Iceland, Day 1

Wow, I can't believe I'm here.

I guess this started with Day 0, Feb 26th, with our flight out of Toronto. It was a long way here, longer than some other times of the year, as with no direct flights, getting to Iceland's Leif Erikson Int'l Airport at Keflavik takes a hop through Boston or New York. So it's now about 9:20 am Eastern time, and we've been up for 25 hours or so, but just had lunch, I think.

We landed at Keflavik at 6:30 or thereabouts, local time. It's not a huge airport, but it was dark and overcast, so we grabbed luggage, signed for the rental car, and sat in a little cafe and had and excellent latte and croissant mini-breakfast while trying to orient ourselves. Oh, and out in the dark parking lot? As I said, it was overcast, but this eerie green-blue glow could be seen from behind the clouds, a little glimpse of the Aurora to greet us as we got here.

As dawn broke, we left the airport and headed for the nearest town. I'm still trying to suss exactly how places are named, as the map seemed to call this town all of Reykjanes, Reykjanesbaer, and Keflavik. I think it is a case of small villages having grown and melded, and the -baer (I don't have the fonts to mash that a-e together properly) might be like Canadians would call a township or county or something... the greater area around the town proper. Possibly.

Not much seemed to be happening in the early morning, and since we thought we probably could not check in to our hotel before noon or so, we went adventuring around the upper Reykjanes peninsula, which has road completely around its coast. We were somewhere between several meters or several hundred meters from the sea on this route, watching beautiful and terrible waves coming in with the wind. We've already seen calm, overcast, very windy, rain, and just now as I look out the hotel window, snow flurries. The agent at our rental counter had actually made the "Don't like the weather? Just wait a minute!" comment about Iceland's weather, and also said it's a local saying that the gods test all the weather in Iceland before sending it elsewhere. I can see how this might be.

We didn't stop and wander too much on this drive, as we were tired, still in grungy and not very warm travel clothes, and it was windy. There will be a few photos later on @shuttermonster's gallery. We did stop and wander up to a strange ruin covered in a graffiti mural, and snapped some of the land and seascape around it. The views here are dark and stark, but in a very powerful way.

We completed the morning's drive with a cut through back across the middle of the peninsula to Keflavik, where shops and diners now seemed to be open and had interesting and quite tasty "boats" (the local translation equating to "sub" as in "submarine sandwich") for lunch. From there, as @shuttermonster is the sole driver and was turning into a pumpkin, we headed right for our hotel. Very quickly out of the seaside village, we found ourselves in what I called a moldy moonscape of lava fields. Our tour included 2 nights stay at the Blue Lagoon clinic hotel, next to a geothermal spa, The Blue Lagoon, that sits on top of a volcanic rift.

Photos will follow, but at the moment I'm blogging on the ipad and quickly finding some limitations of the Blogger interface on that device. We could both stand to freshen up, take a (short) nap, and then we have massage appts at the Blue Lagoon spa itself with a complementary voucher for the lagoon.