August 21 - Reykjavík

Arriving in the early morning in Iceland, we had a moderately busy first day in Reykjavík as we attempted to stave off jet-lag and wait to be able to check into our apartment: a bit of touristing, race package pickup, wireless router pickup, etc.

The tourism element took much less than expected since we're really in Iceland to see some natural beauty and couldn't be bothered with the various museums in town, especially when tired after an overnight flight (not even the much-venerated Icelandic Phallological Museum). We took a quick trip to the top of Hallgrímskirkja and got the standard photo in front of the status of Leif Erikson:

Finding a lot of time on our hands before we could check-in to our rooms, we had a slow lunch, a slow wander around the grocery store for supplies, a slow pickup of our wireless router, a slow race package pickup, then a slow wander around central Reykjavík, where the locals were friendly though somewhat homely:

When we were finally able to get into our apartment, the final remaining goal was just to stay awake for a few hours so I could manage to sleep a decent period ahead of the marathon tomorrow. Our grocery supplies went into action to create a carbo-load meal, but since this is the only time we'll have a kitchen we couldn't load up on much nor cook anything requiring complex ingredients. Thus was born a romantic meal of fried bacon on spaghetti with marinara sauce with "virgin" garlic toast (no butter; no garlic) - hereby known as "Spaghetti Baconara".

You'll notice there are no napkins on the table because we couldn't find any, and Jessica initially wanted to use some toilet paper. But I would have nothing of it and instead eventually found an old package of tissues in my running gear.

Because, you know... I'm classy like that.