Annnd we’re off! First stop: Iceland (3-day layover en route to Germany)
The first “day” was sooooo looong. Stay tuned for details below but first, here’s a preview of some picture-perfect-blog-type pictures of what our first day in Iceland looked like:
And here are some pictures of reality:
We started with a two-hour drive to the airport in Raleigh. After hearing horror stories of overrun airports and lack of staffing, we made sure to arrive plenty early. We were blessed to walk right up to JetBlue check-in counter with NO line. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Then we walked right through security! NO line again. It was almost too fast–I didn’t have time to prep all the things they want you to do. Although, they did tell me afterward that I didn’t even need to remove liquids and electronics from my carry-on bags. I guess I made it harder than it needed to be. That’s reality. So other than a long wait at the gate since we were so early, the airport was easy! Feeling blessed already
Our first flight was slightly late leaving Raleigh, about half an hour, but they made up some time in the air. We had a short 1-hour layover in Boston, but we really wanted to hit the airport lounge. In all our travels, we have never ever experienced an airport lounge, but our new travel credit card, Capital One Venture X, gives us access to a few lounges. Interested? Use my link to get one yourself and I get a referral bonus: https://capital.one/3P1hwkO
Luckily, to go from the terminal we landed in (terminal C) to the international terminal (terminal E), we didn’t have to leave security and the lounge was on the way to our gate (it happened to be the Air France lounge). We were there all of 15 minutes but it was enough time to have a free glass of wine, some snacks, and quite a few brownies!
The flight from Boston to Reykjavik/Keflavik, Iceland, was supposed to be 5 hours but we somehow did it in only 4 hours. Not much time to sleep! I think Celeste and Dominic didn’t even try to sleep and the rest of us slept maybe a couple of hours. But we hit the ground running anyway!
At the airport, we got our bags, stopped to pick up the mobile wifi device we had ordered online–Trawire (**highly recommend**) https://iceland.trawire.com/, and then found the luggage lockers to drop off our backpacks. https://www.luggagelockers.is/keflavik-airport.html Why? We had reserved a large 9-passenger van, but with 6 of us plus my brother, Matt, joining us later, we didn’t know if we would have room for all our luggage. We packed in such a way that our stuff for Iceland was separate from the rest of our stuff so we could leave the big bags at the airport. I might post on our packing strategies later. Then we found our shuttle driver to take us to the rental car agency–another surprise was that he was there even though we were an hour earlier than we anticipated!
Next post: all we did on Day Two, our first day in Iceland, even though we hadn’t slept!
I loved our van – it was way more spacious than it could have otherwise been. Got lucky there!
It was awesome. And you did a great job driving it too