2 October 2016

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2 October 2016

Octoberrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

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Sunday 2 October 2016--My flight lands at Keflavík at 4:00am, a half-hour early. The terminal is very quiet at that hour, even with incoming WOW flights, but the duty-free shop is open. I grab a bottle of Nikka, a Japanese whisky, for a roadie. By the time I get to the luggage carousel, bags are just starting to emerge, and mine is one of the first. Things seem to be going my way.

I have a room booked in a guesthouse in Reykjavík for tonight, but can't check in until 2:00pm or so. I was dreading trying to kill half a day in town after an overnight flight, with my luggage in tow. For once, it made sense to me to book a room for the night before arrival, something I've resisted in the past. The room in my guesthouse isn't available, but I found a relatively inexpensive hotel near the airport. I figure if I get in by 5:00am, I can get six hours of sleep, and arrive in Reykjavík at midday, reasonably well-rested. The kink in the plan is that I can't find the shuttle I've booked to take me there. No one in the airport seems to know anything about it. Eventually, I have an exchange of emails with the hotel, and get straightened out. I'd had the right spot for the shuttle, but the van had simply not been there. Evidently my online booking had got lost. But the driver answers the hotel's call, and picks me up within minutes. Good thing I finally broke down and bought a smartphone earlier this year.

The hotel is on the old US Air Force base that was the precursor to the airport. It is, in fact, called Base Hotel. It's pretty, uh, basic, but comfortable enough. What sparse decor there is is military-themed, including photos and artifacts from its former life. (A reviewer on TripAdvisor notes that the place is "a little hard to find but it is decorated in camo so you can see it a long ways off." But isn't camo supposed to...oh, never mind.) Having got in later than scheduled, I'm allowed to stay an hour past nominal check-out. I sleep well.

The shuttle takes me back to the airport, where I catch the Flybus for Reykjavík. It's a gray day, and even though it's well after noon, the drive into town has that early morning twilight feel. The sky is gray, the sea is gray, the lava fields are gray, the road itself is gray. The damn grass is gray. I can imagine that the first-time tourist might, at this point, start to think he's made a terrible mistake. But the seemingly drab landscape fills me with a sense of anticipation. This is, after all, the first day of my trip, here at last, after months of dreaming and planning. It's too bad that I'm only spending one night here--I had three nights booked last week in a flat in Vesturbær, now canceled--but it doesn't really matter. I'm on the move again, across the arc of the North Atlantic.

My new guesthouse is on the east side of town, a couple streets up from the pond, a short walk from the Flybus terminal. It's a homey, family-run place--Mom and Pop are sitting in the front room when I arrive. Get my stuff settled and go out for a walkabout. Do a little idle shopping, have a kebab, and inevitably head to the pub. I'm looking for the new digs of Micro Bar, which up until this year was housed in the breakfast room of a hotel. I find it now in a basement room beneath Restaurant Reykjavík. Despite the lack of windows, I like it. Intend to have one and go off on a pub crawl, but I fall into conversation with some fellow tourists--a couple of lads from Milwaukee, a couple from DC, and two couples from Ontario (Hamilton and Windsor). The bartender tries to teach us a few words of Icelandic. There is much laughter, and more than a few pints.

Finally, I stumble off in search of Bryggjan Brugghús, a new brewpub in the port neighborhood. It's one of those big warehouse-type restaurants that I'm not really crazy about, but I have a pint at the bar, as well as a nibble. Well, the cheese plate is a good bit more than a nibble. Then off to Mikkeller & Friends, which I find closed, as it was when I stopped by last year. Is it ever open? I manage a nightcap at Skúli Craft Bar, another new place featuring local beer. How things have changed here...when I first visited in 1999, I hung out in the Dubliner (which is still there, next door to Microbar), and considered myself lucky to get a pint of Guinness. The burgeoning beer scene has gone hand-in- hand with an explosion in tourism. About 200,000 people visited the country in 1999; by 2015, the figure was over 1.25 million. When I told people I was going to Iceland back then, the most common response was, "Iceland? Why do you want to go to there?" No one asks that anymore; Iceland has been discovered. There are, of course, good and bad things that go along with that.

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