First thing of the day was to post some postcards.
Got the street wrong initially, but it turns out that Pósthússtræti means pretty much what it looks like, and connected to the parallel street where the post office lives.

They had one of the ‘take a number’ systems, which I’ve not used since … Perth, I think. They had one at the diver licencing centre, and at the place you signed up for medical stuff.

Helped a couple of folks from the USA, who’d arrived at sparrowsfart, lug their suitcases up eleventy-billion steps, and took the opportunity to photograph the stairwell.

My one scheduled thing of the day was also my last tourist thing; A walking tour of Reykjavik, by the folks from CityWalk, guided by Eiríkur.

It was a good tour, and runs on the ‘Pay What You Want’ model, with an added ‘In whatever currency you like’ option to catch the unprepared tourist. By parts historical, cultural, and comedic, the ‘any questions’ sessions veered steadily further away from what we were looking at & into general Icelandic society & culture.

I didn’t know that Iceland transitioned from being a sovereign state joined with Denmark to being an independent republic during WW2, when Denmark was under Nazi occupation and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.

Well worth it, I think.

And that’s about it.

I checked in on the gear box while I was finishing up & donating any leftover food, and Little Red lasted less than 24 hours before being nabbed.

Showered, packed my bags, and shifted them down to the lobby in the evening.

I actually had this whole night booked, thanks to not paying quite enough attention to how long it’d take to get to the airport, how far in advance they suggest you get there, and what time the flight left.
Sleeping in the room would have involved getting up no later than 0300, which seems obnoxious; It’s a pointless amount of sleep, particularly if you’re me, and it’s a marvelous way to wake everyone else up as you rummage around trying to find all of your stuff.
I’ve done the 0600 variant (in San Francisco), but this … was too early, so I shifted down to the lobby and hung out there for a few hours.

Ended up chatting with some folks¹ the next table over, who’d been horrified to discover that everyone else in their room was asleep at 8pm, and had no interest in the worryingly lage bottle of duty-free vodka. This isn’t a party hostel, but there are some limits to how far in the other direction it’s reasonable to go, and lights out at 2000h is too damn far.

¹ A nurse from Ireland, and a student from Canada

Went for a midnight wander through Reykjavik, mostly to see what was happening.
Not much, though I did get a somewhat creepy picture of Sólfar.

And Harpa, the concert hall/conference centre, looking … alien?

After that, I just loitered in the lobby, chatted to the lady on the night desk about travel in general and Iceland in particular.
She described some aspects of the language which seem mindbogglingly complex, to do with conjugations based on gender, numbers up to four, and something to do with the type of verb which I really didn’t understand.

The bus turned up somewhere between 0200 & 0230, as expected, and collected a few others along the way, including;

• A guy from Albany, NY, who was really into travel and finding out about new places and people, and who I think was running away to Paris to avoid the US election.
• An extremely drunk guy from Kazakhstan who seemed to have an entourage to see him off at the shuttlebus stop, who thought I was a Viking.

Big Red apparently blended in with the luggage bay lining of the shuttlebus, and nearly got left behind; If I hadn’t checked, …

Dunk-Kazahk passed out on the bus on the way to the airport, and we had to take turns stopping him from collapsing out into the aisle & the seat opposite on the sharper turns. Then we couldn’t wake him at the airport.
The driver managed it, mostly by being unconcerned about shaking him awake; If that hadn’t worked, I fully expected the next move to be dragging him out by his heels & dropping him in a puddle.

No idea whether he made it onto his plane, or even through passport control.
I wouldn’t have let him into a taxi in that condition, let alone an aircraft – Booze and altitude do not mix well, as any number of “air rage” and other incidents have shown.
This is vaguely relevant, but only vaguely – Take A Picture

The airport happened in an airport-like manner.

Got my tax refund for the jacket, so thank you very much Iceland.

There was a mob of English Schoolchildren on some sort of trip who more or less kept pace with me the whole way through, from Passport Control at Keflavik to the elevators at Gatwick.
I take back every nasty thing I thought about the French group in the hostel, and offer my apologies, because this mob blocked every hallway and space they were in. They all made it to the UK, so I’m guessing that their chaperone’s repeated reminders not to lose or put down their boarding passes and passports actually made an impression.

