October 21, 2003

European Vacation Part 3: The Blue Lagoon

We grabbed the car and in a few short minutes we were headed southwest towards Grindavik (just south of where we'd landed):

map of iceland
to check out Blaa Lonio (The Blue Lagoon), which according to their website is " a natural geothermal spa surrounded by a lava field and black sandy beaches."

chris a, fatty — 10:45am: When we had driven into Reykjavik earlier that morning the darkness had hidden the alieness of the Icelandic countryside. In the daylight, it was absolutely breathtaking. Rocky fields made up of lava rock covered in electric green moss stretched in all directions. We were so blown away that we eventually decided to pull over and take some pictures. (Time Elapsed With No Sleep: 20h 15m).

The pictures really don't even do the colors justice.

Chris on top of a rock pile.

chris a, fatty — Fatty and Chris walking back down to our car.

A half an hour or so later, we started seeing this huge steam cloud on the horizon. We wondered if it could be the spa, but we we're like "Nah, it can't be noticible from this far away." But as we got closer, we discovered we were wrong - the huge naturally heated pools were throwing up immense clouds of steam visible from miles away.

When we turned off the highway onto the smaller road that led up to the spa, the land started to become dotted with smaller, geothermal pools.

We pulled over again to take pics (and enjoy the bad-in-a-good way sulfur stink).

chris a, fatty — Chris and The Fatty.

chris a, fatty — Here's the entrance to the spa. The spa is this huge, brand new building that surrounds the 16,000 sqaure foot swimming lagoon.

chris a, fatty — Oh, and it was really windy.

chris a, me — In order to get from the parking lot to the actual building that surrounds the spa, you have to walk this long path that cuts through piles of lava rock.

Here's the huge deck you walk out on from the locker rooms.

This is one of the few pictures that accurately depicts the electric cobalt color of the water. It was like nothing I'd ever seen.

Here's the last pic I took before the air temperature forced me to stash my camera and make a beeline for the insanely awesome 110°F water.

The water is super-salty (it's about two thirds saltwater and one third fresh water) and our 90 minute swim made me the pruniest I'd ever been.

Oh, and this was so badass - when you paid admission into the Spa, they gave you an braclet that was your key to the digitally programmable electric lockers. All you had to do was put your shit in any locker, close the door, and then hold your bracelet against this little sensor on the locker door and it would lock the locker. All you had to do to open it was put the bracelet back against the sensor.

fatty, me — The swim also made us totally stupid tired. (No sleep + Warm Dehydrating Bath = Almost Inability to Speak). But we rallied yet again to go outside and climb the big hill that over looks the spa complex.

Here's the wooden walkway that led up to the top of the over look.

The view from halfway up.

chris a, fatty, me — Look at our cold, red, saltwater-irritated faces. Ouchie.

fatty — The lagoon from three quarters of the way up.

chris a — Chris-san practices his crane kick.

A view of the spa building from three quarters of the way up.

See that building in the background? That's a powerplant takes geothermally heated water from the earth and uses it to both heat homes and to convert into electricity.

A view across the lagoon from the top of the hill.

Panning right towards the powerplant...

...and then this is what the landscape looked like 180° in the other direction. (To get a better idea, click here to check out the awesomely ghetto panorama I stitched together).

The whole idea of stopping in Iceland on the way to London had been Grant's idea. So right up until this point we'd been laughing at the irony of the fact that he'd been missing out on all the fun - but the Blue Lagoon was so amazing that it just stopped being funny. Sorry you weren't there to see it with us, Lil' Buddy! We missed you! After we were done up taking pics on the hill, we climbed down, grabbed our car and headed back towards the airport at Keflavik.

chris a — We returned the rental car, made it through customs and headed to the cafeteria to grab something to eat and drink five liters of water each.

Mmmmmmmmm....reindeer burgers! With cheese!

3:41pm (Time Elapsed With No Sleep: 25h 11m). After lunch we got to the gate with about 20 minutes to spare before our boarding call which I figured was the perfect chance to finally chance to catch a quick nap. Right after Fatty took this picture, both he and Chris fell asleep and we almost missed our flight! We woke up just in time to catch the last boarding call.

Still totally exhausted, we boarded the plane confident that our three hour flight to London would give us plenty of time to catch up on some sleep before meeting up with Charlene and hitting the town for a night of partying. Little did we know...