We had an early start to get to Manchester Airport. I figured that 4am should do it and in practice this worked out pretty well. We set off with printed itineraries and booking confirmations printed and placed in chronological order in an A4 binder (a middle aged level of organisation, but very effective). The journey was pleasantly uneventful until we arrived at Keflavik and had to wait 2 hours to get the car. I can't remember if I booked a 4x4, but that's what we ended up with and very suitable it tunred out to be - accept maybe for the annoying voice over for the Sat nav - I presume it was in Icelandic, but I'm not sure, all I know is that we couldn't turn it off!
Luca provided a comedy theme which ran for the duration of the holiday when he said that everything was very Artistic in the airport. But Ellis and I both thought he said "Autistic". So as a consequence, Ellis and i spent the entirety of the next 10 days commenting at how Autistic everything was. Which it was.
We were booked into the Blue Lagoon at 2pm, but had plenty of time to do a quick tour of the South West. It was overcast but visibility was OK, the area itself looked similar to expected - like Mars, crusty, fairly flat overall, but very uneven and broken structure where the lava had hardened and with a general covering of greenish moss over the dark grey rock.
We stopped at the Bridge over Two Continents (which spans the American and European tectonic plates and then drove on to Gunnuhver where steam came shooting through a vent and we got our first smell of sulphur. We also took a walk along the nearby cliffs.
The boys were suitably excited and engaged and the noisy and smelly vents were providing suitable amusement. Ellis also didn't complain too much about walking up the cliffs, which was also a good sign.
We arrived at the Blue Lagoon, took a walk round the blue sulphorous pools outside and then went inside for a dip. The boys were unsurprisingly freaked by the need for naked showering before entering the pool, but there were changing rooms for them so we were fine.
We had a good wallow in the pool, under the waterfalls, floating on foam things, under the cave, etc, etc - good fun all round.
By now Ellis had adorned himself with his Ibiza cap and new sunglasses. These stayed on for pretty much the whole trip. He was intending on getting an Iceland cap,but we never really found one. My only concern with the sunglasses was that they were probably changing the colour of everything!
The boys slept on the way to Reykjavik and I enjoyed the views through the lava fields. I wish I'd stopped to take pictures here because although I thought the terrain would be the same throughout, it was actually quite unique - even for Iceland.
It was drizzling when we arrive in Reykjavik. I struggled to find the hotel, so we parked up and walked to it. The reception wasn't run from the same building, so you had to phone them and then they'd give you a number to access a safe so that you could get your key, weird, but actually quite effective. The room was as funky as expected. The bar it was attached to was closed, and I was quite pleased because the soundproofing was little more than a curtain so I'm guessing that it would have been quite noisy.
Reykjavik was not as I expected. I giguredit was going to be very contemporary, cool and polished. In practice it very much felt like an outpost, a settler town, or the location where a bunch of hippies had had a rock festival and then decided that they liked it so much that they were going to live there and had thrown up a bunch of shacks and settled down. It was cool and interesting, different, unique, but not what I was expecting. Out of the centre there was a more of a modern feel, but the centre itself was quite different.
We found a funky little bar and got some burgers. The first girl that served us immediately spoke to us in English. I laughed and asked how she could have known that we were English just from looking at us, but she said that everyone just spoke English there - and she was right. In fact as we travelled around you would constantly hear people who worked in the bars and hotels constantly talking English to each other because they were all seasonal workers and English was their common tongue. I asked the waitress for the correct pronunciation of Takk (Thanks), which she provided but I soon gave up trying to use more Icelandic words because when I asked other people for advice they invariably told me that they didn't know, because they weren't Icelandic - and clearly didn't speak it either! This made communication very easy,but it would have been good to have felt a bit of pressure to learn and speak a few words.
The burgers were good. But horrifically expensive.
We wandered round for a while and checked out the buildings and the graffiti then we went back to the hotel.We watched a bit of TV - The Chase (!?!?!?!), and went to bed.
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