Getting Out and About in Reyjavik

When the COVID vaccine rollout was picking up steam in the spring, our friend Jenna sent a text asking if we wanted to do a summer trip to Iceland together. It was the furthest, lowest case-rate place we could get from home, and one of the only countries accepting visitors. It sounded like a dream! We all wanted to go, but weren’t sure it could actually work out, whether we could find dates that would work for all of us, whether leaving our houses was actually a possibility. So even though we talked about it for months, when we finally booked our flights, it felt like a last-minute plan. Our trip was upon us before we hardly realized it.

We flew overnight from Denver to Reykjavik, arriving early and experiencing a pretty frustrating 2-hour experience just trying to get through passport control, customs, COVID checks, and the rental car line. Jenna and Mike arrived a bit later, and we all met up in the arrivals waiting lot–the first time we’d seen each other in a year and a half!

We immediately headed off to find a bite of breakfast in a small town, local bakery. Then we went off south from the airport, close to the southwestern tip of the country to see the currently-erupting volcano, Fagradalsfjall. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an active day when we were there, so we didn’t get to see the orange, flowing lava, but we did get to see still-steaming flows of hardened streams that had formed since the eruption started in March. The weather was sunnier and warmer in those first few hours than anything we’d expected to get over the course of our whole trip!

Our next stop was just a short drive away at the Blue Lagoon. We’d been warned that it would be very crowded with tourists, but we were really looking forward to a relaxing lunch and afternoon soak after our long flights and volcano hiking. We thought it was a blast! They definitely had the whole operation figured out and streamlined and were able to move a lot of folks through, but we thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere of the steaming, blue water along with our green drinks, beers, and face masks.

We were all pretty tired by the time we arrived at our AirBnb in Reykjavik, and we went out for an early dinner at Matbar, a Mediterranean tapas place, which was SUPERB. Some of the best food we’d eaten in a couple years, actually. Jenna and Mike headed to bed shortly after dinner, but Elisse really wanted to see Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavik’s famous hilltop church, and we weren’t sure if we’d have such good weather the next day. We ended up going for a lengthy stroll around the city, seeing the church, the Harpa concert hall, and a few parts of downtown. We found ourselves getting tired while we were still quite a ways from home, so we hopped on a scooter together to cut across town. It wasn’t even sunset when we got back to the AirBnb around 9:30pm!