Relative Something

We booked our airline tickets more than a year in advance of our chosen dates. We flew to Detroit to catch a plane to Reykjavik. That doubled my challenge of getting through security checkpoints without major complications. Cyndie and the Wilkuses enjoy TSA precheck privileges, so they went off and left me to fend with the standard security.

Yes, I forgot things in my pockets and had to double back and make a second go of it. Rookie traveler.

We flew overnight with a plan to sleep on the plane and be ready and raring to go upon arrival. That only sort of worked. We were all a bit bleary-eyed as we navigated our way through the airport and to the car rental office.

The process wasn’t exactly smooth, but it ultimately played out flawlessly. The agent mentioned car doors getting wrecked, and I asked how often that happens.

“At least one per week,” was her reply.

That triggered our establishing a mantra of Doors/Diesel/Dings to remind us of important details about our vehicle. Mike did the lion’s share of the driving and did a great service of parking in a direction that kept the wind pushing our doors closed instead of ripping them open.

We packed all our gear in and headed for the first scheduled stop on the itinerary Cyndie created: a bakery for coffee and pastries. Next, we found a grocery store and loaded up on lunch fixings. From there, we headed east along the south coast for our first waterfall, Seljalandsfoss.

The only way I knew that name is by looking it up just now on a copy of our itinerary. I was helpless against the local language and didn’t even try to cope with pronouncing the collections of letters forming words. If I heard someone else speak, I could try to mimic the sounds I was hearing, but the results were rarely pretty.

The waterfall, however, was gorgeous.

This beauty offers the feature of being able to walk behind to see the falls from underneath. We put on our rain pants and jackets and joined the conga line of tourists snapping photos and getting doused.

What did I do? I took a photo looking straight up, of course.

It’s a little disorienting.

It was official. We had arrived for the first adventure of our visit to Iceland. We learned how to pay for parking at each attraction. We made use of our rain pants right away. The rest of that first day included another waterfall, a lighthouse, a black beach, and, ultimately, a modern hotel on the Ring Road in the village of Vik.

After dinner at the hotel, sleep came easy.

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