On Life and Love

Iceland: Arrival

It’s August 23rd. After an overnight flight (including my first “visit” to New York), I was blearily standing in Keflavik International Airport with The Runners. One (A.) was there to run a half-marathon, and M. was there for a full marathon.

I will never forget that first look at the beauty of Iceland from my plane. The color palette was just… different. Different greens and browns, and lots of black.

A view from my airplane window as we descended into Keflavik

(One does not just fly in to Reykjavik, apparently, unless you’re already in Iceland or (maybe) the UK. One flies to Keflavik, then buses or drives to Reykjavik.)

So I was tired and wired, and it was my first time standing a place that didn’t have English as it’s first language on signs.

A sign for Gates 25-35 at the Keflavik International Airport.

A very, very clean bathroom.
I’ll confess, it felt a little “Ikea” in here.
Before I left the airport, of course, I had to use the bathroom. The clean, huge, clean airport bathroom. It was a unisex bathroom with a full door in a hallway of a few bathrooms, rather than a stall.

I didn’t know public bathrooms could be so clean.

I let The Runners lead the way to the bus area and figure out where we were going. Two people trying to navigate is already the start of an argument; adding a third to the mix would have killed my fatigued calm.

As we head out of the attached bus station, I start to get a look at the landscape around me. It wasn’t (yet) drizzling, but it was a little chilly (the fairly static 10°C it stayed except in the glacier area).

The rocks were… black. (Basalt, so go figure, but still startling.) The grass was more like moss. The street signs were indecipherable–or, more accurately, decipherable in several ways, most of which were probably wrong.

A view of Keflavik International Airport from the bus that took us to Reykjavik.

I have traveled through or lived in cities and towns from Texas up to Kentucky/Indiana/Ohio, and up until then, I’d thought asphalt was asphalt. Nope. Clearly made of local rock, the roads and sidewalks were startlingly dark.

The bus ride was quiet, and I gazed eagerly out the windows at the landscape. Moss-grass over bumpy landscape as far as the eye could see (I was facing inland). People had made little rock towers in the fields along the roads. Normally I’d have guessed they were tiny graves, but they were pretty frequent and more like towers than piles. I couldn’t really get a good photo, courtesy of the speed of the bus and greyness of the day.

Once we got to town the Reykjavik bus station, we stood in the parking lot and spun in circles, trying to figure out where to go. We couldn’t really see Reykjavik proper from the station. My iPhone was either low on battery or unsure what to do without a proper data connection, and, well, The Runners already had navigation on their minds, so with a Surface, a couple of iPhones, and some mild exasperation, they picked a direction and we started walking towards what should have been our guesthouse.

It was drizzling and (still) chilly, which made the short 2/3 mile walk to get into the city a bit of a blur in my tired mind. I must have looked like a fish out of water, gaping at everything, alternately grinning in wonder and frowning at the weather, dragging my suitcase behind me.

Tj
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