This year is the 10th anniversary for Christi and I so we started planning a trip 6-12 months ago. We knew we wanted to go to Europe as Christi had never been before, but over that time we planned many different itineraries across multiple countries. Finally we landed on Iceland and France (mainly just Paris). Since high school I have had a strange thing about going to Reykjavik and since Icelandair has free stopovers in the country on round trips, we finally settled on this plan since the round trip ticket cost was just a little more than flying back to Nebraska.

My parents were nice enough to fly out to watch out kids while we were gone so we could have a kid-free trip as well as keep them on their same schedule while we were out. On Saturday we flew out of JFK ... if you can avoid driving there and parking, do it. We took the red-eye and arrived at 6.15am. After getting our luggage, going through customs and picking up our rental car (which trust me, I'll write about later) we were off to the Blue Lagoon.

Showing up right when the doors opened was probably the best idea we made. There was actually a longer line than I thought there would be as many other people had the same idea as us, but it wasn't crowded at all. For the first hour or so with all of the steam coming off of the lagoon, you could only see people here and there and it felt like we were more or less by ourselves.

The silica face masks were nice, but the swim-up bar was even better. The wind was whipping pretty good while we were there and it's quite an experience that early in the morning to have 20 degree gusts from your neck up while sitting in 100 degree water from your shoulder down.

After spending a few hours at the Blue Lagoon we got out, took a nice panorama picture right outside the entrance and then drove the rental car to our hotel (yes, yes ... I will get to our sweet car later).



Once we got into Reykjavik we dropped our bags off at the Skuggi Hotel. It was a nice contemporary hotel, which is definitely our style, but had one hidden feature that was crucial to our first two days in Reykjavik: a steam drying towel rack. Since the plan was to go to a couple of lagoons while we there it was a game changer to not have to use the hair dryer to dry off our swimsuits ... which was the original plan in my mind. After getting situated we just started wandering along the amazing downtown area. It's an extremely walkable city as it's not that big and we were able to explore everything we wanted to on foot. A quick stop for lunch at Prikid, where we started to find out how extremely expensive food is in Iceland, we headed over a couple of blocks to check out the Harpa Concert Hall.



In my research for the trip one thing I wanted to see, which was fairly close to our hotel, was the Sun Voyager sculpture. When we walked over to it, there was a fairly decent sized crowd standing around taking pictures. There was one kid climbing all over the sculpture, basically ruining everyone's pictures, and you could tell that people were just thinking, like me, "hey kid, just get off ... we only need 5 seconds of you not being on there to take a cool picture to show people back home." I notice a couple to our right who looks like they are waiting as well so I point them out to Christi saying we aren't alone.

Finally, the kid gets off and I quickly snap some pictures of both the sculpture and the mountains in the distance. While I'm out there, the couple to our right asks Christi if she can take their now unobstructed picture. She noticed the non-accent of the girl and asks where they are from. Amazing enough, they are from Nebraska. We traveled all the way to Europe and within our first 6 hours of being in Iceland we meet a couple from where we grew up. To make it even better, he was from Milford. For those that didn't grow up in Seward, here's what is so amazing about that. It gets even better as we find out that his older cousin was in
my cousin's wedding that Christi and I attended in Indiana. As we chat with them a little bit longer, we find out that our short and long itineraries were pretty identical. They were planning on going to Hallgrimskirkja church right after the sculpture, doing a Golden Circle tour the next morning, and the most amazing thing ever: going to Paris after Iceland. A couple of questions later, we find out that they are on our EXACT SAME FLIGHT and we even met up with them at the airport a few days later and caught up one last time.



After some window shopping we make our way over to Hallgrimskirkja Church. It's massive, designed after the basalt columns around the country and took over 40 years to build (a tip we learned from our bus driver the next day). We made one big mistake here as we took a lot of pictures outside and inside before trying to get tickets to the top. We missed the last ticket sale by about three minutes. With Easter the next day and horrible weather on our last, we missed the window to see the views from up on top. However, the enormity inside and outside was definitely enough to get our fill.



At this point with the red-eye, Christi and I were running on fumes. Somehow we managed to stay up to get an early dinner at the Public House and then decided to throw back a few white russians at the Lebowski Bar, yes a themed Lebowski bar!!!, to ensure that we would just pass out as soon as we got back to the hotel. Our plan worked to perfection as we slept for a good 12 hours and never experienced jet lag the entire time we were there.