Last Morning in Iceland

[kevin_standlee]

After breakfast, while Lisa (who really isn't much improved) was taking a bath and otherwise getting ready for us to leave, I walked over to the pharmacy where we got Lisa's cough syrup the day we arrived and bought a package of face masks to cover her cough. Based on the past three nights, she's going to continue coughing for a while, and it's best if she doesn't cough over everyone around us (including me). Her bronchitis is still bedeviling her. On the way back, I took a few pictures of the area around our hotel.



This is Austurstræti, one of the main city-center streets of Reykjavik.



Here's the City Centre Hotel, where we spent the last three nights. This is a modest but comfortable 3-star hotel. Here's a picture that I think is our room or of a clone of it. It's not a five-star hotel, but we don't need that level of luxury. Having enough space, and a refrigerator, and a bathtub, and a place to store things, was more than we had in any of the other hotels on this stay. The only regret was paying near-rack rate of more than $300/night. Iceland isn't cheap, but I might have been able to have done better if I'd shopped around more.



The Laundromat Cafe was diagonally across the street from our hotel. It's a good thing that we weren't counting on using its coin laundry. (We'd done laundry on our first day in Belfast, the approximate halfway point on this trip.) There are apparently no other public laundries in Iceland, and this cafe-with-coin-laundry closed a few months ago with no obvious sigh of reopening.

In about an hour we check out of the hotel, after which we have an hour to kill before catching our bus to Keflavik Airport. That will get us there roughly three hours before our flight to SFO, but that's just as well, as we'll want more time than ever to clear Terrorization with Lisa's cold and the usual medical issues. Also, there's something she's interested in buying in the duty free area, and with our Saga class upgrade, we'll have use of the Saga lounge, which, as befits the Icelandair hub airport, is very nicely appointed.

After our first trip to Iceland two years ago, we said "that was nice, but we don't need to do it again." We were wrong. I hope we get a chance to come back, and possibly for a longer stay when neither of us is sick.

Comments

[totient]

Oh no! The Laundromat was, besides being a laundromat, also a *fantastic* breakfast spot and I am sad that it's gone.

[totient]

Also FYI there is a public laundry in the KEX hostel. KEX has private rooms in addition to shared ones and is my favorite budget accommodation in Reykjavik, albeit that "budget" still means a rack rate of ISK18,900 / USD150 for a private room for two people.