iceland – day 1 – v rocks & reads

06/20/24-07/01/24

backstory…

I went to Iceland with my dad in 2017 as a high school graduation trip (he had the idea that we could each go on a trip after graduation with him to a destination that we get to choose), and it was AMAZING. we were there for ~10 days and camped the entire time.

I was mainly motivated by the volcanoes and waterfalls back then, but I was interested in geology to a certain extent, I just didn’t know that much about it. as I started to get more interested in geology and began studying it, I wanted to go back to iceland more and more, because it’s a really unique location geologically. It was formed by a mantle plume/hot spot and also lies smack on top of the mid-atlantic ridge, which is a divergent plate boundary.

in april, as I was finishing my final semester before field camp, I really wanted to go on a graduation trip with Jordan (and I thought I was getting a LOT of extra grants/money to help pay for field camp – spoiler alert: I got ~$1500 less than I was expecting), and Iceland was at the top of my list. I started tracking flights to Iceland from PHX (it was way cheaper than out of SLC) the first week of April and we bought tickets less than 2 weeks later. I think literally 9 days after I proposed the idea to Jordan, we booked our flights! the downside to this was that I was heading into finals and field camp, so I had very minimal time to plan, which is usually something that I looooveeeeee to do! I was not as organized for the trip as I would have liked to be, which was disappointing. but…. we had a BLAST!!!!!! seriously, it was so so so fun and I wish we could go back and do it all again.

anyway….

trip to az + iceland day 1

arizona

we flew out of provo to the mesa-gilbert airport and spent the night at Jordan’s dad’s house while they were out of town in order to leave the next morning to keflavik

on the plane 🙂 jordy flying a drone on his phone even though he flies real drones…

at david’s house we scrounged around for some snacks, but ended up getting too hungry and finding no food we wanted to eat, BUT we did not have access to a car, so Jordan biked like 4 miles round trip to pick up food for us…. he is a hero. (my hero)

bonus:

iceland day 1

keflavik

we had kind of crazy start, because our flight was delayed, then delayed again, and then… canceled. we were pretty pissed, and I was a bit stressed (shocker), but they ended up switching us to fly United (instead of ArirCanada) through Chicago instead of Toronto, and our flight was actually later in the morning with a shorter layover, so we kinda scored.

brontosaurus!!! (i think, i can’t remember). also this is the same airport we stopped in on our way to switzerland with my family (:

we basically flew overnight, and then (because of the time difference) landed in keflavik at 8am… so we were running on very low sleep

but LOOK!!!!! we made it to ICELAND!!!

also, I skipped over us picking up our rental car, which was kind of stressful! they have like a million warnings about damage to the vehicle and what insurance to get lol

reykjavik

after a couple quick stops on the keflavik peninsula, we drove to reykjavik to go grocery shopping, pick up some rental equipment, and explore! actually we might have grocery shopped in keflavik but I don’t remember lol

thingvellir

setting up camp

oxararfoss

exploring

after setting up camp, etc., we drove around and explored a little bit of thingvellir!

bedtime

after our first big huge awesome day in iceland, we tried to cook dinner and found out the stupid propane didn’t work, so we had to make the saddest, lamest sandwiches in the world. but! we were still in iceland!!! eating sandwiches!!!