Longest Day Ever | Iceland Nov. 22-26, 2017

This year for Thanksgiving Break, instead of heading home and filling myself with Turkey and mashed potatoes, a group of 12 of us decided to go on vacation.  This included me, one brother, my sister, my parents, a cousin, an aunt, my dad's friend, his wife and two kids, and his daughter's boyfriend.  We decided to go to Reykjavik, Iceland and we'd been planning this trip for about a year now.  It was an amazing experience and I really wanted to share it with all of you!  So the next couple posts of mine are all going to be Iceland related, which will also give me a chance to read and write some more book reviews.  School is way too busy this time of year.

I also used this trip as an excuse to practice with my GoPro Hero 5, but I didn't break it out until the second day of our trip.

We flew out of Logan International Airport in Boston on Wednesday evening and arrived in Iceland at about 6am.  The first issue we faced was that a seven-passenger car does not hold seven passengers and their luggage.  So instead of having two seven-passenger vehicles, we had to get a Ford Focus as well.  This car mostly sat in the driveway during our trip but was necessary for getting from and to the airport.  The airport is 45 minutes or so away from Rejkavik so after landing and organizing ourselves we decided to head that way and find something for breakfast.

After driving around for a little with no success, my dad finally pulled into an open auto-body place and asked somewhere where a good place to eat was.  That was when we learned that most things in Iceland don't open until at least 8am and even more not until 10am.  Our first culture shock.  The man was nice enough to have our three cars follow him to a bakery that he knew opened at 8am.  We ate pastries and hung out for a couple hours, waiting for the sun to rise (around 10:30am) and things to open.

So my dad is a HUGE Ronald Reagan fan, and low and behold, the house where Reagan and Gorbachev decided to end the Cold War is in Rejkavik, Iceland.  So we decided to try and find it.  Emphasis on the 'try.'  The GPS was not working very well and we ended up driving back towards the airport.  We called it quits and headed back to the city.

    

Once back in the city, we went to Hallgrímskirkja, which is a Lutheran Parish opened in 1986.  It is the tallest church in Iceland and you can take an elevator up 8 stories to look out of the clock faces you can see in the photo.  You can then go up another flight of stairs and look out those arched windows.  Those don't have screens or glass or anything, so it was very cold and wicked windy.

After the church, we grabbed some lunch and then headed to our Airbnb early to see if we could at least drop our stuff off.  Thankfully the house was ready for us and we ended up lounging around for a couple hours before getting dinner. 

Wednesday and Thursday were combined to be probably one of the longest days of my life because I did not sleep on the plane so I was awake for about 30 hours I think.  However, the day was also so exciting that it didn't seem to matter.

And this was only day 1...