Leaving Iceland

Before starting down the champagne trail of my journal, though drinking champagne at this moment, I thought I'd get us out of Iceland.

First, before leaving the Hotel Ranga, we had our last breakfast there, a real "smorgasbord" which you may recall means sandwich in Swedish. In Iceland, they call "smorgasbord" a "smorgasbord", but I think they add some consonants to the pronunciation so it sounds like your tongue is crashing on your front teeth, pretty much like all of their words.

It was a nice spread, with waffles you could make on your own (though they were thin in a Rye Krisp kind of way), yogurt (or Skyr, as they call it in Iceland), bread, cheese and meat (so you could make your sandwich) and, my personal favorite, sardines. I think I was the only one there that ate the sardines and I had a lot of them!

They also had various fruit juices, but, as often happens in Europe, they were more a selection of colored flavored liquids. There was something which was close to, but not quite, something like bad orange juice. There was something that looked like, but was definitely not, cranberry juice. There was something which appeared to be grapefruit juice and was a distant member of the citrus family, but apparently not well liked by his cousins. There was also an amber colored drink which pretended to be apple juice, but was only a lame impersonation.

In the middle of the second breakfast, I surrendered and drank the water, which was quite good and readily identifiable.

Our original booking back in Reykjavik had us in a hotel close to the airport. However, on arrival to Iceland a few days before, we had noticed that there was more than one airport and our "Reykjavik" airport was actually in Keflavik, so the hotel was about 40 miles away, a bit more than we wanted to drive at 5 in the morning. Of course, our reservation was prepaid, noncancellable and not subject to change without a penalty fee of the full cost of the reservation, so I started making phone calls to change it. The wonderful thing about being irritating is that oftentimes people will agree to something just to stop talking with you. Our money was refunded and we re-reserved a room near the correct airport.

We had a very nice drive back to Reykjavik. Instead of snowy, frozen, rugged and barren land, it was for the most part dry frozen, rugged and barren land. We drove around Reykjavik. They haven't quite mastered the art of commercializing their harbor, so it was pretty much a working harbor.

Since we didn't have any heavy cargo to pick up or leave off (well, except for our suitcases, but we still needed them), we drove up the hill to a beautiful church, Hallgrímskirkja, which is pronounced, "church".

The inside of Hallgrímskirkja is spectacular, with incredibly high vaults (ceilings, not the jumpy kind). It is decorated in the official color of Iceland, gray. You also can pay several thousand Iceland kroner to take the elevator up to the top of the church tower.

The elevator is small, slow and creaky, not in a good way. I have a recurring nightmare about elevators, which involve small, slow, creaky elevators which do not go the right direction, start to tip, doors open to vast chasms and the floor starts to retreat. It occurred to me that this elevator seemed a lot like the one in the dreams. We made it to the top of the tower without the floor giving way. The tower, which is stone, swayed and creaked. I didn't think stone towers were supposed to do that. Karen and I looked at each other, commented that the view was lovely and wondered if the other had had quite enough. As often happens, we found ourselves in complete agreement.

We had a wonderful meal at the Hamborgarafabrikkan, which is a hamburger and cheese cake place which was started by a couple Icelandic radio personality celebraties (I know, it sounds a little odd) who liked the Cheesecake Factory. Karen had seen a series of television shows on the flight to Iceland about the development and opening of this restaurant, so we thought, "let's go!!" The hamburgers were outstanding and the milkshakes were wonderful! I particularly recommend the coffee milkshake laced with Kahlua.

At the end of the day, we drove to Keflavik, stayed in the Icelandair Hotel which was close to the correct airport and prepared for our journey to France.

All is well with the Barnums!!