I nodded off repeatedly while waiting at the gate, and ended up joining the line just to stay on my feet so that I’d stay awake.
Pretty sure I fell asleep during taxiing, as it’s the last thing I can solidly remember, and my next view was of this;

I’m guessing I missed the first couple of hours of the flight.

Woke up again just before touchdown, and had a moment of “Oh Hey, that’s the runway” when I opened my eyes.

The only impediment to getting through the airport was the school group, one of whom didn’t understand that “EU Passports Only” means that you need to go to the other line if you’re not on an EU passport.
Don’t think their chaperone assembling them right in the way of the only access to any passport control machines or lines particularly endeared them to the officials; It certainly didn’t impress me.

Finding the hotel was easy, and I got to take a little train between the terminals to get there.
Might just be that hotel, or it might be my newly-accrued Silver Status on the Hilton loyalty system, but the sucking-up was noticeable.
Checked in, had a shower, got some lunch (during which I kept dozing off and waking up with a start, which startled the server), and did a lot of sleeping.

Today was the Golden Circle tour, one of the ‘must do’ Icelanding things.
Or possibly Þings.

The instructions were to wait on the doorstep of the hostel between 0800-0830 for pickup; The shuttle van turned up at 0829ish.
Thee’d been some issue with paperwork, so the shuttle which had been going to take us (There were two of us from the hostel – myself and A? from Germany) to meet the coach at the tour company headquarters was instead going to take us, plus a few others from different lodgings, to meet the coach in the parking area of a service station.
Amazingly, this actually worked.

Also, it was snowing when we transferred between vehicles, and we were still in Reykjavik.
It got worse further out, as this bloody awful photo out the front of the bus is trying to demonstrate.

The first stop was at Þingvellir, a rift valley between two continental plates and the site of the Icelandic Parliament for most of it’s history.

You can’t really see it in these pictures, but there’s a solid layer of ice on the grille of the white coach, clear enough to see the lettering of the number plate through.

It was chosen, I’m told, because it’s reasonably accessible from everywhere, and wasn’t too bad a spot to set up camp, which makes me wonder what the hell the rest of the place looks like.

I think that’s water, rather than snow, in my hair, but I’m not sure.
It was bloody cold when the wind picked up, which happened frequently, despite the jacket. I’d have been half-dead in my grey hoodie.

Tried for a couple of panaoramas in a vague hope of capturing the feel of the place.

Selfie with A?
I’m going with A? because I’m less than sure that I’ve remembered his name correctly – There are a couple of options, and I can’t remember which one it was. In any case, nice chap.

While walking back up this path towards the coach we got a flyover from a Raven, but my photos … were crap.

Next, Gullfoss.

It was somehow an even more exposed place, to the extent that my first move was to go indoors and scope out a place to put on the merino thermal layer I’d thrown in a pocket just in case.

Well, this was the case; Best 200 Króna I spent all day, for bathroom access so that I could change.

I also had lunch before proceeding down to the falls, working on the theory that we had a chunk of time, and most of the folks from the bus headed straight down, so it’d be less crowded a bit later.
The tourist emporium had decent windows and insulation, so that you could observe the frozen wasteland in comfort.

The snow on the path had frozen into ice, so most people took the gravel off to the side, particularly on the slopes.
The wind wasn’t helping; I saw adults being blown off balance out at the more exposed bits, and at least one child deliberately being slid along the ice by the wind.

This is the higher level.
There are stairs to get down to the falls level.

The expression in this shot, I think, is a combination of “How Cool Is This?” and “I Can No Longer Feel My Own Hands”.

They warned us about the slippery footing on the stairs down, and indeed on the rocks by the falls.

And it’s a long way down, and that water is at maybe 2°C.

Despite the ice and some poor footwear choices on A?’s part, we risked the stairs and did not die, though note the Death-Grip on that railing. And the ice on the steps.

Finally, or so I thought, Haukadalur, place of geothermal activity, boiling waters, and home of Geysir.

In all honesty, I wasn’t expecting to be impressed by this stop.
I’ve been to Rotorua, I’ve seen geysers.

What I’d not seen was the surface of the water pulsate as pressure changes happened underneath, then the whole central portion of the pool drop, and then an explosion of water punch straight up.
None of that delicate tracery bollocks here.

I’m told that this is the colour of the Blue Lagoon, and it’s due to algae.
It’s … pretty blue.

Especially when compared with the algae-free pool next door.

