary on the U.K. floods of 2012.
The next day, we’d leave Reykjavik and begin the real adventure.
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Looks like u guys r having a great time. What a great experience…esp for the kids. As much fun as Europe is…there is no place like home. I will keep reading if you keep writing…