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Iceland is a strange and cold place.
It is beautiful, definitely, even in the small distance between Keflavik and Reykjavik, but it is cold enough that it's hard to sleep in the car without blankets (especially when there is still water on the floor), and I suspect my impression of it is more affected by my sleep-deprivation than anything else. It did seem vaguely magical and implausible. Even the language.
We drove in to Reykjavik around 8am looking for interesting things one could do in a day, before our evening flight home, and I ended up hailing the National Museum of Iceland as the most plausible. It was indeed interesting, full of the settled history of the island (began in 873 AD, before which it was uninhabited), beautiful medieval and renaissance artifacts and fragments of architecture. I took pictures of several Viking-related things for my knight marshal and his house, as I do know several very Viking-interested players.
It was a big enough museum that it took most of the morning, as my mom slept in the car. We then retraced our steps through Reykjavik (it's a weirdly homogenous town) to find the Viking Museum, which was on the way back to Keflavik before the airport, though there was a singular mountain (I'm sure it was a volcano) standing before a wall of its fellows, looking very Erebor, on the way.
The Viking Museum is full of excellent artifacts and a reconstruction ship that was actually sailed to Newfoundland and back by historians. There is also a very cute audio-guide tour through an exhibit of brightly-colored Norse Mythology, as well as a diorama of the Norse settlement found in the New World. As if that weren't enough, nearby there is a tiny demo farm, with goats and cows and chickens and rabbits, all absurdly adorable. It made for a good afternoon.
Since there wasn't time to sit down for traditional Icelandic fare before heading for the airport, I laughed at the Icelandic menus at the Domino's we ordered from as my mom filled up the car. That language is visually hilarious, though probably only to native English speakers.
We made it to turn the car in and board the plane on time, and it was back to Boston for us.
It is beautiful, definitely, even in the small distance between Keflavik and Reykjavik, but it is cold enough that it's hard to sleep in the car without blankets (especially when there is still water on the floor), and I suspect my impression of it is more affected by my sleep-deprivation than anything else. It did seem vaguely magical and implausible. Even the language.
We drove in to Reykjavik around 8am looking for interesting things one could do in a day, before our evening flight home, and I ended up hailing the National Museum of Iceland as the most plausible. It was indeed interesting, full of the settled history of the island (began in 873 AD, before which it was uninhabited), beautiful medieval and renaissance artifacts and fragments of architecture. I took pictures of several Viking-related things for my knight marshal and his house, as I do know several very Viking-interested players.
It was a big enough museum that it took most of the morning, as my mom slept in the car. We then retraced our steps through Reykjavik (it's a weirdly homogenous town) to find the Viking Museum, which was on the way back to Keflavik before the airport, though there was a singular mountain (I'm sure it was a volcano) standing before a wall of its fellows, looking very Erebor, on the way.
The Viking Museum is full of excellent artifacts and a reconstruction ship that was actually sailed to Newfoundland and back by historians. There is also a very cute audio-guide tour through an exhibit of brightly-colored Norse Mythology, as well as a diorama of the Norse settlement found in the New World. As if that weren't enough, nearby there is a tiny demo farm, with goats and cows and chickens and rabbits, all absurdly adorable. It made for a good afternoon.
Since there wasn't time to sit down for traditional Icelandic fare before heading for the airport, I laughed at the Icelandic menus at the Domino's we ordered from as my mom filled up the car. That language is visually hilarious, though probably only to native English speakers.
We made it to turn the car in and board the plane on time, and it was back to Boston for us.
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