Day 1 - Iceland Airport
| Breakfast @ Airport | 800kr |
| Bus ticket to Reykjavik and Blue Lagoon entrance | 6300kr |
| Lunch @ Blue Lagoon | 1440kr |
| Dinner @ Reykjavik (for 3) | 5100kr |
| Hotel room (for 3) | $198 |
Arrived at the airport in Iceland, dead tired with no local currency. Apparently everyone uses credit cards, so that's easy. We didn't know the exchange rate, but we thought it was about 150kr to the dollar, which made everything look pretty cheap. In fact it was more like 120kr, which we discovered later. So the pizza dinner for 3 was $42.50 for two pizzas and drinks, which is still pretty okay.
They make it very easy to visit the Blue Lagoon, Iceland's premier tourist attraction, straight from the airport, so that's what we did. I'm sure we paid a premium, but the ticket I bought got me a bus ride to the Lagoon, entrance there, and then straight to our hotel after a pleasant swim, so the convenience was well worth it. Had a surprisingly good breakfast at the airport cafe while waiting for the bus -- we arrived at 6:30 or 7am, and the first bus wasn't until 8:30. There was a really neat sculpture outside the airport of a pointy-tailed animal hatching out of a giant egg.
Iceland is powered and heated in large proportion by geothermal energy, which works well because of all the volcanoes. We drove by a plant on the way to the Blue Lagoon.
The Lagoon itself was wonderfully relaxing, especially being one of the first to get there in the day. We stayed in the water for quite a few hours and were wrinkled like raisins.
After the Lagoon, we checked into the hotel (the only one we booked before we left) and explored Reykjavik. It's a small city, but it had a nice street with lots of stores and restaurants. Picked a little pizza joint for dinner and got two enormous pizzas. One was a "salad pizza," which apparently means "with a hole in the middle which is covered up by a large pile of arugula and spinach". So you get less pizza -- still a lot of food, since it was about an 18 inch pizza -- but some greens to go along with it. I have never had a hollow pizza before. It was damn tasty.
Crashed early. I woke up after four hours of sleep, around 1am local time, and the sky was still glowing blue. I guess we're close to the Arctic Circle!
