Day 11: Reykjavik, Iceland (Wednesday, 03 September 2025)

Cruise Compass

Dinner Menu: Taste of the Mediterranean

Today’s Weather

Location at Start of Day (failed to record it)

Location at End of Day

In April 2025 someone on the CC Roll Call for our cruise mentioned the Perlan Museum, which I hadn’t previously heard of. It actually sounded quite interesting, so I began to look into the logistics of trying to get there on arrival day. The basic options seemed to be the (fee-based) HOHO bus, a taxi, or city buses. The HOHO was quickly ruled out given our noon arrival, the route’s 1.5-2.0 hour round trip timing, and HOHO’s last boarding time of 4:30P. Logistically, that was simply cutting things too tight. Taxis were do-able, but wait times of up to one hour post-arrival sounded nasty.

City bus actually seemed pretty reasonable. There was a stop at the port that we could walk to in under 10 minutes, and the Perlan stop was (no more then) 15 minutes away from the museum – so a one-way trip would take around 40-45 minutes point-to-point, cost us about $5.25pp each way, and the buses ran until at least 7P – so we could potentially exit the ship at 1P, spend 2-3 hours at Perlan, and still be back onboard by around 5:30P in time for both dinner and a rest before our planned 10:00P excursion to see the Northern Lights! I was very confused regarding whether or not you could do a contactless credit card payment onboard or not. So many sites said that, within the city limits of Reykajavik, you had to use their app on-board. I finally discovered that contactless payment had officially debuted in December 2024 so there was no need to get the app. We could just scan our credit cards when boarding and all would be good!

The more I looked the more I was intrigued. Turns out that The Icelandic Phallological Museum (aka The Penis Museum) was right along the bus route we’d be taking to/from the Perlan. Given that TripAdvisor suggested that the Perlan was around a 2 hour event and the Phal was about an hour, it seemed likely that we could do BOTH during the afternoon of Day 11 of our trip. I figured that the gift shop of the Phal would be more than worth the effort to add a stop. 😊

I had hesitated to take the phone out of airplane mode due to dire warnings about the expense of roaming in Iceland. However, since reliable location services required this – and I also had added international phone service – I finally did this and discovered our Verizon plan included 250 minutes of phone/text plus 20GB of data, so I kept mine running for the rest of the trip as I expected it would last us just fine.







We didn’t get clearance to debark until early afternoon, so we had lunch at WJ first, then made our way to the gangway. Shuttle service from the pier was running at a faster pace during the initial hours after the gangway went down. Despite a long line, shuttles were arriving about every 6 minutes and we were able to board the 3rd bus to arrive and were taken to Harpa within about 5 minutes. Harpa is a very striking building and I took several pictures.









From there, we walked over to the Penis Museum (to think: had things gone as originally planned we could have visited the Vagina AND Penis Museums!) but, finding that there was a collection of free artwork (mostly cartoons) in the entryway and the giftshop was also free, we decided not to pay for admission. Instead, we grabbed a free city guide on our way out (having failed to grab the free lit available when we exited the pier) and Google Map’ed our way to some souvenir shops in hopes to find things for the kids as well as a Christmas ornament for ourselves. We eventually (on about the 3rd try) found what we were looking for and made some purchases.





We stopped at a nearby park to get pictures of the iconic statue of Ingólfr Arnarson and, while there, I realized I’d failed to check around for geocaches. So I pulled out c:geo and started investigating.



I found out that there was one nearby called Þjóðleikhúsið, which translates to “National Theatre”. That seemed quite appropriate to be our Icelandic cache so we walked over to look for. Just as we got to GZ and I looked down to my phone a voice behind us said “hey, are you looking for a geocache?” Turned around and met fellow-shipmates Laura and Graham Lan, retirees who are living a semi-nomadic existence. We found the cache together and then enjoyed chatting with them for about 40 minutes before returning to the ship around 335P. Grabbed a couple drinks from the Pool Bar and then enjoyed some beautiful balcony time in our cabin.

The evening activity was the Northern Lights tour, led by Christian, a former Australian/German banker who has since become an Icelandic “aurora chaser”. He became unhappy with the way various aurora prediction websites presented info and created his own site, https://emeraldskies.is (and also https://emerarlskies.au). During our bus ride down to near Keflakik (pronounced “Keplavik”) International Airport he gave us a great explanation of the fundamentals of both aurora science as well as prediction model science so we could understand how to read the data. We had ideal darkness and clear skies, but the sun’s activity wasn’t ideal and, as such, we never had significant activity visible to the naked eye. Cameras picked up varying evidence, ranging from average photos from my Samsung S21 to pretty good shots from various iPhones to amazing shots from Christian’s expensive SLR with wide-angle lens. However, to the naked eye what we saw could have just as easily been urban light pollution. Kind of looked like clouds lit by moonlight, except there weren’t any clouds. We left the viewing location about 2A and were back onboard by 3A. While we didn’t get the results we wanted we still had a good time, made so by Christian’s commentary.

My camera:



Christian’s camera: