Iceland! Day 1

Trying to narrow the pictures down from a 9 day trip to Iceland where EVERYTHING is just amazing, is next to impossible.  Several long posts ahead here!

The story behind the trip.  Around December I started thinking I needed to plan an epic trip.  Something to celebrate ME.  I started out thinking I wanted to do a riding trip. Horseback. Somewhere awesome.  After a few years of watching the show Heartland, I thought I wanted to go to the Canadian Rockies.  I started researching and stumbled across Wild Women Expeditions. They had a pretty awesome Canadian Rockies horse back riding adventure...and LOTS of others!  I looked at all of them and decided on Iceland.  Don't ask why.  I'm not sure.  It just called to me I guess.

Not long after that, I was having dinner with my friend, Jill.  Our girls used to be in 4H together and we've become friends over the years.  I said, "Hey, want to go to Iceland this summer?"  And within a blink she said, "Sure. When?"  And there is began.

We took an early bus to Chicago, had lunch with Jill's niece, and then to the airport to begin our overnight journey to Iceland.  I was bound and determined to sleep at least 5 hours on that plane and all but drugged myself to do it.  We arrived at 6 am the next morning and by 8 am were at the Blue Lagoon!  

The Blue Lagoon is a geothermal lake that has been developed into a spa and tourist attraction.  I had been told to go there first if we could because so many other places would pale in comparison.  In some ways, this was very true.  It's very "touristy" and I can't imagine what it would be like later in the day when it was actually crowded.

 The water is about 100 degrees naturally heated in the earth.  It was around 60 degrees so not really too bad out that your head froze while your body got hot.  You can see the construction on the right side where they are adding on to the hotel/spa.  Most places the water is about 4 feet deep but was as deep as five feet and in some places quite shallow around the edges so you could lounge back on the rocks.

This was the first mineralmask which was kind of an exfoliator and the next one was an algae mask.  It was pretty funny seeing everyone walking around looking like this carrying their smoothies!

You can see how the minerals have turned the bottoms of the rocks white and the whole "floor" is white like this too which is why the water is so light. These are all volcanic rocks.

Next stop after we dropped our bags at the bus station was downtown Reykjavik.  What a beautiful town but it probably helped that we have beautiful weather.

Both this pic and the one above are looking across the "pond" in the middle of the city. 

Reykjavik is actually on the Atlantic ocean but this harbor keeps it fairly safe from weather.  A little further east was the major shipping harbor where we also saw a cruise ship docked.  

 After an icelandic fish and chips lunch for $24 each (food here is REALLY expensive!) we went back to the bus station to meet our group of Wild Women and head out to the farm!