Thursday, September 4, 2025

Day 12: Reykjavik, Iceland (Thursday, 04 September 2025)

Location at End of Day

 In March 2025 I booked us a bus tour (via Costco and ShoreExcursionsGroup.com) of Gullfoss, Geysir & Thingvellir.  I had to first check the excursions offered by Royal because ShoreExcursionsGroup showed us leaving Reykjavik at 11:59P while Royal said 5:00P, and I of course needed to be sure that we’d get back in time.  All of the Royal excursions seemed to arrive back at the ship no later than 4:00P, and since the 3^rd party excursion also came back at 4:00P I figured I didn’t need to worry about their incorrect sail away time.  Of course, by using a 3^rd party site I was able to save about $50 per person over Royal’s price.  Sadly, on May 20 I got a confusing email from the tour operator saying they had move the tour start time to 12:00P to “fit [our] ship’s itinerary”.  To me, that meant they either were shortening the trip to 4 hours (which I didn’t think was physically possible) or they were going to deliver us back to the dock two hours post-sailaway.  I felt like I had no choice but to cancel the trip due to their confounding communication.

Since we had no multi-hour bus trip, we were able to sleep until 10A following our early morning return to the ship.  We then grabbed a quick donut/bagel at the WJ before catching a shuttle to Harpa by 11A.  We decided it was too complicated to deal with using city buses to get to Perlan, so instead we walked over to the Museum of Photography and saw a really interesting retrospective spanning 50 years of work by photojournalist Gunnar V. Andrésson.

From there we decided to head back over to the downtown area to see if we could find lunch.  We ended up at a place called Icelandic Street Food, which served up soups.  It was a mixed bag.  I had the Spicy Tomato while W got the Fisherman’s Special, which we both thought would be a seafood soup but instead turned out to be more like a bowl of fish paste.  We combined the two and made the 2^nd better, but still not great.

We then wandered over to Rainbow Street and got some photos, but my phone’s battery was exhausted by the end of this so no more pictures of Reykjavik after this.  That’s OK, because we were ready to head back to the ship anyway – particularly since we couldn’t find any ice cream in the area. 

 So at 2P we re-boarded and dipped into the stockpiled chocolate from the Clermont minibar and E’s remaining Gingerbread Oreos before heading down to Schooner for the afternoon.  This was the first time we got the Handcrafted Margs and actually enjoyed our cocktails sans terrible OJ.

Tonight’s Headliner was pianist John Paul Ekins presenting music built around VERY earnest stories.  Technically and musically good, but a bit pretentious!  Played Chopin, March of the Tin Soldiers, Rhapsody in Blue, and ended with Hey Jude/Give Peace a Chance.  Before going to bed we set the clocks back another hour.