Dagur eitt

 Day One.

Boy oh boy was this the longest 32 hours of my life, but man has it been the best! It started bright and early Friday morning (3:30 am to be exact) when Jacob and I started our trip by driving to his mom’s house so she could take us to the airport. After being dropped off at the airport, we met with Dr. Barineau right outside the JetBlue counter. I went through TSA for the first time, which I was worried about since people say it could take hours, but we weren’t in line long at all. It took us longer to get through all of those ropes! The Atlanta airport was uneventful except for the train shutting the door in Jacob’s face, forcing him to have to take the next one alone. It seems like I was the only one anxious about this, Jacob was a pro. Things really got crazy when we boarded. I just couldn’t shake the nerves, and the plane was so loud and scary. I did it though! I survived the flight to New York City with minimal tears right before take-off. Flying isn’t that bad, it is exactly like riding on the field trip charter busses in high school if you ignore the going 700 mph part. I did learn to take-off is horrible, it’s way too fast.

When we arrived at JFK in New York, we had 7 hours to kill, so we took our time to find a place to eat. Which didn’t really work out for us since we found out the hard way that you have to go through security to get into each terminal. So we had to settle for a food court with a Mcdonald's and a Chinese restaurant. I don’t have anything bad to say about JFK as an airport, however, there is absolutely nothing to do and the chairs are ridiculously uncomfortable. With all the excitement I had for the trip, I felt every second tick by the 7 hours we had until we got onto our plane taking us to Iceland. Boarding wasn’t as smooth as it was in Atlanta, they didn’t board by groups but instead by chunks of seat numbers. That would’ve been fine except for the fact that everyone was huddled up forming their own chaotic line trying to get on first. The airplane that took us to Iceland was massive! Instead of the two rows of three like we had in Atlanta, there were two rows of two on either side by the window and a group of three smack dab in the middle. Dr. Barineau, Jacob, and I were assigned the middle row of three, with me being in the middle of them. We had a red-eye flight and had already been up for hours, so all three of us needed to sleep on the plane. As you could guess, none of us got much sleep. We were all three squished together and the person in front of Dr. Barineau reclined their seat all the way back. Jacob says he got about three hours of sleep, Dr. Barineau said he got about thirty minutes, and I got roughly two hours of some of the worst sleep in my whole life. But that was all okay because we landed in Iceland at 6:15 am!

The aesthetics of the Iceland airport are incredible, it looks really cool rather than really stuffy like the two I had been previously. You could just tell that this day was going to be amazing, even if we were all exhausted. We had to take a shuttle to the rental car place from the airport. We had to wait outside for a while and it was COLD. We could see the snow across the horizon coming our way, and Jacob and I rushed to pull our big coats out of our luggage. It’s a good thing we did because as soon as we got the car and headed to the grocery store, a large snow cloud settled itself right on top of us. Dr. Barineau impressed me with his navigation skills, since we were having problems with the GPS and all of our phone services, he got us around Reykjavík and back to the rental car company to pick up a hot spot. The sights were breathtaking. You would just look out of the car window and there would be a couple of small volcanos just existing there. It was really wild and beautiful. I wish I wasn’t so exhausted, because I would have been able to enjoy the sights that I saw on day one. Our geology exhibition started at the “Bridge Between Continents” where on one side you could stand on the North American Plate and the Eurasian Plate on the other. It was really cool to see the basalts and even cooler to hear Dr. Barineau talk about the actual “bridges” and how there isn’t one place on the island you can say that since the mid-ocean ridge has actually jumped. Iceland has a bunch of spots you can park to check out the local scenery, and we stopped at many: a maar, spackle craters, and a spot on the coast where the waves are massive! We were exhausted from a long day of travel, so we headed to the hotel. But not before we ate dinner first at, Aktu Taktu, a hamburger and hotdog place. I was told I HAVE to try the hotdogs, so I got one. The hotdog was good, however, Icelandic mustard and American mustard are veryyyy different. Icelandic mustard is very sweet and a very unfortunate-looking light brown color. It wasn’t bad necessarily, but I don’t really like sweet hotdogs I’ve found.

The hotel we stayed at was nice. It was only us in the house for the night. I got my own bathroom though since I was the only person upstairs. Jacob and I joked about my Harry Potter room because of its small size. But the bed was very comfortable and I had no complaints. I did sleep with my head at the foot of the bed though. There was a radiator at the head of the bed that was making me a bit nervous. The shower in this hotel took some effort. We think their hot water comes directly from a geothermal pool and it is HOT. When you went to put the cold water on it would almost completely cancel out the hot water. So it was a long time of standing around waiting for the temperature to be tolerable. The toilets are weird in Iceland as well. They’re square for one and the water in the bowl is basically on the ground! I do like the buttons to flush though, it’s nicer than the handle. I wrote my blog post and was asleep by 7:30 pm.