The final stop was a toilet break where refreshments and the ever present souvenirs could be purchased.

The actual spot was an Icelandic Horse (there’s a specific breed) place of some sort, though I’m hazy on whether one rode the horses, or simply looked at them.

In any case, my attention was taken up by an Icelandic Cat, who wandered out to graciously allow us to pay attention and provide pettings.

Thee was a dog racing around who was very interested in the cat, but also kept to a set distance from it.
The guy in this shot was, I think, trying to protect the cat from what he thought was a menace, but based on body language of the critters, and a casually-readied paw, I suspect that the dog knew exactly how far a cat can reach and exactly how pointy their feet can be when they put their minds to it.

The same happened here, when this cat stopped in the middle of a puddle to fluff up, arch it’s back, and demonstrate to the dog that, in fact, it was not welcome to come over and say “Hi”.

Seriously, it’s not standing on a dry spot, it just walked right through in the shallower bits, having selected a line so that it didn’t have to adjust course to hit said shallower bits.

And that was the Golden Circle, and it was awesome.

Back at the hostel we’d acquired a new room-mate, Deep from generally the East Coast of the USA, who was dead to the world when I first got back, but eventually surfaced, and came along when Aaron & Amanuel (which I’m pretty sure I spelled wrong earlier) & David & I headed out for another go at seeing the Northern Lights.
We did see them, but they were behind a couple of bloody great lights at the harbour, and it didn’t look much like moving would improve the situation. Still, it was nice to know that last time wasn’t a fluke, and while they were faint, they still looked unreal.

My evening ended at maybe midnight, after a bunch of folks gathered with a bottle of … vodka, I think? … in the lobby, and general socialness happened for a few hours.
I made them vote on which postcard was going to my parents, and which to some friends.

Everyone else’s evening ended at maybe 0330 when the rest of Room 33 came back, trying to be quiet, and doing a pretty good job of it, I thought.

Today’s thing, because yesterday was a Sunday, was Hallsgrimskirkja, seen here lurking behind a tree.

For all that it looks like the figurehead of a ship in that shot, the statue isn’t connected to the church; It’s a statue of  Leif Eriksson, given by the USA in honour of the 1000th anniversary of the Icelandic Parliament.

The interior, and indeed the exterior (with the possible exception of that doorway), are … minimalist.
Stark, one could say.

Given that the Church is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland, it makes sense.

It makes less sense that the pipe organ looks to be set up to fire upon the altar, possibly in the event that the Bishop suddenly comes over all Roman Catholic?

The wee shop sells tickets to ride up the spire.
Also postcards, but I didn’t think to photograph those before I sent them.

The elevator takes you to a space below the observation level, and you walk up some steps.

Up at the top there’s a door, and it’s there to keep the warmth in and the wind out, because Holy Cran are you exposed up there.

The views, I think, can do the talking for this next bit.

Hadn’t realised I’d caught the shadow of the spire until I was picking which images to keep.

Eventually I came back down, and wandered back towards the hostel, in search of lunch and anything or anywhere warm, though I did pause to capture this little offence against both God and Man.

It’s Iceland.
You cannot go scuffing your feet through the fallen leaves as you drink your Pumpkin Spice Latte because there are not that many trees, and any fallen leaves end up in Sweden thanks to the high winds.

On the plus side, there was the troll here, and a cat which I didn’t manage to photograph, who ambled across the pavement and vanished down where the guy in the brown outfit is looking.

On the way back, I swung past the statue of Ingólfr Arnarson, Iceland’s first settler, and thanks to some pink lipstick applied during a Pride Festival, a supporter of LGBTQIA+ causes.

And here, photographed mostly out of novelty, is a plane coming in to land at the domestic airport, Reykjavíkurflugvöllur.
Yes, they really do come in that low.
Also, the white building with the grey roof to the left there is the Prime Minister’s office, and a tour guide who was there at the time mentioned that the PM was in, because that’s the PM’s vehicle in the car park.

I found my warm thing, and lunch thing, and tried a Nutella Crepe in a place where they, oddly, were closing at the unusual time of 2:38 in the mid-afternoon. This tuned out to be because of protests to do with equal pay rates for women, 2:38 being more or less the time when women effectively stop being paid.
I only discovered this after the fact, and didn’t notice any protests at the time.

