Our Unexpected Icelandic Adventure

I know exactly why this happened. The 3 days leading up to leaving for this trip, we were all whining about how we might not even see all that much snow on this trip. And then. We got stranded in Iceland. Ice. Land. ICELAND. It’s seriously so much more cold and snowy than it sounds if you can imagine that. I mean, the plane landed on a runway that was completely iced over… that should have been the first sign. What happened was our plane that picked us up in DC was 2 hours late due to a blizzard of ungodly proportions hitting Reykjavik Wednesday night. We left DC 2 hours late and were told that our connecting flight to Munich would wait for us. LOL. We walked off the plane, saw a flight board with no mention of Munich and I knew it was bad. I’m the most realistic one in this group (some would say negative, but whatever), so I figured immediately that there were no other flights to Munich that had been scheduled. Annnd I was right. We walked up to the service counter (well actually stood in line for 45 minutes) and were apologized to and handed hotel, bus, and meal vouchers for the next 24 hours. Before we knew it we were on a bus to Nordica Hotel by Hilton in downtown Reykjavik in ICELAND. Our bus got stuck in the snow, I thought we were going to die from being hit by another tour bus driving straight at us down a one way hilly road, and by the time we made it to the hotel it was finally light outside! Get this. We landed at 9:40am and it was pitch black until 11am or so… and then it started to get dark around 3:15pm. Iceland is a strange, strange world. But it’s also enchanting at the same time. It was hauntingly beautiful with its industrial downtown buried under 5 feet of snow. And after having lunch at our hotel, I was feeling MUCH more optimistic about this little speed bump, so Justin and I headed to downtown Reykjavik to explore the city!

It was snowing HARD!! Like hitting your face so fast that you can’t see ahead kinda hard. Not the best conditions for trying to navigate around a strange city ;)

The stores were so cute! And so was this guy :)

Everything was white!!!

Then we found a little church on a street corner and when you pass a church in Europe, you go inside. #thefirstofmany

And then there was this little garden… or what would have been a garden.

Just walking around was so much fun!

It was freezing!!

So we went to find coffee!! Well, hot chocolate for me :)

It was fun watching the city light up! At 4 in the afternoon!

And then we found THE church! Please don’t ask me to try to spell the name. Icelandic is a WEIRD language.

The view of Reykjavik from the tower!

And then we headed down one last alley before heading back to the hotel! Please notice how icy the streets are… they didn’t plow/salt at all!!!

Now we are sitting in the airport in Paris about to board our flight for Munich! Thank goodness!! Hopefully the next place I’ll update from will be GERMANY! :)