Seeing the Northern Lights has been on our bucket list for many years - and when we have ventured north in the winter previously (Alaska in February) we did not see them. So we decided to go to Iceland in the winter - another attempt at seeing the elusive Aurora Borealis.
It was actually less total travel time for us to drive to Orlando (three hours) and take a direct flight to Reykjavik, rather than drive to a closer airport and have a lay-over in either Boston or New York, so we flew round-trip Orlando/Reykjavik.
We still refused to check luggage, even if winter clothes take up so much more room than summer clothes!
The flight was a red-eye and was fairly easy (more on Iceland Air in a later post) as we slept much of the time. Iceland is really quite far north......
Unbeknownst to us, Iceland Air does not always taxi to the terminal, so imagine our surprise when we walked off the airplane in the dark at 6am (wearing jeans and long-sleeved tops) and we were outside! 😲 It was cold! Damn cold! And windy....damn windy! We walked to the shuttle bus, quickly donned our winter coats, and eventually made our way to the terminal, through passport control, etc....
Thought this was a strange exit sign - to where else would we be exiting?
It was a little confusing getting the rental car, but eventually found our way and drove the 30 minutes to the Airbnb. It was a bit weird - it being so dark at 8am - and we kept having to remind ourselves that it was Saturday morning, not Friday evening.
We found our Airbnb, which was very clean and nice, dumped all of our stuff, and looked for some breakfast, eventually finding a bakery with good food, a sweet for Brad, and (a lot of) strong coffee. It was then back to the Airbnb for showers and strategizing. Keeping in mind our goal was to see the northern lights, we had previously booked a Northern Lights Tour through Reykjavik Excursions for Sunday night. We looked at the weather (clear nights Saturday and Sunday), as well as Aurora forecast ("moderate" for Saturday and Sunday nights) and called and changed our reservation to our first evening in Iceland. Here's the thing - Reykjavik Expeditions "guarantees" an aurora sighting and if none, then one can go back the next evening for free. So we figured, if there are two nights with the same potential, then let's go the first night and if we get skunked, there is always another "clear" and "moderate" night the following evening.
As it was only noon and our Northern Lights tour wasn't until 9:30pm (yep, that's pretty much past our bedtimes 😆) we decided to head to the Seltjarnarnes peninsula, about a 30 minute drive from our Airbnb, to see the Grótta Island Lighthouse.
We drove back to the Airbnb, stopping first at a local food store to grab a few provisions, and crashed for a couple hours. We had dinner at the Airbnb (just some food we grabbed from the food store) and also looked to see when we could go to The Blue Lagoon - we did not realize that we needed to make reservations well in advance until we chatted with someone at the airport. (We were just planning to stop by on Day 1.) So we made those reservations as well. Then it was a few hours of waiting until 9pm when it was time to drive to where we would get picked-up for our Northern Lights tour.
This is how Brad spent those hours .......
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