Over the weekend, I snuck away for a spur of the moment trip to Iceland. Two weeks ago, I got an email alert for a great deal on flights and hotels in Iceland. After a few days of consideration, I booked the trip and was on my first post/mid-covid international flight. 

Traveling to Iceland during covid was an interesting experience. I'll do a separate post on everything that entailed, but Iceland has been great at their handling of the pandemic, and I felt very safe the entire time. 

And it was just so nice to travel again! Iceland was a repeat trip for me. I loved it when I went back in 2017, and I was excited to go back again. 

Our flight left Friday night around 8:30 p.m. We were scheduled to arrive at 6:30 a.m. local time, but just like last time, our flight got in early. We landed around 5:45 local time (1:45 a.m. according to my internal clock).

We cleared customs incredibly fast, even with all the additional covid protocols and documentation we had to show. Pretty quickly, we were on a shuttle for the 45-minute ride into Reykjavik. After dropping our bags at our hotel and fueling up on some breakfast (or a late night snack, whatever you want to call it), we set out to explore the city. 

Reykjavik is a fairly small city, and it's super walkable. Since I'd covered a lot of the highlights on my last visit, I wanted to make sure to repeat only my most favorite things, and then find some new places to explore. 

We started at the Hofdi House, the site of an important meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev that was crucial in ending the Cold War. 

Outside the house is a piece of the Berlin Wall. 

The house sits right on the water, so from there we walked out to the lighthouse, and then strolled down the walking path observing many of the sculptures and the stunning view of the mountains along the way. 

Partnership

Sun Voyager

Our second stop, and probably my favorite part of the day, was a quick trip out to the Grotta Lighthouse. This lighthouse sits on a small island off the Seltjarnarnes Peninsula, and you can only access it during low tide when the water recedes enough that you can walk across the sand. 

Before we left, I stalked the tide charts and realized low tide would time pretty perfectly with our Saturday morning arrival. We took city bus 11 from downtown Reykjavik and about 15 minutes later got off on the peninsula. 

After a 15-minute walk, we reached the beach and found ourselves climbing over huge mounds of seaweed left behind by the tides. 

We enjoyed the views from the island and the salt-water smell of the air. 

We even stumbled across a small art exhibit by a local artist who was on a mission to paint all the lighthouses in Iceland. She'd made impressive progress, and her paintings were quite lovely. 

Once we finished exploring, we hopped the bus back downtown. We wandered around the pond, checked out the Parliament building and the town square where activists typically hold their protests.

The Monument of the Unknown Bureaucrat

Then we stopped for a snack at the famous hot dog stand. 

After strolling through a flea market featuring local artisans and various antiques and knick-knacks, my energy was fading. I hadn't managed to sleep at all on the plane, and I was really struggling at this point. 

We made a brief caffeine stop, and relaxing in a cafe with a cup of tea helped bring me back to life. The free refill in a to-go cup was also a nice treat. 

Our next destination was the Old Harbour area. This part of town is where much of the fishing industry used to exist in Reykjavik, but over time it's been converted. Now there are lots of shops, a food market, and it's where lots of the whale watching tours leave from. 

My husband's boss had told him about this excellent chocolate place that happened to be located in the Old Habour, so I was especially excited to visit there. 

Since the OmNom chocolate shop didn't open until 1, we had about 15 minutes to kill, so we decided to check out the Puffa. This is a strange art installation that features a giant mound of grassy Earth with a cage of bird carcasses at the top. I'm not sure what the artistic commentary was here, but we did climb to the top to check it out. 

The path up is a very narrow spiral, and not all the rocks on the path were very secure. Did my husband step on an unsecure rock and fall off? Yes. Is this the story of every trip we take? Also yes. Luckily, where he slipped was not very high up and he was totally fine. I had about a million heart attacks, but was glad not to have to find out where the ER was. 

Once we finished exploring the Old Harbour, we walked up to Hallgrimskirkja, the famous and easily recognizable church in Reykjavik. This is is a pretty popular tourist stop, not only because of the unique shape of the building, but because it offers really gorgeous view of the city from the top. 

By the time we finished at the church, it was a little after 2 p.m., and we were excited to head back to our hotel to hopefully be able to check in and take a short nap. 

We were scheduled to go on a Northern Lights trip that night, but we knew there was no way we'd make it if we didn't get some sleep. 

Luckily, we were able to check in easily enough, but when we connected to the WiFi, we found out the Northern Lights trip had been canceled due to the weather and the low visibility. 

We still settled in for a short nap. I'd been awake for 30 hours straight at this point and desperately needed some sleep. I set an alarm for two hours later so we could figure out our plan for dinner.

We found a place just a couple of blocks from our hotel that specialized in delicious Iceland seafood and lamb dishes. We both got seafood options, and boy, was the food delicious. 

Back at the hotel, we pretty immediately passed out again. We ended our first day in Iceland walking 10.5 miles (or 24,000+ FitBit steps) around the city.