Besides, thanks to the rather nice crepe & coffee, I was wondering how to say something in Icelandic; Ég þarf insúlín.

Little Red was carefully placed in the gear swap box today.

A useful day-pack, but too small for my purposes, and I didn’t want to be lugging around an unused bag any longer than strictly necessary. Gear swap seems the best place, as I’m petty sure someone can find a good use for a 15 litre pack.

The plan had been to make some dinner, but there’s a group of 20 French High School students staying at the hostel, and they tend to monopolise the kitchen when they’re in there. And by “tend to”, I mean “It’s damn near impossible to do anything at all”, so I wandered off to a place that did submarine sandwich sort of things, Hlöllabátar, a little kiosk/diner in the square near the hostel.

Not sure why I took a picture of what I’m guessing is a stormwater chamber lid, but that’s what happened.
Maybe it was the lettering?

Probably happened on the same outing as this photo of Reykjavik at night, in a spot right on the edge of downtown; Most of the restaurants and bars are behind me.

I’d been sitting in the lobby when I was given the heads-up by the woman from San Diego that they’d just seen the Northern Lights down at the harbour, so I grabbed my jacket and headed off, telling some folks along the way.

The location was less blurry than this in real life. Either my hands were too cold to hold the phone steady, or maybe it’s just not so good at night photography.

We (myself, Aaron from Mexico, & David from Canberra) weren’t 100% sure that the faint white misty streaks off to the north were actually the lights, and not cloud, or just our imaginations.
Fortunately, the damn things show up much better in camera images, so after some tricky balancing of a DSLR on his wallet, Aaron got some proof that we were not, in fact, imagining it.

Streaks of white mist, or cloud, or imaginings, do not show up green on a digital image; The white in the bottom left is the lights of the port.

We saw some movement & twisting in the white, and maybe some tints of green where it bunched up.
No photos – My cellphone saw nothing.

So that was a pretty good end to the day, and it wouldn’t have happened had I not become fed up with sitting on my bed using a stool as a desk, and moved down to the lobby.

First, a picture of the wee courtyard where the kitchen lives.

The block that the hostel is on is built hollow, or at least this bit of it is. No idea if that’s a common thing here, though I’ve seen other openings in buildings, so … probably?
In any case, that’s the next street up visible through that passageway, and the red building is the hostel kitchen.

And then I took this to be all arty.

Headed off in a different direction, along a slightly different part of the waterfront, to see what was there.
At this point I’d like to point out that the weather was pretty mild, so I went with the grey hoodie.

Had another go at a panorama.

I have no idea what this is, but it looks interesting.

And this looks VERY interesting.

The wanderings took me to the harbour on the other side of a peninsula inhabited mainly by storage tanks, where they keep a different view.

It’s also where my hoodie plan ran into changeable Reykjavik weather, and it started to rain.
Did manage to photograph some Icelandic Graffiti Art while heading back to the hostel, so that’s something.

Traded in my hoodie for the jacket, and headed off for Hallsgrimskirkja.
Sadly, this is where the photos stop.

I have photos, but either due to crappy internet (probably) or something odd happening at the database level (less likely, because filezilla also had problems), I’m having enough trouble uploading them that … I’m not going to.
It’s more annoying than it’s worth to me to be trying to post these fucking images and have the damn thing fail most of the time, and that’d end up with blog posts from someone who’s pissed off, sick of the whole thing, and which ran along the lines of;

• Saw a church. Very minimal and Lutheran. Awesome views from the top, plus awesome windchill
  Go look up pictures from the spire that someone with decent internet uploaded, because I’ve got nothing.
• Had a Nutella pancake on the way back which caused me to look up the Icelandic for “I Need Insulin”.
  The place closed early because there was an Iceland-wide protest about the 14% disparity between women’s & men’s wages in Iceland, where women walked off the job at the time when they stop getting paid.
• Saw the Northern Lights from the harbour, but they do not show up on cellphone cameras.
  Not that it’d matter, because …

So I’ll go more text-based, and fill in some images later, if I can.

More wandering around today, though I picked a different direction.

Found a monument to Civil Disobedience, which seems very Icelandic.

And a tiny little park, which I mostly photographed because I could see a particular building and it amused me to take a picture …

… of this building …

… because of this piece of music.

This is down by what I found out later is the Town Hall, and it’s in recognition of the Unknown Bureaucrat.

