I'll start with the worst part about going to Iceland, both to get it out of the way and because it's first chronologically. The travel there is pretty harsh. It's a direct flight from DC to Reykjavik, but they only seem to have red-eyes available, so you leave at 8 pm DC time and get in at 6 am Reykjavik time, which is actually 2 am DC time. By the time you go through passport control, get your luggage, and get to the hotel it's about 8:30 am, which is 4:30 am to your internal clock. And if you're like me, you haven't slept at all, because you cannot sleep on planes. Thankfully, S had the foresight to book the hotel rooms for the night before, so that we would have a place to put our luggage and catch a few zees. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to check-in until 3 pm. It's an extra night we had to pay for, but it was so worth it. When you have two children ten-and-under and two adults 70-and-older (S's parents came with us), you can't be bumming around the city for seven hours on essentially zero hours sleep. As it was, we crashed until about noon, and then we were in condition to actually do stuff (albeit tiredly) for the rest of the day.
We went whale watching, which... meh. There wasn't a whole lot to see -- a few fins in the distance, and it was tough to tell if they were whales or dolphins. I went whale watching in Australia once, and you could see huge whales right up close to the boat, so this one was, like I said, meh. S's parents sat inside most the time with the kids who fell asleep on some cushioned benches. Afterward, we went to dinner at this place called Laundromat Cafe, which was pretty cool. Reykjavic has tons of good, reasonably* affordable restaurants that you can just walk into and be seated immediately. And overall the city has a super fun vibe to it.
*I say "reasonably" because it's comparable to big US cities like DC and NY. It's on the expensive side compared to most places.
Too fun, in fact. Our hotel was not far from the main nightlife area, and it was so loud at night. None of us could fall asleep our first night because it was so loud. Well, the boys and I couldn't fall asleep because it was loud and also because our internal clocks were still on DC time (and they slept on the boat), so at midnight it only felt like 8 pm. S couldn't sleep, because we couldn't sleep. She got super annoyed with us because we couldn't sleep, but it's like, what do you want us to do? Not everybody can adjust their sleep schedules to their surroundings the way she can.
We had an excursion booked for 8 am the next morning, and she was freaking out that we weren't going to be able to do it, and the whole vacation was going to be ruined, and maybe she should just cancel everything and get us on an earlier flight back. And I was just trying to talk some sense into her without exacerbating the situation. Because I've been there before -- needing to sleep but unable to do so and having a mini mental breakdown because of it. It sucks, and you aren't thinking rationally. I mean, obviously, there's no reason to cancel an entire five-day vacation because you had trouble calibrating your sleep schedule the first night. What I told her is that we would eventually fall asleep, get three or four hours in, the kids would also sleep in the tour van on the way there, and we would all be tired but fine. Lo and behold that's exactly what happened.
We went to this place called the Golden Circle, which is a nature route with a bunch of cool shit on it. Here are some photos.
The tour guide we had was really cool. She told us all about the geothermal power plants, which I find really interesting. She also gave us a tip to try to see the northern lights that night. Usually you can't see them from Reykjavik very well, because they're obscured by the city light, but she said the skies were looking right for it, and she suggested going out to certain spot between 11 pm and 1 am. It was walkable from the hotel, and I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep anyway, so I went to check it out. Nobody else wanted to go -- chasing the lights can be a bit of a fool's errand, as we learned the next night -- so I just went alone.
And I got totally lucky and saw them and they were awesome. I didn't get the full-on, light up the entire sky show -- I think you really do have to get away from the city to see that -- but I'm not complaining. It was still so cool. The new iPhone can actually do a really good job capturing the colors -- its better than your eye, honestly; the pictures below look more vivid than what I saw in person -- but it can't relay the feel and the awe. There's a 3D-movie feel to the lights, where they draw you in, and even though you're quite far from them, it looks like you can reach out and touch them. I walked up and down the Reykjavik shore for over two hours looking at the sky.
Everybody was jealous and regretful they didn't come when I showed them my pictures the next morning. I think S's mom was a bit miffed that I didn't go back and wake everybody up so that they could've seen the lights too. I actually thought about doing that, but I was about 25 minutes from the hotel at my speed. So, doing the math -- 25 minutes back, 15 minutes to get everybody up and dressed, another 35 minutes back out there (they're slower than me) -- we're talking an hour-fifteen round-trip. I didn't even know if they would be visible that long.* Plus, I told everybody I was going to go and asked explicitly if anybody wanted to join me and nobody did. You snooze (literally), you lose. Plus, plus, S is still there and got to see them tonight with some colleagues, so I don't have to feel guilty toward her about it.
*I didn't have the international travel pass activated on my phone, if you were wondering why I didn't try to call them.
The next night we took a boat tour so that everybody could see them, but it was foggy, so all we saw was this.
The thing is, this is kinda cool too. Like, if somebody said, Hey, you wanna take a boat ride in the harbor at night in the eerie fog, while listening to Cat Stevens and Pink Floyd, I would have said yes. But because everybody wanted to see the lights it was disappointing when we didn't. I did snap the pic below before we left though, and it's pretty cool.
Well, that's all for Part 1. I'll post Part 2 probably later this week.
Until next time...
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