We woke up around 6am and finished packing before heading down for breakfast at around 7:30am. As we weren’t going on a tour we indulged a bit more and I took a gamble on some coffee. We then headed back up to our room where I (very reluctantly) had to toss the remaining donut I had failed to eat the night before. Not without first taking a picture, though!
We headed downstairs to the lobby at 8:35am for our 8:45am pickup to find the drive already waiting for us. We piled into his van only to have three other folk ask if they could go to the airport as well as they were late for their flight. The driver said it was up to us, they have an 11am flight and are otherwise screwed, so we figured why not. The ride to the airport was uneventful with talk about Dublin and Garth while the three men in back chatted amongst themselves. The city had a very different feel on a quiet workday compared to the madness of Garth Weekend. It’s a shame we didn’t get to enjoy more of the normalcy. We were dropped off around 9:15am and, as he collected 15E from the other three our 20E + 10E tip worked out cheaper than what we initially planned so we were fine.
We were greeted by a guy with a thick Irish accent that was unlike most of the others we had encountered. This one sounded like it was straight out of Boston. He said “The patches?” and I asked him to repeat himself a couple of times before Michelle took pity on me and said informed me that he’s saying “Departures?”. Haha.
We had to wait in line with others at the alleged Icelandair counter hoping it was the correct line. We occupied the time chatting with a student of Washington State University in Spokane. Finally at around 9:45am the Icelandair agents showed up and we were able to check our baggage. Security wasn’t too bad other than forgetting to remove the Kindle from the backpack and them having to rescan everything.
After a very long walk to the gates — with only some car ads using Irish heroes as entertainment — we were unceremoniously dropped in the duty-free area that reeked of perfume. That seriously should be illegal, it’s a miracle it didn’t set either of our noses off.
After a two hour wait we were finally ready to board by walking downstairs and out onto the tarmac then up the portable stairs to the plane. It was slightly delayed from the scheduled 12:15pm departure but not too much. I spent the flight tagging photos for the blog (current me thanks past me for doing that!). The only unpleasantness is a tall guy in front of me kept leaning his seat back but as he as nearly my height I understood. It sucked, though, but the flight wasn’t too long. We landed around 2:30pm Iceland time (one hour before Irish time).
The process of passport control and customs was seamless. The luggage arrived a little wet (due to rain) but wasn’t too bad. We exited the airport and hopped aboard a FlyBus we had pre-booked for the forty-five minute ride to Reykjavik. Along the way saw a lot of neat volcanic terrain and cool fog banks as well as the angry ocean to our left. During the ride we learned that our Northern Lights cruise for the evening was cancelled due to the rain.
After a transfer to a smaller bus at Reykjavik’s bus station we were dropped off at our hotel around 5pm. We checked in and, after an hour’s rest until 6pm, went out in search of food. We didn’t want to go far so stayed in the harbor area, deciding on the Grandi Foodhall, basically a food court. Michelle had spinach ravioli and water and I had “volk”, a pita with lamb, lettuce, and cucumbers. We also shared fries topped with parmesan and aoli — yummy! To drink I tried a “Appelsin”, basically a Fanta Orange — very tasty, if a bit sweet and in the small bottles Europe seems to offer.
Michelle went back to the room while I went to the Elding office and rescheduled the cancelled cruise for Wednesday. The office was nice, a bit bigger than many of the other “buildings” scattered around the harbor, many basically shipping containers with roofs. I returned to the room around 8pm, offloaded pics, and relaxed a bit before sleep around 10pm.
