Day 1 (June 20, 2025)

Landed in Keflavik around 6 am local time. Took a bit to get through customs and get our rental car sorted out, but nothing too bad. We are living out of a Hyundai i20 for a week and a half, it’s a small car, presumably just a model for the Euro market, as I’ve never seen anything like it out on the roads in the states. Akin to a Toyota Yaris. It fits all of our stuff in the trunk, even the big suitcase, which was a bit of a worry. It’s been great though, has Apple CarPlay and all that good stuff. Getting used to seeing speed in km/h has been weird but no big deal. At least cars drive on the right here.

After leaving the airport, we went to a little cafe called Brikk in some town I don’t know, about half an hour from the airport. I had a Nutella croissant pastry sort of thing, and Sofie had a salted caramel cinnamon roll sort of thing. Both were pretty good. After a little latte for the both of us, we were on our way.

I have noticed a lot of interesting architecture, I suppose maybe it’s Danish or something like that in style? Kind of brutalist, but not exactly, just feels very matter-of-fact for the most part, but then you’ll have some building randomly that looks super quirky and doesn’t fit at all, but I think that’s kind of fun.

After our breakfast at Brikk, we continued on to Sky Lagoon. We intended to go to Blue Lagoon, but discovered while waiting at Dulles that it was pretty booked up, and it seems like you needed to book way in advance to get a spot. I overheard some people today saying that it was closed for a while due to volcanic activity nearby, and that’s played a role in why it’s been so busy.

Regardless, we enjoyed our time at Sky Lagoon. It wasn’t overwhelmingly crowded, plus we were there fairly early (yay overnight flights), and had a nice time. They have a thing they call the 7-Step Ritual (which I only remember five steps of), that they recommend people go through. It’s definitely a marketing gimmick, but it was a nice little slice of what I presume was a bit of Icelandic culture. There was a cold plunge, a sauna that I found it difficult to breathe in, a cold misty room, and a part where you basically made a paste out of some kind of salt, rubbed it all over your body (except not the face), and went into a steam room to let it soak in.

I lasted maybe a minute in the steam room before I felt like I couldn’t breathe well, and we left to rinse off pretty promptly. Even with that, my skin still felt nice afterwards. Maybe there’s something to it after all.

We enjoyed a bit more time at Sky Lagoon, then headed on to Reykjavik proper. We first stopped at Bonus, the budget supermarket in Iceland, where we were warmly greeted by a cashier who didn’t seem Native to Iceland (I have not found Icelandic people themselves to be outgoing or overly friendly). We picked up some snacks to have in the car, and enjoyed perusing the unique selection of products we don’t see in the states. After that, we stopped by our hotel to see if we could check in early, but our room wasn’t ready. So we left the car at the hotel and walked about two miles from the hotel into the city. Our destination was a hot dog stand that is well-renowned (Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur was the name, don’t ask me how to pronounce it). Honestly? I felt it was overrated. I got two hot dogs, one with all their fixins and one without, and really preferred the one without. The aforementioned fixins were crispy onions (that tasted weirdly sweet) and raw onions on the bun beneath the hot dog, and a sweet mustard and some kind of remoulade on top. I really didn’t like any of those toppings, and the hot dog itself didn’t taste like much of anything. Overall kind of a disappointment.

But while on the subject of weiners, we discovered that the Iceland Phallological Museum was close by, and that was high on our list of things to do, so we opted to go while we were so close. The museum was a good time, a plethora of animal penises, a few human penises, a few things from people who were a little too obsessed with their own penises, and a lovely collection of phallic art. Truly a pretty unique experience. I also learned that hamsters have the biggest testicles in the animal kingdom, at least in relation to their body size. Wild stuff.

From there, we were feeling pretty exhausted, and it was after 3pm, so our hotel room was supposed to be ready. We managed to find a bus that was pretty close by and would take us to a stop just down the street from our hotel. We checked in, brought our bags up to the room, and settled in for a little nap in the Reykjavik Lights hotel. The hotel itself wasn’t anything too special, the room was small compared to an American hotel, but it had everything you could need, and was cozy enough. One odd thing is there was a slot on the wall where you had to insert your key card, otherwise the room didn’t have any electrical power. Makes sense from an energy saving standpoint, but was an odd introduction to Icelandic hotels. We showered, napped for an hour or two, then spent some time trying to figure out what to do for dinner. We ended up going to a burger spot called 2Guys, which was good enough, but they put a sauce on their burgers that was similar to (or maybe actually just was) Thousand Island dressing. I didn’t love that, and the rest of the toppings didn’t add much, but the burger patties themselves were fairly tasty. We went and stopped at Bonus again (a bigger store this time) for more snacks and some ice cream, then went back to the hotel. We ate the ice cream, which was odd and had some flavors we couldn’t identify, and went to sleep shortly after, capping off our first day in Iceland.