Iceland Day 1: Flight from Seattle

We just spent 5-or-so days in Iceland with our friends John and his wife Audrey.  It was quite the adventure and I wanted to share.  Enjoy!

Day 1

It’s departure day morning and we’re already exhausted.  Up until near-midnight packing, and still not done.  I’m frenziedly trying to neaten things up while simultaneously chucking the piles of clothes on the floor into gargantuan, XXL-size Ziploc bags, pausing here and there to kneel on them, bearing down until all the air is gone in a great whoosh, and carefully sealing the zipper.  Vacuum-packed clothes: the only way to travel.

Normally I wouldn’t care about our place being de-cluttered before a trip, but neatening up has to happen this time – unbeknownst to Jason, I’ve hired cleaners to come through and tidy up our apartment while we’re away.  Sometimes you just need to come home to a clean kitchen and freshly made bed.  But it won’t be much good if they come over to vacuum and find that we’ve exploded our closet all over the living room.  Definitely not helpful.

I feel obligated to provide a picture with every post.  So here - have a picture of our packing process.  And also the lower half of my husband.  Awkward.

Also, never let it be said that we are light packers.  I’d love to tell you that I’m low maintenance: radiant face and perfect hair, right from rolling out of bed in the morning.  That would be a flagrant lie.  This skin?  This hair?  Requires work.  Requires products.  And if some of them don’t come along for the trip, I’ll look like a vagrant the whole while and they won’t let me back into the hotel.  True facts.  Don't listen to Jason if he tries to tell you otherwise.

At least this time I can blame it on the snow pants and the insulated jackets and the scarves and the windbreakers and the handwarmers.  Yes.  It’s definitely their fault.

Cramming protein bars into our mouths, we’re halfway out the door when we realize the big suitcase is definitely too heavy.  We've been players in this particular travesty before – sorry, haven't gotten to that bit of the Ireland story yet – and do not relish the thought of it transpiring again. 

In any case, there's a 50 pound limit per checked bag, and we can barely move this one.  Sigh.  Time to pull out the third suitcase.  After haphazardly chucking some of the weightier toiletries snow pants into bag number three, we’re finally on our way.  Thankfully, Icelandair has an amazingly lenient checked bag policy (2 per person!  For free!)  And now – now we'll have space for souvenirs.

Onward to the airport!  Jason’s parents gave us a ride, and it's an easy trip through security.  We meet John and Audrey on the other side and find out it wasn't quite smooth sailing for them – Audrey broke her leg 5 weeks before the trip, so with screws and a titanium plate in her leg, she was fully expecting to set off the metal detector.  What she wasn't expecting was that her hands and boot would randomly test positive for TNT.

So, she got to be carted off in her wheelchair to a back security room, making her the first among my friends to have the dubious privilege of having seen an airport security room (there are apparently lots of gloves.  Ick.)  After some time (and a consultation with an explosives expert), they determined that she and John looked like Upstanding Citizens™ and let them go.  Nevertheless, it’s their first trip abroad and already full of new experiences!  In all seriousness, she is an absolute trooper.  Braving international travel for the very first time on crutches can’t possibly be easy.

We board the plane, and, as far as airlines go, I immediately prefer Icelandair to Aer Lingus; in comparison to what felt like severe water rationing to and from Ireland, we're all given a decent-sized bottle of delicious Icelandic water.  It definitely beats the over-chlorinated airport tap water sloshing around in our four water bottles (flying is rough when you've got a 96+ oz quota to meet.) 

Not unlike our other international flying experience, the in-flight entertainment is quite good (I definitely re-watched The Matrix for the first time in years.  Fantastic.)

All-in-all, the flight from Seattle isn’t too bad – a direct 7 hours and change.  Time still crawls by in that way it only seems to do when aboard a plane, and I'm again struck by the fancy that without any kind of exterior reference point beyond the covered windows, I'm simply stuck in a very noisy and incredibly slow teleportation device.  Planes do weird things to my brain.