We left the flat in Paris a few minutes before 10am so we could stop by our favorite bakery for chocolate au pain to go with the fruit and yogurt we’d already had at the flat. We made our way to the metro station which was not too far - for a direct line to the airport! Hooray!
Checking in at the airport was interesting. They have self-serve kiosks, like we used in Reykjavik, for you to print your own baggage tags. Ken and Pauline did it just fine. I got all the way to the end of the process and it told me the kiosk couldn’t do it. It must have been out of the tape or something. So I exited the process and went to another machine… eventually to a third. I ended up with three boarding passes but no bag tag! The IcelandAir agent told us we had to wait in line. Nobody was moving quickly in that line… the passengers, the agents, nobody. We were in line for probably close to an hour before we got up to somebody, and then we were on our way in less than five minutes. Thankfully the security line was short, and we will had plenty of time at our gate.
We grabbed some sandwiches to eat for lunch (either at the gate or on the plane) and waited until it was time to board. The flight was mostly smooth and before we knew it, we were back in Iceland!
When we got off the plane and walked down the jet bridge, we went down some stairs and then got on a bus to be bussed over to the terminal. I think they don’t have enough gates for all planes to pull all the way up! You can see our plane and the jet bridge in the distance here.
We made our way to the car rental counter to pick up our car for the week. Ken quickly looked at the Iceland road signs to see if there were any he needed to pay particular attention to, and we were off to find our car. The speed limit for much of the drive today was 90km/hr!
We are staying in Geysir this week, which is a bit more centrally located - on the golden circle. It was slightly over two hours to get here from the airport. The first part of the journey was through Reykjavik, most of which we’d already seen. We had fun pointing out areas and things we’d seen last week. Once we got through the city, it was suuuuuper desolate! Beautiful scenery, and not much else! Even our hotel is pretty much in the middle of nowhere… we arrived to the hotel shortly after 6:30pm. Here are some of the many views from along the way…
We dropped our stuff in our rooms, took a few minutes to get settled, and then headed out to find dinner. We were skeptical about finding something to eat other than here at the hotel because it really seems like nothing is around… but the front desk person told us there were several good places about 15 minutes away, and they’d all come up on a google search. HA! So I did the googling and found Mika Restaurant. Online it looked like they specialize in langoustine… and handmade chocolate. I got us a reservation for 7:30. We were all starving by then, because our bodies were still on Paris time, which is two hours later!
We enjoyed a wonderful meal - Ken and I had langoustine tortellini, and Pauline had lamb. Then we shared a chocolate mousse dessert. All of it was fantastic.
After dinner we came back to the hotel. There is a geothermal area right across the street, so we walked over to explore it briefly. We will do more of that tomorrow when we have on warmer clothes! There is a Geysir that erupts regularly, but we didn’t walk out far enough to see that yet. It didn’t take long for us to get cold enough to want to come back in! Tomorrow we’ll put on our base layers and be fully prepared.
Then we sat in the very nice bar area to make a plan for tomorrow. Then we headed back to our rooms to blog and sleep! They’ll call our rooms during the night and wake us up if there are northern lights to go outside and see. Clothes are laid out, just in case…..
Nothing major today, but it was still another banner day. :)
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