Iceland 2017

March -Snow and northern lights

Day 1

basel - keflavik - reykjavik

Finally: first time in Iceland in Winter/Spring, we are going to see the Northern Lights or at least we hope so. I continue repeating myself it's not important for me to see them, I just want to be back in my "home country", but it's not totally true: I'm totally euphoric to go back to Iceland, the country where my soul found its place, but I totally hope to see the Northern Lights and check the Aurora forecasts since weeks (actually months).

This time we fly from Basel, with a direct fly to Keflavik.

As I see Iceland from above in its "ice" look, I can just stare and cannot stop smiling :)

Driving to Reykjavik it starts snowing and we reach our flat around 7 p.m. What expects us is horrible: the flat is cold, pans are dirty and there is mould on the windows. I'm so disappointed! Last time we booked we got a super design flat in middle of Laugavegur, with balcony and view of the Hallgrimskirkja, but primarily: it was clean! I call the reception and in this situation my english becomes excellent: one hour later we are in a nice hotel suite, smaller as booked but clean. Now our holiday can start! :)

Since it's too late we cancel our reservation at the Fish Market and we have a take out grilled salmon in our hotel suite, whereas our son enjoys his from-mummy-cooked pasta with pesto.

As soon as we are finished I stare at the snowy sky out of the window: where are you Aurora?

I check my Aurora forecasts apps: high probability but cloudy sky...so basically: no way we will see anything. Tonight for a start I'll dream about them.

Day 2

Reykjavik

Here we are again: Iceland! It's always so nice to wake up the first morning and realize I am in my country! :)

As always I am super excited and wake up earlier then my men, so I go for a walk alone to Sun Voyager on the coast: the air smells of ocean and freedom and I stare at the sea for a while...

Walking back I give a call to my husband and we meet at Te og Kaffi for a cappucino (for him) and chai latte (for me): our son plays with his firefighter truck and his police car and we let the morning start slowly.

We walk around looking for a place where we can rent a stroller (see Interesting facts for details), because our son becomes a little lazy monster when he has to walk hand in hand with one of us for more than 5 min, but no way: no strollers in Reykjavik, apart the ones left outside with babies inside (I already have one, don't need an extra!).

So we enjoy lunch at the Sea Baron, a small restaurant at the port which has the best lobster soup ever! And we discover it has also a play room for kids: I mean, the restaurant about the size of my bedroom, but they have an extra room for kids: incredible! We can enjoy lunch peacefully, whereas in the meanwhile our little one plays with polar bears.

It snows and snows and after a very long afternoon nap and a bad intestinal experience after a new restaurant for dinner, we go to sleep.

(But before, I exchange some words in Icelandic with an true Icelander in front of the hotel: I'm soooo cooool!)

Day 3

Reykjavik - Akureyri

And finally we go North, out into the nature :)

The landscape is magic and scaring at the same time: snow and a strong wind are our fellows. On the mountain pass up to Stadur it's my turn to drive, never a decision as been worst: it's a total white out, I do not see anything else then white, white street, white landscape, white sky, the only thing which keep me/us on track are the yellow poles along the street, without them we would be lost. I'm quite happy when we reach the intersection to the West Fjords: we made it! Afterwards my husband drives, I'm so stressed my back is totally in pain. We stop in Hvammstangi for lunch but our favourite restaurant (and maybe only one in town) is closed, so we eat some sandwiches and look forward to our dinner in Akureyri this evening. We reach our house on the Fjord in front of Akureyri in the afternoon and we are delighted to discover that we got a newly built one: it's totally cozy and at the same time pure design, just fantastic! We have a whirpool just for us on the veranda outside and full view of the Fjord: I want to stay here forever (I mean it!).

Day 4

godafoss - myvatn

It's a lovely sunny day today, our little one plays in the snow outside of the door and we enjoy the view from our house: thanks Iceland!

Today we drive first to Godafoss: while our son sleeps in the car, we go one after the other to see this wonderful waterfall which we only saw in summer 2013. The air is freezing and even with sun I get the feeling I have no nose anymore: brrrr!😨

I take a quick selfie and jump back to the car.

We drive further to Myvatn where we enjoy a tasty meal in Vogafjos farm. Our son cannot stop to observe the cows just near the restaurant. We drive home in the evening and enjoy a meal for two with lobster soup and candle light.

Day 5

Akureyri with snow

Today it snows all day so we spend a cozy day at home, with some wellness outside in our Jacuzzi and a lot of play and sleep.

Day 6

Akureyri with snow

Same as yesterday, snowing even more. But it's a nice change from everyday life where everything runs too fast. Today, as yesterday, we live the moment, we slow down and enjoy just each other company.

Day 7

husavik - myvatn

Sun again ☀️ this morning we decide to go to Husavik to check if there is a whale watching tour in which you can sit inside the boat in the warmth but no: even in winter you have to freeze. So we decide to skip the whale watching tour and visit the whale museum instead. We are lucky we still had no lunch: the smell is awful (no wonder with all the whale bones in there!). Our son is a bit frightened from all the huge"monsters" bones hanging around and prefers to sit in the small playroom at the entrance. One hour later we leave the building and smell again some fresh sea air: so refreshing!

We look everywhere for a restaurant but everything seems to be closed with the exception of a supermarket with a small kitchen area with microwave at the entrance. We eat some sandwiches with hangikjöt and drive further to Myvatn. The temperature is around -15 all day and the landscape white in white. It's just wonderful to discover this country over and over again. A few shots here and there, it's slowly becoming dark, the sky is clear: we decide to eat at the hotel's restaurant where we stayed last summer. And we meet again a nice US couple we had met few days before in Akureyri at dinner. This time we speak more and the lady plays with Erik although she can just speak English. The man tells us in German that he comes from a small town in the US where a lot of German immigrants have been for generations and that he grew up with a funny English-German dialect. As us, they are also hoping to see the Northern lights tonight and stare at the sky outside from time to time through the window.

All the way back "home", to our fjord, I look through the car window at the sky , but nothing, absolutely nothing although the air and the sky are so crispy and clear. Again, I go to bed with resignation 😩

Day 8

trying to reach aldeyjarfoss - northern lights

Best day ever: 1) we survived 2) we saw the northern lights (listed in order of importance)

My husband loves Aldeyjarfoss, so although we have to drive a bit in direction highland , we decide to try and see how the road is.

It's already afternoon when we leave, the street is covered in snow but good and with our spikes wheels we feel invincible. Well.. we are wrong. As we turn into the F26 ( a few Km away from Aldeyjarfoss) the snow is so high I do not feel comfortable anymore, so my husband suggests he will drive now ( alpha man knows how to drive 🐒- ah ah, you will see my dear! 😎)

3 min later we are stuck in snow, we can't go forwards or backwards, just nothing.

In the meanwhile our son wakes up and need some entertainment , so I take out the Tablet and put Troy the train (I watch a couple of minutes too, who knows , maybe he has an idea how we can come out of this mess).

I try to free the weels from the snow but the problem is: the snow is just everywhere under our car 🤔

I try to keep calm and give my son the feeling everything is fine: it's incredible which power you discover to have in yourself after you become a parent.

When I am almost ready to give up there they come: 4 young super heroes from California who got also stuck few Km away from us coming for rescue. We free the bottom of the car from the snow with our hands, legs and all bodies (whereas my husband coordinates 😒).

Half an hour later we are safe. They take a photo of us, my husband not 😒 (I guess he is pissed by the way I hug them 🙄). My husband lets the drone reach the waterfall for which we were almost going to need a rescue team.

On the way "home" the sunset over the fjord is wonderful and we decide to celebrate the day (and life in general!) with a dinner at Rub23. A few minutes before reaching it , I check all of mine Aurora apps and all say the same for tonight: probability is very high!!!And the sky is clear!

So during dinner I cannot stop looking outside, but I see nothing.