I followed a pond/park set up, which gave a view of the Hallgrímskirkja; Eventually I hit the edge of the domestic airport, which isn’t all that interesting, so I headed uphill towards the aforementioned Hallgrímskirkja.

It was Sunday, so I didn’t go in to take a look, or ride the little elevator up the spire.
That seemed … massively disrespectful?

I did run into Emanuel the room-mate outside the church, and we wandered back to the hostel together.
I did pause to try to get a good shot of the church down the road, though I’m not sure this qualifies as anything other than “OK”.

The rough-hewn bollards save the shot though, so I’m pretty happy with those.

Somehow I managed to come to Iceland without a waterproof outer layer, so despite the eyewatering prices I summoned up my cash nerve and bought something.
It turned out cheaper than I was expecting, to be honest, to the extent that I double-checked with the folks that I’d understood the price correctly.

Sometime before that I ended up wandering through a market of sorts (Emanuel mentioned it) – Many Icelandic Wool Sweaters, a number of book vendors, and what looked like a recruiting booth for the Pirate Party.
I was vaguely tempted by an Icelandic Version of “The Hobbit”, but it was hardback, so quite heavy, and about US$25.

Dinner-pasta was odd; Some folks from Quebec saved me some cooking by giving me the half-jar of pasta goo they’d not used, which was nice. (They were leaving in the morning)
Then we were invaded by the French, in the form of a school group, and it got really loud.

I escaped to the lobby, where I ended up chatting with

• A woman from Portland who’d just finished the Camino, and was attempting to photograph her Pilgrim’s Passport.
  She’d enjoyed it, and pointed me at a Facebook group to investigate.
• A woman from San Diego/Taiwan who’d travelled through Scandinavia, and had seen the Northern Lights outside of Tromsø, in awful weather where the only cloud free spot was clear because it was exposed to the brunt of the wind, and they were given survival suits to wear over their cold-weather gear.

The French loudness spread when they set off the fire alarms by cooking.

And then again an hour later.

The hostel WiFi/Internet Router may be having trouble.

I was able to get an internet connection on my phone, but not my tablet, in the evening, and I wasn’t the only one having that trouble. A restart fixed it then, but now, a few hours later, I can’t get my phone to connect.

More accurately, it’s failing at the Assign An IP Address step, so the network is there, but it’s not talking to anything else. This may put a damper on further updates.

If you’re reading this, and there’s no “OK, it’s fixed now” update, I’ve presumably wandered out and found a public WiFi networks to connect to using the phone.

OK,we seem to be back in contact, but I’m not sure how long for, so, … Don’t expect regular updates?

The plan had been to get an early start and … well, that didn’t entirely happen.
It was earlier than yesterday, so that’s a good thing.

On the early start front, the guy from San Francisco had an unpleasantly early flight, which meant he was up and moving and trying to be quiet at 4am or so. Or maybe 3am.
Nobody’s 100% sure.

One of the things I’m enjoying about not having made specific plans for the location is that I’m not tied down, so when I ended up chatting to someone from Canberra & someone from Hamilton, Ontario, it wasn’t interfering with any existing plans.
I do intend to do some of the tours, the Golden Circle at least, but there’s time to book those.
Also, I think I need to get a waterproof layer first, at least a jacket of some sort; Warm is covered, Wet … not so much.

Eventually I wandered out into Reykjavik and adopted a process of wandering down interesting roads until they got less interesting. This took me, in the fullness of time, to the waterfront, where I started playing with panorama mode again.

In my defense, look at what it did to that black car.

There are a fair number of monuments in the city, though this is the only one I photographed today.
I do want to go back and take a shot of a monument to public protest in Asturvöllur, because I think it’s the first time I’ve seen such a thing.

I actually engaged in commerce today, in that I bought some stuff from a local market to supplement the enormous amount of pasta in the free boxes. Did have to apologise for not speaking any Icelandic, which lead to a fun conversation with the shopkeeper and some guy who was just hanging around; Could have been the neighborhood nutter, could have been a store worker on a smoke break. Not sure.

Made a food, chatted to someone from the Netherlands who’d just rolled into town after driving the ring-road in faster time than she’d expected (the weather was a bit crap, which greatly reduced the urge to get out of the car).

