Day 5 - Reykjavik to NYC
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Our last day in Iceland was a little bit anticlimactic after the awesomeness of the previous day and night. We did a little sightseeing and shopping around Reykjavik before our afternoon flight.
We started the day by visiting the Reykjavik Botanical Garden. As you might expect, there wasn't much going on outside in the middle of winter, and the greenhouse was closed, but we did see a pretty duck pond surrounded by snow. Then we drove to Perlan, a development with a restaurant and observation deck built on top of hot water storage tanks on a hill outside the city. There were some more sculptures outside, and some nice views of the city from the observation deck.
The weather was clear, so we walked down to the harbor to take a few pictures of the extended sunrise. Then we walked through the shopping district one last time (Julie wanted to find an Icelandic wool sweater) and saw a few interesting things, like a cool pattern painted in a tunnel between two buildings, a Pac-Man/Donkey Kong mural, and a "single glove speed dating" site – I should have added my lonely glove to it, but didn't.
And that was it for our Iceland adventure. We went to the airport and returned our rental car, went through security, did a little more shopping at the airport, and then flew back to New York. The way the flight schedule worked out, it was impractical to try to make it all the way back to Atlanta on Sunday night, so we stayed in a hotel (that was only mildly dodgy) near the airport. We had dinner in the room and settled in for the evening, with one more day to go before returning to Atlanta.