As we walk outside (I will never forget this moment, ever!) we are talking to each other and all of a sudden I stop and tell my husband to shut up: there!!!!there it is!!!!northern light over our house!!we stay there looking for a couple of minutes and then decide to quickly go home, where it is darker. But on the way, we have to stop on the bridge (everybody else is doing the same): behind Akureyri there seems to be a Northern lights factory. The sky fills in colors changing shape in an unnatural way, it's marvelous and scaring. I take my son out of the car and show him the sky "Look, you see the strange lights in the sky? These are the Northern lights!" and he replies " Cold, no northern lights, car, watch Troy the train" so I put him back inside with his Tablet and his favourite cartoon. We normally allow a maximum of 30 min a day cartoons, well..this evening he will get more than 2 hours 😳 I laugh and sing and almost cry looking at the lights above us, everywhere. At a certain point they start being less and we drive home, where they start again, like curtains in violet and green. In total we get more than 1 hour of them, we are full up and excited and fall asleep very late tonight.

Day 9

akureyri - hvitserkur (also known as the place where our drone died😳)- reykjavik

We wake up late, we are still so enthusiastic of yesterday's northern lights experience and we just want more: so I look at my apps and websites and notice a warning signal up in the screen "Storm and avalanche danger respectively in the West and South of Iceland tomorrow" ...FUXX 😳

We actually planned to travel tomorrow by car back to Reykjavik but what should we do now?

I check more websites, we write, we telephone and in the end decide to pack all our stuff and leave our lovely sweet home in Eyjafjordur one day before the plan 😢 (even now I'm writing I feel again the pain of this decision)

So we quickly book a house between Reykjavik and Keflavik (after all the days in the nature, I do not want to stay in the middle of the city) and leave. The weather is super nice today and although it's a long drive, we enjoy it a lot. We decide to give a look at Hvitserkur, which we only know from the beautiful photos in Internet. It doesn't seem to take long from the main road on google maps, maybe 30 min in each direction. But it takes much longer: the street is a gravel road full of holes and we need more then 50 min to reach the spot. Our son falls asleep in the car, I am tired, so just my husband walks down the path to see the rock in the picture above.

In the meanwhile I enjoy the wonderful view of the see, the wind caressing the yellow grass and the snow covering the mountains on the other side of the bay.

As my husband comes back 20 min later he doesn't seem very happy:

me "What did it happen?"

my husband "My drone died" (his face looks a bit like that 😱)

me "How?"

my husband "It flew 10 meters up and then fell down....I miss one rotor too"

Oh SHXX...he loves his drone almost more than he loves me and our son 😒, what should we do now?

Well..night is coming, so we have to continue our travel back to Reykjavik and the main topic in the next few hours is: Phantom 4 Pro.

Exhausted (me from the topic 😩, my 2 men from the travel), we reach our home in the middle of nowhere at around 10 p.m. (our son was so sick of sitting in the car the last few hours that we had no other choice than to drug him with cartoons on his tablet (yes, HIS tablet - my husband's idea)).

It's rainy and super windy, near us there is just an absolutely creepy house and someone sitting at the window in the faint light 👻 (ahhhhhhh!!!!Fear!!! I should consider stopping reading Icelandic thrillers 🤔).

We fall asleep all together in one bedroom (the house has three of them!)

Day 10

reykjavik

We wake up totally exhausted, not only for the long drive yesterday but because our son woke us up more than once tonight.

We spend the time until around 4 p.m. sleeping, eating, playing through our manor until the little one falls asleep (finally!) so that we can have a nap too.

We then decide to go to Reykjavik for a short walk and dinner.

Leaving Reykjavik behind us is not so bad... (I like the city but I don't like cities in general)..what's bothering me is the thought we will have to leave Iceland tomorrow...

Day 11

keflavik - basel

As always: I would prefer to walk on fire (or lava in this case) than to leave Iceland but today is the day we have to go, I try not to cry this time.

Before going to the gate we take our Avoshake at Joe&theJuice (which we will discover will open soon in Zürich too) and with a huge pain in my hearth I go on the plane.