Layover in iceland

Seems this blog title is somehow still apt. I apparently need to vary the continent's I am traveling to. The intention this summer was to do Japan and China, but after witnessing my physical meltdown(due to motion sickness and heat) in Hawaii in april, scandanavia(and it's climate) seemed the perfect place!!

We left Saturday from sf, after catching up with some friends. We got our tickets on a new airline called wow. It is a no frills airline to the extreme. Our luggage added like 1/5 to the costs of the flights. The seats were bare bones, you were not given food or drink, and there was no in flight entertainment. Definitely not what I'm used to, but I luckily slept through like 90% of the flight. Joe was not so lucky.

We arrived around 2pm in Iceland, local time. We putzed around for a bit, trying to gain our barings and grabed some food. I had a ceasar salad and joe had a salami sandwich, whos color looked non food like. We then found our bus to the blue lagoon!  It was so cold out(three layers and a scarf) and we were about to jump into an outdoor hot tub. Although that not does not even remotely describe what we walked into. 

The bus ride up took us to topographical features we have never quite seen before; lava rock covered in moss. It's sharpness was beautiful. The facility looks like a spa, and was reminiscent of my time in the spa in Budapest, except everything was foggy and it was 54 degrees. We got bracelets, which both kept our stuff safe and allowed us to charge items without going back and forth to the locker. As Joe noticed, everything was very efficient.

We took a dunk first, sans camera(I know I can't believe it either) and did take 1 of a silica mask, which left our skin feeling great! We then took a nap on the relaxation area. I brought the camera out the second time to capture the ethereal beauty of it and as we were more acclimated, were able to explore much more!  I tried not to get my hair wet, thus avoiding the reccomendation to coat my hair in conditioner and ultimately failed. It's currently frizzy in random spaces and not easy to work through.

We were able to use our return nus tickets to get into Reykjavik, the capitol city.  After an incidental by tour of the city(with all the stops) we got out at the bus station and found our we downtown. After looking at several exorbitant menus we settled on a little more reasonable pub style menu. Joe had a local beer and a local fish stew. I had a croque madame, because it's something I am used to, obviously. We were treated to some love music(which I may or may not have slept through a bit since we are on negative sleep at this point).  We took a walk around the downtown, since at nearly midnight it still hadn't gotten dark. (The sun set around 1030pm).

We then walked back to the bus station and arrived back at the airport just in time to sit around for 4 more hours. We have tried uncomfortably to sleep on slate benches and have finally given up. We still have about 2 hours left and will be flying to copenhagen!