As a whole, my journey over to Iceland was nearly completely uneventful. Upon my arrival to Minneapolis, I discovered as I went to retrieve my bags from the baggage claim that as of 3/14/2007, Icelandair is flying out of the International terminal at MSP and not their main terminal. This meant that I would have to wait outside to catch the shuttle, which wasn’t too bad, except it was 40 degrees outside, so it was at least a little preparation for the weather that awaited me in Iceland. After a short shuttle ride to the international terminal, which apparently is on the ass end of the airport, I checked in at the Icelandair ticket counter in what was the quickest check-in I have ever encountered. After walking directly up to the counter and not waiting in line, the agent asked for my passport, typed some stuff into her computer and then no more than 30 seconds later, she was attaching the tags to my bags and directing me to my gate.
The plane was a 757-200 and the interior appeared to have been recently renovated. The seat was quite comfortable and the plane was more than half empty so I actually had an entire row to myself. The total flight time was 5 hours 30 minutes, comparable to flying to Kona from LAX. The coolest thing was that all the announcements were in Icelandic first and then English second. Also, before the plane took off, one of the flight attendants was walking down the aisle with a little cart of newspapers and magazines, but they were speaking in only Icelandic as apparently everything on the cart was in Icelandic only. The food was edible, nothing great, some kind of swedish meatball/mashed potatoes main dish, along with a cold pasta/ham salad and a chocolate chip brownie as a desert. The flight as a whole was fine, I tried to sleep, but I never really can sleep on planes, so that ended up being a wash.
Now arriving in Iceland at Keflavik was a bit trippy as everyone from the plane was basically funneled towards “Passport control,” which is like Customs or whoever it is that handles incoming foreigners in the US. We had to wait at the bottom of some stairs for everything to open up and then at the top we were subjected to another security screening, which seemed odd, but apparently was due to the fact that usually people are on their way to connecting flights to other parts of Europe, so they handled everything at the same time. The security was comparable to US security, but the screeners were a little bit more polite. Upon reaching the passport agent, I merely handed over my passport, she stamped it and sent me on my way with not a word spoken.
After that, I went over to pick up my bags and before hitting the baggage claim there was this huge duty-free shop. Since I was pretty tired, I didn’t look around too much, but I did pick up some Brennivin for Sara and Jason, so that worked out quite well. After getting my bags I picked up my rental car and upon leaving the airport, it was dark and snowing. I had to walk across a large parking lot to get to my rental car (a red Toyota Yaris), so by the time I got there, I was completely frozen. I was too frozen and too tired to take a real good look at a map to know where exactly I was headed so I pretty much started up the car and headed out, hoping I would be able to find my way without getting way lost. (Jesus, this has been long) Now the drive from Keflavik to Reykjavik is about 50 km I think, so it took me about 35 minutes. I was flipping through the radio stations and came across a French language station, a traditional Icelandic music station, an English evangelical station (WTF?), several Icelandic talk stations, an American pop music station and the BBC world service live, which was pretty awesome. As I was driving to Reykjavik, I was amazed by how much it kind of reminded me of the Big Island, except covered in snow. The area right outside of Keflavik kind of looked like a lava field and people had taken pieces of lava and made statues along the road, so there was kind of a weird deja vu sort of feeling.
Upon hitting Reykjavik proper, I realized that I probably should have spent more time actually looking at a map since all the signs are in Icelandic and I in fact had no idea what the address for my hotel was so I was basically driving blind. I knew my hotel was kind of close to the Hallgrimskirkja, which I could see as it is the tallest structure, so I navigated towards there and decided I would just drive around until I could stop and check a map. Amazingly enough, when I turned off the main highway and after consulting a map, it turned out I was within blocks of my hotel. All hopes of fortune were soon dashed when I discovered the parking situation around the hotel kind of sucks. I drove around for the next 20 minutes trying to find parking and when I finally did, I discovered that although all the nearby spaces are metered parking, it is from 10:00am to 6:00pm and it was only 8:00am. Luckily, I was able to check in at the hotel and this will have to be continued…