The latest room-mate is from Canada, and is a deckhand on the ferries. Maybe Toronto?
French room-mate returned from a day-tip to do the Golden Circle, and seemed to enjoy the hell out of it, so that’s encouraging.

Late-arriving guy turned out to also be early-rising guy, which seems like being a glutton for punishment.
There’s a reason for that, but I only found out later.

The Travel Hangover (note: Find a better name for that) was in the mid-phase, so I … stayed in bed and chatted with people as they went about their morning prep, and waited for the painkiller to take hold.
Woman-from-Wales was renting a car to go wandering around Iceland in a strictly on-road capacity, and we nattered about travel places & misc. local oddness while she packed up her stuff.

Eventually, I got up.
I’d well and truly missed the window for hostel breakfast (1550isk), but the free baskets provided me with some ‘instant’ oatmeal, which did the job nicely.

Took a short wander around the Reykjavik Downtown, just so that I could say that I’d left the hostel.
There are many shops who are happy to sell me souvenirs, many cafes and bars and restaurants where the prices are eye-watering at first glance, until you remember that the króna is worth maybe 1.2 NZ cents.
Then you feel better about the prices.
Then you convert the price, and your eyes water again.

Spent the afternoon doing podcast things, which was an oddly useful task to have.
Not a huge amount of concentration required, and it let me sit in the lobby/cafe and soak in the Icelandicness.

Late-arriving-guy turns out to be from Mexico, and is volunteering at the hostel in return for bed & breakfast.
5 hours a day for five days gets him a week, which … I’m not sure whether it’s a good deal or not. I worked out a rough pay rate, and it’s not too bad as an hourly pay.

By the time I got hungry again it was late enough that I really didn’t feel like wandering out, so the ‘abandoned stuff’ boxes provided me with dinner.

The room picked up another room-mate; A French teacher (of mathematics) who picked up a cheap flight deal.
This led to a discussion of cheap flights which elicited a ‘damnit’ from the guy from San Francisco.
The teacher is doing a Golden Circle day tour tomorrow, so I’m going to hold off on booking mine until I hear his report; If there’s something he regrets doing, or missing, it’d be worth knowing.

This post started out more negatively than I’d like, so I’m mixing it up a bit in the hope that this will reduce that a bit.

I’m staying at the Reykjavik Downtown Hostel, which conveniently enough is actually downtown, and which seems like a nice place.

My first afternoon here, during the time I was awake, there was a … Class? Workshop? … on making bags from old t-shirts, as part of a reuse & recycle programme the hostel is a part of.

This goes as far as the bathroom in the hostel reception/cafe, which had a notice about Moon Cups, going into some detail & menting that they’re available for purchase at reception.
They’re very much into reducing waste. There are free food boxes in the kitchen for anything left over, so there’s a lot of pasta, a lot of rice, a variety of cereals, and a phenomenal amount of salt.

I’ve seen book swap shelves at other hostels (San Francisco & Rotorua spring to mind) , though this is the first time I’ve seen then divided by language. Could maybe be tempted by the Dark Angel tie-in novel, in exchange for my J.G.Ballard collection.

There’s also a gear swap box, which seems to have a solid layer of camping gas cannisters.

You can’t take fuel cannisters on a plane, so that part makes sense to me. The jandals, on the other hand, … I got nothing, and those weren’t the only pair.

How do you end up with surplus jandals in Iceland? The country actually has ‘ice’ in the name, which should be an indication that beachwear isn’t going to cut it.

The flight was, for the most part, horrible. I slept badly the night before the flight, which is standard for me, and worse on the flight, which is also annoyingly familiar, so … That wasn’t fun.

Takeoff was very rough, to the extent that I was wondering whether there was an actual problem. Turns out there wasn’t a problem, just Chicago providing a Windy City farewell, but it left me rattled, and that stuck around for most of the rest of the flight. Re-watched “Warm Bodies”, so it’s not like the whole trip was horrible.

Got to Iceland roughly when we were scheduled (the plane was late getting to Chicago, so we departed late) , and getting through immigration was a simple process thanks to my shiny UK passport. Going to have to enjoy that while I can.

It was still dark outside, and I was starting to feel the dehydration and lack of sleep kick in, so I bought the biggest bottle of water I could find and drank it while the sky turned grey & the sun came up. The vague plan was to get a bus to the hostel once the sun came up, so that I could see the view.

