Category: Iceland

Our third day in Iceland got off to an inauspicious start. Where we’d had rather roomy mini-buses — and a few empty seats — for our excursions up until then, the one that picked us up on Sunday morning for a tour of The Golden Circle had been built for school children. I’m only 5’6″, so this typically isn’t the biggest issue for me. But Cara is a little taller. And everyone in this micro bus was wearing two or three additional layers of clothing and carrying a backpack of some sort. There were no empty seats.

(Day 1. Day 2. Day 4.)

I found this a little odd since The Golden Circle is the most touristy of the tours and a fairly long one. A roomy ride would have seemed in order. Then again, it didn’t require equipment like crampons or dry suits and fins (more on that in the next post). We ended up weaseling our way into the front seats with a little more leg room, but I did wonder if this was the one trip we could have gone with one of the bigger tour companies and just settled for a bus.

Continue reading “Another Day in Iceland: Geysirs, Horses, Tourists” →

Toast. It’s likely the first word you think of when you think of Iceland.

No. That’s not right. I imagine ice is the first word, with volcano and Bjork tied for second.

Our second day in Iceland started with toast. I don’t eat toast much at home anymore. I’m either trying to do away with carbs or swinging wildly in the other direction and wrapping a buttery croissant around bacon, eggs and cheese.  (Check out Day 1 here. Day 3. Day 4.)

But in Iceland, we started our mornings with toast. IcelandAir Marina Reykjavik’s Slippbarinn does offer up a full breakfast and a breakfast buffet, but we didn’t pay the room rate that included breakfast and didn’t quite feel like shelling out $20-plus a person for eggs and the like. Besides, the hotel’s cafe, at the other end of the common area from Slippbarinn, had a view of the pickup location for excursions.

I’d forgotten how good toast could be, especially when made with good bread. (Boy, does that sound like something a wanky food-writer would type before going all-in on a 2,000 word piece about artisanal toast.) So toast with butter or cheese or avocado it was (pesto was also an option). We had yogurt, too. Iceland does yogurt right. In fact, you might as well start eating Icelandic yogurt now, because it’ll be the thing to dethrone Greek yogurt once Americans get bored with that.

So after loading up on toast and layering on the clothes, we climbed into an Extreme Iceland minibus for the Sensational Iceland tour. Of the tours we had scheduled, this was the one I looked forward to the most because it included a glacier hike.

Before we’d get to any hiking, we had some driving to do. And it was during the drive that I discovered a new-found appreciation for my mirrored sun glasses. I’m not a huge fan of sun glasses. I like seeing the world as it is, not dimmed or color-corrected. But I was happy to have them. It wasn’t that the sun was too bright. It was that we’d been up until 2 in the morning looking at Northern Lights. And I was tired. And we were wrapped in all those warm layers and the bus rocked back and forth just so. And baby needed a nap.

Continue reading “Iceland: Toast, Sunglasses, Death by Glacier” →