Iceland Adventures

We now return to our regularly scheduled travel blog, albeit after the fact and not concurrent with my adventures.

One thing before I go further. My blog is hosted by Wix, and I'm running into an issue with images. I've hit the 2 gb limit, so I can't upload any more images to the site without paying a lot more money. I've tried embedding Flickr images, but that doesn't work either. So, for the time being, I'll just put a link to the Flickr image. You'll have to click on it to see the picture or pictures, then come back to the blog. When I get time, I'll go back and replace earlier images with links, which should free up some space for putting images directly into the blog post again. (The gallery below is the last thing I uploaded before hitting the limit.)

Well, cancel that paragraph. I went back and deleted a bunch of photos and videos, replacing them with links to the pictures. And then I said screw it, and upgraded my account for more storage. So, photos will return!

On August 2nd, I drove to Raleigh and met Paula at the hotel. I had got a reservation there for the night I return, so we were able to park there and shuttle to the airport. Of course, I'm always super worried about timing before a trip, so we had a long time to wait at the airport before our flight. I had bid and won upgrades to Saga Class on the flight, so we were in the front row of the plane and got champagne and a goodie bag to start. It was fun sitting up there, and I had a lovely view of the moon rising over the ocean.

The food was also really good. The seats, though, although they were wider, were not very comfortable for sleeping. I was in the window and there was a gap between the seat and the window, so I couldn't lean against it (as I usually do). Neither of us got over a couple of hours sleep. But we were off the plane as soon as the door opened, and headed out on our adventures.

First, we shuttled to the rental building to get our campervan. It was...I guess the best word is a beater. It looked like a wreck, but drove just fine. I had put Paula on as a second driver, but forgot to check if she could drive a manual. Nope. 😂 Like I said, it drove fine. It was a 6 speed, and had plenty of power. But it had rust, the wiper blade on the driver side didn't touch the glass, the USB power port didn't work, and the auxiliary heat (which you use at night) had only 2 settings: super hot or off. Oh, and I kept having to put the door facing back on the rear door. The zippers didn't work on either sleeping bag. I'm sure there was more, but you get the idea. These campervans get used nonstop during the summer. I'm sure the one we got had come back from another rental earlier that morning.

Undeterred by such trivia as rust and a brake pedal that squeaked, we headed off to Reykjavík. Our first stop was the Icelandic Phallological Museum. Yep, a whole museum devoted to phalluses. Some of it was scientific specimens of preserved phalluses of all sorts of animals, from blue whales to opossums (who have bifurcated penises, in case you didn't know). The rest of it was historic or artistic. There's a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix's penis, for example, and all sorts of fetishes with big dicks. We had a blast. And, actually, learned some stuff.

From there, we drove to the rainbow street, something else I hadn't seen on my previous visits.

From there, it was a quick trip to the large church that is so frequently photographed, the Hallgrímskirkja. I want to call it a cathedral, but it's a Lutheran parish church and I don't think Lutherans have cathedrals. I could be wrong though. It's very impressive on the outside, but not so much on the inside.

Next up was our pre-booked visit to Sky Lagoon. We had paid for the 7-step ritual. I think I mentioned this in another post. The 7 steps are the hot pool, cold plunge pool, sauna, mist room (cold water), salt scrub, steam room, shower, then back to the hot pool. It was a lovely place, with lots of stone, and the large hot pool was an infinity pool, looking out on the ocean west of Reykjavik. I skipped the cold plunge pool, as I planned. Six steps was plenty for me. Paula did 7 steps, and had a higher tolerance for the heat of the sauna and steam room than I did. I liked it all though (all six steps).

From there, it was on to Þingvellir (Thingvellir in English) National Park. We hiked from the visitor's center down to the church and around the Silfra fissure. The weather was good. For Iceland that means that the wind wasn't blowing us over and it actually was not raining. It was cool though, but that suited both of us.

I had planned to go from there to Gullfoss and Geysir, but it was getting late and we needed to head toward Vik for the night. So, instead we decided to visit another hot spring, under the theory that there is no such thing as too many hot spring visits. This time it was Laugarvatn Fontana Geothermal Baths, not too far from where we were and in the direction we needed to drive. It was good, but not our favorite. There were multiple pools at different temperatures. Some were rock pools but several were very shallow swimming pools. I did enjoy the very hot pool (38-40˚C), but didn't like that there were so many children there. And I was particularly disturbed by the people who brought their very young children into the hot pool I was in. I'm talking a toddler, under 2 years old, in 104˚F water, and they were having the poor kid paddle around from person to person. By the time they finally took him out, the kid was flushed and sort of out of it. People are morons. (Public service announcement: American Academy of Pediatrics says that children 5 and under should not go in hot tubs at all.)

Anyway, from there we headed east toward Vik. The drive was close to two hours, and I was starting to get tired. I hadn't slept well the night before the trip, and got <3 hours of sleep on the flight, so I was running on fumes. We stopped for dinner (yummy fish and chips), though, and that revived me. We made it to the Vik campground by 9 PM, found a parking place, and crawled into our sleeping bags. And then discovered that they did not zip. We were fine though. I will note that we should have set an alarm, since we had to be at the site for our glacier hike the next day at 10 AM and it was a 30 minute drive. But more on that in my next post.