Naturally, I fell asleep on the bus.

Still, I made it to the bus terminal, and then onto a smaller bus to get to my hostel, as the bigger vehicles won’t fit down the streets.

Something I’ve noticed on some long flights is that I get a sort of “travel hangover” in the days following. Headaches, odd fever spikes, and generally feeling ill. It happened in London, but I didn’t notice it in Chicago, and who could possibly notice a fever in Dubai.

Well, it happened here too, but this time I was expecting it, and made sure to have no plans for the first few days.

There was no way I’d be able to get into my room/bed at 10am, but I did stash Big Red and hang out, by which I mean sleep, in the lobby/cafe. I didn’t go for lying down on the benches, as some other folk did, mostly because they’d grabbed the ones that weren’t a massive inconvenience for patrons.

After a while, the reception folks gave us access to the guest kitchen & the wee lounge upstairs, because it’d be a more comfortable place to sleep. And possibly so that we’d get the hell out of their nice lobby.

There was already someone crashed out on the sofa, but there was a comfy chair, and I got in a couple of hours of much-needed sleep until check-in. When I got to my room, there was already someone sleeping there. (She’d also arrived that day, but managed to convince them to let her get in early)

Didn’t do much for the rest of the day. Hung out in the lobby cafe, listened to some folks making bags from t-shirts and talking about sustainability issues & gear recycling, that sort of thing.

Roommates turned out to be a (formerly sleeping like the dead) woman from Wales, here on very much a spur of the moment trip with a monumentally cheap flight deal, and a guy from San Francisco who was finishing up his trip, having already done a bunch of sightseeing up North.

Someone arrived at around midnight, and did a pretty good job of being quiet as he located his bed, more or less figured out how the duvet worked, and got into a top bunk without turning on the light.

It was sometime during this stay that I ticked over into a higher category of loyalty membership for the Hilton conglomerate; I’m assuming by nights stayed or total stays, because I’m sure as hell not worth it for dollars spent. Not with the number of cheap advance deals I’m using.

The first thing I did upon checking in was fall asleep for four hours or so. Woke up with my phone plugged in but in the floor, so maybe I fell asleep reading something?

The room faces one of the O’Hare flight paths, so I was able to get this shot of a plane landing. Or a UFO. I’m not sure.

Spent some time sorting out accommodation for the UK;

• An airport hotel for arrival, as it’s a sufficiently early flight out of Iceland that it’ll probably be easier all round to take a very late bus to the airport the night before, rather than leave the hostel at 3am and annoy everyone. That means I’ll be pretty shattered by the time I hit Gatwick, so something walking distance seems like a winning strategy.
  For even more on that winning strategy, it was cheaper to go with an actual hotel over a Yotel cabin. In theory I won’t be able to check in until nearly 4 hours after I land, but I’ve noticed that relatively few hotels will leave you in the lobby if they can avoid it, and I’m a silver member now, so let’s see what that’ll get me.
• Some accommodation in London, at a B&B who’re listed on Hostelworld for some reason, for a little over a week.

The airport hotel did have some amusing decor in places, such as in the elevators.

I was there for a couple of nights, and had had the vague plan of heading back into Chicago’s Downtown for my last day.
Even set out for the train station, but then realised that there was really nothing I wanted or needed to do there, so I went back to the hotel instead, via a 7-11 because holy crap did it get sunny that day.

Caught up with Steve & Moni on my last evening in the US.
The first choice of restaurant was closed for a private function, so we found another, from which we were able to watch them station some staff members outside to fend off unlucky patrons, and then to welcome the multiple shuttlebuses of people arriving for whatever the hell the event was.

Packing up and checking out went as well as could be expected.
Takes up less room this time, which I don’t even pretend to understand, though I did do a thorough check in case I’d forgotten something.

I turned the top compartment of the pack into a repository for occasional items, and took the cold weather stuff out of it’s drybag, but I don’t see how that’d free up much space.

Got to the airport vastly early, mostly because I was getting sick of the Housekeeping folks knocking on the room door to see if I was gone yet. In hindsight, I should have kicked back in the lobby, because Icelandair check-in didn’t open until 4 hours after I got to the airport.
Not my best plan, it would seem.

TSA screening went well though. No issues beyond the usual hair-fondling.

And someone gave me a voucher for a day’s internet access, which is how you’re getting this update.