A Travel Blog
We spent a two-day layover in Iceland in May of 2016, on the way to our 10th wedding anniversary trip in London. We stayed near the center of Reykjavik and toured the Golden Circle.
Our Reykjavik layover was short, so we only had a few hours on our last evening to explore the downtown area.
This was the colourful corner of Klapparstigur, Týsgata and Njálsgata near our hotel.
As in most cold-weather countries, Icelanders consume a lot of coffee. We visited Reykjavik Roasters, one of the city’s most serious coffee places, where I enjoyed a very nice and very hot $6 Americano.
On our way to London, we took advantage of the Icelandair stopover option, which lets you extend a short changeover at the Reykjavik airport into a stay of up to 7 days for no extra airfare. We took two full days, spending the first day in Reykjavik, then taking a Golden Circle bus tour on the second day.
Our overnight flight landed very early, so we dropped our bags at the hotel and headed out to explore drizzly Reykjavik in a haze of jetlag. Impossible to miss almost anywhere in the city is Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church in Iceland. It took 41 years to build, with construction starting in 1945 and ending in 1986.
It cost 900 ISK (about $9) to go up the tower in an elevator, where we were rewarded with photogenic views of otherwise low-rise Reykjavik.