Accidental Adventure: Day 6

Day 6: Ireland, Iceland, and Insane luck

We were supposed to be landing back in the good old US of A. I was supposed to be driving to work for a two day meeting with my whole office. We were, instead, landing in Dublin and using more of those Hilton points to stay for free at a property with a free airport shuttle. Yes!

My brother hadn't been to Europe before our trip, so the prospect of getting to visit our motherland, if only 15 hours to drink some Guinness and sleep, was thrilling. Knowing we'd get to see yet ANOTHER country, this one new to both of us, and explore during the daylight was the cherry on top. Before we went to bed in our freebie hotel, I did some digging and learned that the famous Blue Lagoon of Iceland is less than an hour from the airport in Reykjavik. We also learned that visiting the Blue Lagoon is VERY EXPENSIVE. We're talking $100 for a few hours of swimming in some hot water. Did we plan to do it anyway? Obviously. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We made it to the Dublin airport and onto our flight without issue. Thank goodness. When we landed in Iceland things were pretty murky - all that rain we had avoided so beautifully in Scotland seemed to have caught up with us. We got our itty bitty rental car without issue and hit the road.

We found the rain!

Oddny's Pool

Finally putting those rain coats we'd been carrying around to good use!

So we check out this cool plaque at the side of the road, see some very cool rocky coastline, and generally get soaked. Iceland is very cool, but very wet. We decide perhaps we should migrate more quickly to the warmth of the Blue Lagoon though.

Blue Lagoon sign

As we pull into the parking lot, the rain clears up. We make our way inside and we're feeling pretty excited. It's very chilly, but the water is gonna be a balmy 98-104 degrees Fahrenheit. They rent bathing suits, so the fact that we're utterly unprepared to hang out in a giant, accidentally occurring hot tub is NBD. There's a free drink included with our entrance fee. We're so good to go.

The thing about the Blue Lagoon is that it's accidentally man made. It's the offshoot water from a power plant down the road that picked up too many minerals and plugged up the lava flow that was supposed to re-absorb it. So instead of this hot water seeping back in, the silica in it made it into a lovely little pool with a nice, smooth bottom. Apparently a dermatologist made tons of money when he realized that a local guy was going and swimming there (it was supposed to be closed off as an environmental disaster site) and his eczema was clearing up. He bought the land and charges tourists like me and Anj $100 a shot to swim around in the hot water. Brilliant capitalism.

There are employees now whose job it is to swim around with bowls of silica mud that they encourage the tourists to smear all over their faces. Apparently this is good for the skin. Anj and I make friends with one of these employees and we're having so much fun chatting with him that he gives us free drink coupons! And tells us all about life in Iceland. And gets into the politics of hydroelectric power and hunting and education. It was fascinating, and really made me think that more of the world's problems could probably be sorted out amicably if we'd all just hop into warm geothermal pools and slather silica on ourselves and talk things through over beers.

So as we're chatting with this fellow, something magical happens. The sun comes out. We go from a rainy, chilly, windy day to this:

It was unreal. We couldn't stop giggling. How did we EVER get to be so lucky? Missed flight turns into A+ adventure. Our past selves must've had AMAZING karma.

After several hours of soaking we finally decided that we had to get back to the airport because we were NOT missing another flight.

Water outside the Blue Lagoon on the lava flows

By the side of the road near the airport

Because we were so far north, it didn't matter that our flight didn't leave til nearly midnight (more delays, donchaknow). We made some new friends in the duty free shop, marveled at our extraordinary trip, and promised that we'd be back. We mean to keep that promise.