Travel day and First night in Iceland.

We took Icelandair from Toronto Pearson Int. and my, was it a journey in itself. Firstly we were shuttled from the main building to this other smaller, sub-airport. Then someone came to get us and shuttle us back because we weren’t suppose to go there. Returning to the main airport, we waited in a “terminal”, which was really just a hallway with about 20 seats. Everyone was squished in this small area, standing or sitting on the ground, until another shuttle bus came to collect everyone and bring us out to the tarmac. I haven’t traveled to oodles of places, but of the handful that I have, this was my least favourite experience. I was looking forward to checking out the shops in the main area and getting some classic airport food, this unfortunately didn’t happen. I’m not sure if this is normal for Icelandair, or just for our particular flight, but it definitely wasn’t relaxing.

The flight itself was quite nice, they hand you a bottle of Icelandic glacier water as you enter the plane, and provide everyone with a pillow and blanket. Every seat had a tv with a large selection of free entertainment. My husband and I booked “economy” , and while the Icelandair website has different levels of economy (some include baggage and some don’t), the Itravel2000 site does not have that distinction. It doesn’t mention anywhere if luggage is an additional fee so we figured it must come with it. Nope. We had to pay for our bags when we left the Toronto airport.

We essentially took a red eye flight. Leaving Canada at 9pm and arriving in Iceland for 6:40am. I was HOPING to sleep through the flight, but of course, my inability to sleep unless in a quiet and dark room ruined that plan. This made the first day in Iceland very exhausting.

Originally, we had booked to leave Toronto at 2pm but that flight was cancelled and we were bumped to this one. It seems like the majority, if not all, the flights to Iceland are in the evening/night though. The lack of sleep wouldn’t have been an issue if we picked up our campervan immediately after arrival; We could have had a rest before going out to explore the city, but because of the switch in times and days, we were off by several hours and the increase in cost to pick up the van at an earlier time was yet another surprise expense we didn’t want to deal with. We priced out tickets to Reykjavik and back using the Flybus, and luggage storage for the day. It was more affordable, so we went that route. For about 5 hours we walked about the city, checked out some popular structures and spent probably around 2 hours in the Harpa concert hall. What an impressive facility! So many interests facades to it and we really enjoyed the inspiration to the basalt columns; a geological feature special to Iceland.

We returned to the airport for 2:30pm to pick up our campervan.

I partially wished we had just paid the extra fee for an earlier pick up time, but the thing is, there will ALWAYS be surprise costs that pop up over the course of a holiday, and to have 2 big ones right within the first day means you could be really going over budget as the trip progresses. Since we couldn’t avoid the surprise fees for our baggage, we decided to save money with the van in anticipation of having to spend more later. Which we did.

We headed back to Reykjavik to go grocery shopping at a Bonus; stocking up on plenty of food for the next few days of our adventure. After, we decided to switch gears from concrete exploring to checking out the nearby Heiðmörk Park. This was a maybe from our original itinerary but we were easily able to add it in because the flight changes gave us an extra day in Iceland!

Lucky us!

This was a fabulous spot. We spent a few hours here, but could easily have spent an entire day with the amount of trails it has. There’s also a few horse back riding companies nearby that you can book tours with. We enjoyed this park so much we went back to venture into some different areas the next day!