Birthday in Iceland: Long Weekend

Hello Dear Readers –

Been a while!

I promised I’d write this when I returned from Iceland, and then poof! 4 months went by…

Let’s get to it! Started on Dulles International at the lounge, for 6 hours. Why not?! Hours don’t exist when you’re on vacation.

Once we boarded the red-eye to Reykjavik, it was difficult to fall asleep. So I was relatively awake the whole time.

Landed at 6 am, picked up the rental car, and we were off! Talk about a party van – I rented a 9 passenger Renault 🤣

First stop – Blue Lagoon! I eventually got too hot and went and took a nap in the van.

Our AirBnB was over the mountain through a few small towns over in the southeast center of the island, and the driveway wasn’t plowed – so it was an adventure in the dark trying to figure out how to park and unpack!

This is gonna end up being a short post, since we only spent 3 days in the country, but it was packed and there was a lot of driving!

I ate a sheep’s head, shark, puffin, horse, salmon, whale and fried fish. All weird, but not all gross. Word of advice – fermented shark is disgusting, the sheep’s head is bland and not good, and the horse is stringy. But drink all the whiskey and beer!!

Even in winter, the waterfalls are everywhere – almost every pull off on the roads have some sort of flowing water.

Even though it never reached above 35°F, it wasn’t as cold as I thought it would be in the coldest months of the year – February.

They have this really great pizza place down by the black sand (mostly rocks, honestly) beach.

As we traversed over this rock, we spent a lot of time out at night – since the day was only like 6 hours of sunlight. Unfortunately, cloud cover was 100% so we didn’t get any solid Arora Borealis pictures. The best I got were at 2 AM.

We hit the viking museum and a replica of a Viking village!

After some very long nights, it was good to relax and see the history of the island. Skyr is rich in protein and the cultures used in this yogurt dates back to like 800 AD.