Rebecca and I have been here just a shade under 24 hours but so far we have managed to see an insane Northern Lights display, lose all feeling in our bodies and willingly swim into a tectonic plate gorge river thing in seal suits while it was negative 15 degrees Celsius out, watch geyser explosions, spend $60 on a meal of soup, and witness the most beautiful Lisa Frank Unicorn sunrise of all time ever at my ideal-world time for sunrise, which is 10AM. (the picture here can’t really do it justice.) But back to the beginning of the day, which was actually in Paris.
The D.C.-to-Paris leg to get to Rebecca before the Iceland journey was officially the 12th plane I got on in the last 30 days and I didn’t think it could happen but by plane 12 you’ve lost about 80 collective hours of sleep and all the magic wears off and the promise of unlimited yet-to-be-on-HBO movies and free shitty wine starts loses all its appeal. I grumped around the entire flight, didn’t sleep, and slammed my tray table down unnecessarily hard about 4 times just to make sure the ogre woman in front of me knew I was passively aggressively getting back at her for reclining her chair ALL THE WAY at 1PM before we even reached 10 feet in the air. By the time we landed at CDG both of my eyelids were twitching the eff out and I was also convinced I’d eaten a bunch of crack without knowing it and Rebecca found me wandering in the street in front of her Paris apartment about 2 hours later mumbling around Platform 9-and-three-quarters so at least I got there somehow.
Rebecca is my best friend and let me not help with anything and nap for 2 hours before we headed for the “other” airport across the city and, after enduring a 20 minute period of being locked out of the airport which had shut down completely because we think a sweet but senile old man left his suspicious bag in the middle of the airport and wandered away from it, we set a new world record for busting one’s late ass through an airport (8 minutes from ticket gate to boarding gate) and then finally passed out for 3 good hours before touching down in stark, snowy Iceland/what we still think might be Mars. And now we’re here.
For this trip, we’ve chosen to utilize a rental car and the jury is still out on whether or not it will arrive back at the rental desk in good enough condition to get the €2,000 damage deposit on it; an uncharacteristically early snowfall has made the roads somewhat terrifying and we are apparently the only people in the country interested in staying in our designated lane. It was a 2 hour drive from the airport to our sweet little wilderness outpost, and I feel proud that I didn’t cry once whilst driving down the dark, icy streets of polite Icelandic death. The reward, it turns out, was in the most magnificent of all magnificent destination arrivals for which the Northern Lights roll themselves out for us like a magical glowing green sky-carpet.
When we finally pulled in, we noticed that there was a barely-there greenish streak across the sky – it looked like the Milky Way but way closer. We pretty quickly realized it was, in fact, a Northern Lights sighting, and while we were excited we saw it right away, it was kind of like “oh man, I guess I worked this up in my head way too much and they just do some pretty intense exposure work with the photos you always see.” You also hear a lot of stories about how hard a truly incredible display is to stumble upon just with dumb luck and that it can take days to find them in any form at all, so we figured we may have expected too much.
When we spoke with the hotel owner though, he told us it might be a pretty good night m for lights and that we should try again so we put our stuff down and walked back out to do just that. And then our heads fell off. Because within 10 minutes, the gas works had gone from barely there to this giant bright green wall just streaking up the entire Northern sky side with what looked like green searchlights flashing straight down into the ground and then disappearing like Zeus Bolts. It was insane.
After 10 minutes of being punched in the face with awe (and extremely cold) we both had to stop gaping and go shower as we’d stopped at the Blue Lagoon first for a geothermal spa extravaganza and in the process got enough silica and additional crap in our hair that it formed really beautiful bird’s nests atop both of our heads that were capable of sustaining 20 mph winds without moving a hair twig.
We were also exhausted and almost just passed out but then we were all like “hey let’s go to the lobby and just peek out the front one last time but it won’t be like last time so whatever…” Except THIS TIME we got to the door and outside it were just electric green S’s and smoke streaks shooting horizontally across the sky and looking all like the evil witch light from Hocus Pocus and we were both dying. So, despite the fact that I only had a puffy jacket thrown over my very short nightgown and was wearing slip on sneakers, we stood outside again in -17 degree Celsius air for another 15 minutes. It was glorious, and I looked like a crazy person. See Evidence A Here:
I’m a day behind and tired as crap so if you are interested in the rankings of above mentioned Crazy Person, please stay tuned for Part 2 sometime tomorrow which will recap the kamikaze snorkeling fiasco, Trapper Keeper cartoon sunsets, wildly overpriced soups, and an update on if I go back outside in an hour in my nightgown to catch more of this glorious Northern Lights show that we’re sure hoping will make an encore appearance this evening.
Until then, just regular “Bye!” because I haven’t learned any Icelandic words yet and everyone here like speaking English actually so it’s fine.