Welcome to Iceland!

Our flight into Keflavik airport landed at 6:20am which gave us the chance to be welcomed to Iceland by a beautiful sunrise. We landed right on time (thanks Icelandair!), and as expected, Cathy's flight from Boston arrived 20 minutes later and Mijin's from New York arrived just a few minutes after that. Group together!

The 40 minute bus ride from the airport to our hotel in Reykjavik was very cool. As I had been told, but had completely forgotten, Iceland doesn't really have any trees. It's just relatively flat ground made up of volcanic rock and and mountains. The town of Keflavik, where the airport is, is tiny, and small houses dotted the landscape between towns. I think one of the coolest things we saw where cairns made of huge rocks, so huge that they actually looked like statues of people from far away. I hope to get a picture of them tomorrow during our drive to the Blue Lagoon.

We got to our hotel around 7:30am, grabbed breakfast, and took naps. We were scheduled for a tour departing at 12:30 which gave us a few hours to get some sleep. Our tour was to the Laugarvatn Fontana Geothermal Baths and Thingvellir National Park.

The baths were great and achieved the first day of my goal of sitting in a geothermal pool every single day. Iceland seems to be completely powered by geothermal and one of the things this means is that they have lots of outdoor swimming pools that are heated year round. The Fontana baths has three pools, one at 32, 36, and 40 degrees Celsius. They also had three steam baths which were apparently sitting right on top of a hot spring. The temperature and amount of steam varied depending on the activity of the spring below. Mijin, Jim, and I were sitting in one that was very comfortable until all of the sudden it got really hot and steamy, and we couldn't take it. Nature was keeping us moving. There was also a dry sauna sitting on top of the hot springs which a nice way to dry off a little...until that also got too hot. All in all, the two hours we spent at Fontana were what I hope this whole trip will be - relaxing in hot pools, talking with friends, looking at amazing natural scenery and relaxing!





Our on way back to Reykjavik, our tour stopped at Thingvellir National Park (and World Heritage site). Thingvellir is famous for a couple of reasons. First, it sits at the meeting of the European tectonic plate and the American tectonic plate which are apparently pulling apart approximately 2cm each year. This pulling apart has resulted is cracks, huge deep canyons (some above the ground and some in the ground) with large rock walls. It's hard to describe the super cool to see and even cooler to walk through. Hopefully the pictures will give some sense of it.







The second reason Thingvellir is famous is that when the Vikings arrived in Iceland, this is the spot they chose as their spot to settle disputes. This is where the general assembly was established in the 900s and continued until 1798. You'll see pictures below of the flagpole marking the area they met and Cathy with the law rock where disputes were settled. For a much more complete history of this place, click here. The vistas from this spot are AMAZING. It makes sense that this spot was picked to hold large gatherings. It's kind of like a natural amphitheater.





A few more pictures of the crack and vistas from the top edge of eastern side of Thingveiller.



Our package came with a three course dinner at the hotel's restaurant, Vox, and we did that on Day 1, so we wouldn't have to think about finding a place to eat when completely exhausted. The course were INCREDIBLE especially considering that our voucher said 'chef's choice' so we thought there was a chance we would be getting breakfast leftovers. Instead it was a delicious and beautiful selection of Icelandic dishes including an asparagus and watercress salad, flash frozen monkfish, pan friend Icelandic perch, and a dessert of cheesy pancakes with berries and birch ice cream. My descriptions can't even begin to do them justice, so I hope to add the pictures Cathy took on her phone to the blog soon.

After dinner (and honestly during dinner), we were incredibly excited to go to bed and get a good nights sleep to be ready for our road trip on day two!