2018 Iceland

Landscape below Ljosafoss Power Station We came to Iceland mainly for a chance to see the Northern Lights and this is our last day and our last chance. Fortunately the skies were clearing and there was a real possibility. Given that, we scheduled a retake on our Northern Lights Tour from Sunday night for tonight. You are allowed retakes for free until you see the lights and even though it meant another long bus ride, we were going to try again. That meant rearranging some of our plans to get back in time for the tour.  So we removed a visit to the Selialandsfoss Waterfalls in southern Iceland and exchanged a visit to the Blue Lagoon for a visit to the Sundhöll Reykjavíkur thermal bath in town. In truth, I should have scheduled the Blue Lagoon a few days earlier to make sure we got a time slot that fit because earliest opening left for today was 5 pm, too late to make the tour. So we traded an expensive ($200) tourist spot for a less expensive ($20) place where the locals go. ...

Eric our Tour Guide Today we set aside for a tour of Reykjavik, starting with a free 2-hour walking tour of the downtown area. It’s only “free” in the sense that they ask for a contribution at the end, but we have found these to be good as the tour guides work very hard to be entertaining as well as informative and this one didn’t disappoint.  Here are some of the random things we heard on the walk: 1) Reykjavik and its surrounding suburbs (like Hafnarfjörður where we are staying) only have a population of about 220,000, but it is two-thirds of the total population of Iceland. Colorful House with Christmas Lights 2) They never have to shovel snow from the streets or sidewalks downtown because they pump water from the hot springs underneath the streets to keep them warm. 3) Because there are so many hours of darkness during the winter, residents leave their Christmas lights up much longer and paint there house in bright colors to cheer themselves up. Iceland White ...

Golden Circle Tour Route Today we took the Golden Circle Tour via bus to see some of the natural beauty of the country. Iceland was created by volcanoes and remains volcanically active today. The interior, where we were headed today, is a high, mountainous plateau and totally snow-covered. There are still active volcanoes, lava fields and glaciers inland, but they are much further to the interior and the roads to them are impassable in the winter. Iceland itself, by the way, isn’t nearly as cold as you might think. It is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate, despite being just outside the Arctic Circle. It rarely goes below 17 degrees in January but also stays pretty chilly even in the summer.  For us it remained around 32 degrees and snowed, sleeted or rained just a little every day. The wind, as we found on our last night, can be very brutal and basically the whole interior of Iceland is uninhabitable. Lake at Þingvellir National Park Our firs...

Hallgrímskirkja (Church) So what do you do to kill time while waiting for your room and a nap? We hardly slept at all on the plane so we were both pretty tired. Fortunately we had a rental car and that gave us at least a little flexibility. We drove to the hotel just in case our room was available, but no luck as of 6 am. I had a list of suggestions for a day in Reykjavik but most of that proved unfeasible in the ice and darkness of the early morning. I suppose they don’t call it ICELAND for nothing. So we drove around in the downtown and waterfront area until we found a 24-hour market, bought some cinnamon pastries and drove back to the hotel parking lot to sleep for a bit in the car until about dawn, which, by the way, is 10:30 am in January. Our room was still not ready so we headed back to downtown Reykjavik again for sightseeing. Organ and Choir Our first stop was to attend mass at the Hallgrímskirkja which is the largest church in Iceland. The service was Lutheran (Denm...

Puffin Hard Landing in the Airport Today we started out on our trip to Iceland apprehensive about flying on WOW airlines since it was our first time flying them and they are new and a heavily discounted flier with fares as low as $99 from Newark to Reykjavik. We booked through a travel agent so we don’t know what we paid but it was definitely the “no frills” plan. I later added one checked bag ($59.99 each way) and assigned seats ($6.99 per, each way), but it was a worth the price. Using the travel agent, as it turned out, was a big negative with WOW as I had to call their service center instead of using their website and that took hours to make those simple changes. The actual flight itself was great. It was a new Airbus A321 which I think makes a daily run back and forth between Newark and Iceland. Of course you pay for everything. A soda, for example, is $3.29 which sounds expensive until I realized I had just paid $3.51 for one at the Newark airport. The flight is on...