My trip to Iceland began with a red-eye flight on IcelandAir to Reykjavik that took off from SeaTac at 7:30 p.m., about 30 minutes late. The flight was fine, at about 7.5 hours long, except that I couldn’t sleep at all and they offered no free snacks or juices. For an international flight, no snacks was unusual. I landed at about 9:45 a.m. Iceland Time.
I was due to meet my friend Nathan at the airport plus two Australian women, our traveling companions who had seen Nathan’s offering of the trip on Facebook but did otherwise know either of us. My plane was the last to land of our group’s and I disembarked into an airport with an unbelievably long line waiting to go through passport control. It wound around inside the farthest reaches of the airport and took me an hour to get through. When I finally made it through and collected my suitcase, one hour had elapsed and the tour agency and my three traveling companions were waiting for me.
It was an overcast day in Iceland but relatively warm at 50 degrees F. Our driver took us on the nice four-lane highway into Reykjavik, driving for about 45 minutes. We traveled through a rocky, mossy landscape with essentially no trees.
In Reykjavik, our hotel is near downtown, the Hotel Klettur. Since it was only about 12:30 p.m., we had time to kill before the hotel’s 3 p.m. check-in time. We were all hungry and all but Nathan were sleep deprived from our flights (Nathan had flown in the preceding day), so we walked nearby the hotel to find a restaurant for lunch. We found a nice small restaurant and enjoyed some Icelandic fish soups. Mine was “plokkfiskur”, more like a fish gratin, that was very good. We stretched out lunch with conversation to get to know each other, plus desserts and tea, then returned to the hotel and checked in.
Nathan and I decided to walk around downtown to explore, but one of our companions had twisted her knee so didn’t want to join us. Nathan and I walked around the iconic Hallgrimskyrka, the huge cathedral-like church in downtown and found the touristy pedestrian streets and shops nearby.
We ate dinner in a restaurant featuring more Icelandic food, where I ate another version of the fish gratin “plokkfiskur” that was better than the first and Nathan had Scandinavian fish and chips that was pretty much just normal fish and chips. That was as much sightseeing as my tired body could take, so we walked back to the hotel and called it a day.
Lori's Travels 