Sunday, May 17 — Since arriving in Iceland, we haven’t been sleeping well. It didn’t get dark until around midnight, and it got light again at 0300. While the hotel did have blackout curtains, the curtains exactly fit the inside of the windows — which meant there was a ring of light all the way around the perimeter of the window. We’ve been having a hard time falling asleep/staying asleep while it was still light out.

This morning, no one was in a hurry to get moving. Eric and Keith went to the spa for a short while. We finally headed out at 1045. We waked back downtown, taking different streets that were closer to the waterfront. Check out this cool ship that we got a glimpse of.

While there were still plenty of adorable buildings on our route, we found these streets less charming since they had quite a lot of modern, blocky buildings. One of the things that we were really excited about was that the leaves had begun to come out the trees. We’ve never seen spring happen in real time before. We marveled that the trees had been barren on Wednesday, and,only four days later were full of new life.

This time, our destination was a cafe called Kaffe Brenn Slan that was across from a bar called The Big Lebowski, on the same street as the tourist booking agency.

The cafe had real candles on the table, and Keith singed his hair when he leaned over the table! At the booking agency the other day, Christi had picked up a self-guided walking tour map. After breakfast, we tried to do the walking tour. We followed the road we were on for a ways. Most of the buildings were adorable, and the views of the waterfront from the cross streets were stunning.

Eventually, we realized we’d missed the street we were supposed to have turned to go up the hill to the church. Rather than backtrack, we just zig zagged up streets until we reached the top. It looked to be mostly residential, with an eclectic mix of building types.

We found the church with no difficulty, though by not following the correct route, we’d missed the famous rainbow road. Here was the front of the church.

And the view from the side.

This was a statue of Lefir Ericsson in front.

We thought the church looked kind of creepy, so we didn’t go inside. Instead, we… to be continued…