Iceland in February to see the Northern Lights seemed like a good idea in October when we booked this trip, though we were questioning our decision after a particularly cold January in Toronto.
Packing winter stuff takes up way more space than summer gear. We made our way to Pearson on Friday evening, both of us with two pieces of luggage in tow (a suitcase and carry-on). We took less luggage for three weeks in Namibia!
Our Icelandair flight departed 30 minutes early, cause all the passengers were there. We didn’t sleep much on the five hour flight :( We were lucky to get out at all, in between two major snowstorms on Thursday and Saturday in Toronto.
We arrived at Keflavik International Airport (KEF) around 6am. It’s a much larger airport than I expected. I googled, it handles about 10 million passengers a year! That’s impressive for a country of 400,000. (For comparison, Pearson handles 50 million.)
There was a bit of a line up at immigration which moved quickly. The agent just asked how long we were staying and if we had booked accommodation. We got the standard Schengen stamp and were through.
Our luggage was already touring around the carousel. We picked up our Dacia Duster from Europcar and were on our way by 7:15am, a very impressive 75 minutes after touching down at KEF!
It was still dark as we drove to our hotel in Reykjavik. It’s been a while since I’ve driven a standard, most rental car companies don’t have them anymore.
We checked in at Hotel Skuggi. They have an early check-in plus breakfast for 55 EUR, which worked well for us. Cleaned up, had breakfast and then took a two hour nap.
We woke up at 11:30am feeling much better. It was a beautiful day - sunny and about 3C. I had sketched out a few things to see today, all within walking distance of each other.
We started at the Sun Voyager sculpture, and then continued along the waterfront to the Harpa Concert Hall. This is an impressive building which has multiple floors open to the public (just the concert halls themselves are for ticket holders only). The Iceland Symphony Orchestra youth had a free concert in the foyer for young listeners, which filled the floors with music. It was quite nice.
We walked further past the shipyards on our way to lunch. There were a few art installations along the way which we stopped to look at. (There’s a lot of art sprinkled throughout the city).
We had lunch at Kaffivagninn, a classic old diner. The food was excellent and the atmosphere great. There were more regulars than tourists which was nice. We tried the local Egils Gull 0% beer which was pretty good. The homemade desserts looked tasty but we were too full from our mains.
Next stop was National Gallery of Iceland (Listasafn Íslands). (‘Íslands’ is Icelandic for Iceland, and not the English word ‘island’ as I mistakenly thought before I got here). We toured around their curated exhibits. It’s a smaller art museum, with four exhibition halls.
We still had time to get to Hallgrimskirkja Cathedral before it closed at 5pm, so headed back out. The route took us through residential streets and their brightly painted houses.
Hallgrimskirkja Cathedral is a famous landmark in Reykjavík. It’s more impressive from the outside; the inside is nice too, but if you’re there when it’s closed you’re not missing out. It’s possible to take the elevator to the viewing platform in the tower for 14 CAD. It looked touristy and windy & cold, so we didn’t bother.
Got back to our hotel and cleaned up. Heather was stilll full from lunch but I was peckish, so I headed to the nearby Hlemmur Mathöll food hall. I ate at Kröst, which was really good. I tried their IPA, which is brewed by a local craft brewery for the food hall. It was excellent, and reminded me of the great IPAs we had in Estonia.
And that was it for our first day in Iceland! It’s country number 105 for me and 65 for Heather. Tomorrow we head to Vik.
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