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<\/a><\/p>\nThe weather was grey and rainy, and that wouldn’t change for the duration of the trip, but the scenery was unreal.\u00a0 The southwest corner of Iceland is basically one big lava flow, and every time I got out of the car it felt like I had another planet to myself.<\/p>\n
One of the sights you can see in this part of the world is the place where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge<\/a>\u00a0comes ashore.\u00a0 The Ridge is the place where two tectonic plates are separating, and most of the time it has the common decency to stay underwater where you can’t see it.\u00a0 But not in Iceland.\u00a0 Oh no.\u00a0 Not only is their plate separation flagrantly above ground where everyone can see it, they’ve even built a bridge over it.<\/p>\n That’s Europe on your left and North America on your right, for those keeping score at home.<\/p>\n Once again, Leigh and I had decided that it would be a great<\/em> idea for the pair of us to arrive at a location in a foreign country where our phones didn’t work by separate routes.\u00a0 After all, it wasn’t at all terrifying the last time.<\/a>\u00a0However, in this case, the location in question was an airport, my rental car did not get stuck behind a flock of goats, and we reunited without a hitch.<\/p>\n From the airport, it’s about a 40 minute drive into Reykjavik proper, where Leigh had found us an adorable little AirBnB right next to the most famous building in the city, the\u00a0Hallgr\u00edmskirkja<\/a>. (And if you think I’m not cutting and pasting all of these Iceland words into the blog, you’re nuts.) Since we each took a picture of it, I’ll let you, the reader, decide which one you liked better.<\/p>\n I’m not, of course, going to tell you who took which one, because then I’d have to admit that I took the one with the trash can in it.<\/p>\n To finish our first day in the land of Ice, we took a restaurant recommendation from a good friend of ours who knows from food.\u00a0 We did an 8 course tasting menu at Nostra, which is a restaurant\u00a0much<\/em> too hip to have allowed us in.\u00a0 There must have been a mistake somewhere.<\/p>\n Still, the food was amazing.\u00a0 I don’t recall everything, but we had pressed lamb with tomatoes four ways and salmon roe, celeriac combined with celeriac puree and beef, arctic char with parsnip two ways, and a bunch of other things that were all too amazing to mention.\u00a0 Leigh and I don’t go to fine dining restaurants that often, because we live in a mitten, but if we could go places like this more often, we’d have no money left at all.<\/p>\n One more peculiarity of this trip – since we were there right around the solstice, it never got dark.\u00a0 Reyjavik is below the arctic circle, so the\u00a0middle<\/em> of the sun went below the horizon, but the whole thing never entirely set.\u00a0 Walking home at 10 at night looked just like noon the same day.<\/p>\n Bonus Iceland Picture:<\/p>\n We started Thursday separately – I took a red-eye flight from Detroit and landed at about 11 AM in Iceland, and Leigh was to join me a few hours later.\u00a0 Given a rental car and a bit of time to … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"