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I've had strangely lucid dreams lately, always just before my alarm goes off.

Last night I dreamed I was in Iceland. Mostly on the base, in Keflavik. I was looking around trying to see the stuff that was there when I lived there. Of course, in my dream it didn't look anything like it had in real life, but hey. I ran into some nice people still living there who let me use their couch to sleep on. The whole base had fallen apart--the school was closed, and all the buildings were falling down and boarded up and things like that. At one point, though, I was standing on a hill with the people I was staying with, that really does exist, but the buildings at the bottom looked like they'd had a fire in them and again, were boarded up, and I was talking about how my brothers and I used to sled down that hill, and then try to come to a complete stop in a hurry because there was a parking lot at the bottom, but one time my brother didn't stop soon enough and whacked face-first into a parked car, and the sled kept going! Which really did happen once. Thankfully he wasn't going full speed or he'd have broken his nose or arm.

The base is, as I've mentioned here before, actually closing this fall.

But in another part of my dream I was riding this bus around Iceland, and I got off at a stop in Rekjavik (or was it Akureyri?) and everything looked just like when I'd been there before and I was strangely creeped out. Except nothing looked anything like it does in real life, but in a dream, you don't notice that kind of thing. Eventually, in my dream, I caught another bus back to Keflavik. Aaaand then my alarm went off.

And now I have urge to take a month off of work and go backpacking around Iceland. Anyone wanna join me? :^)

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I so badly wish I could fit this image into an LJ icon and still have it readable:



Based on the Ill Will Press cartoons.

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Pictures of Iceland! With lots of other information next to the pictures.

Okay, now I totally want to go. I could save up and be ready to go in a year...maybe. Getting there would be the biggest chunk of money, oy freaking vey. It's seriously about a thousand bucks round trip from Portland to Keflavik.

Things to do:
In Rekjavik, there's a ton of pretty cheap cultural stuff--museums etc. There's a kick-ass swimming pool (more on that later). There's the runtur, aka pub-crawl, but that gets expensive insanely fast, as going out to eat or drink is obscenely expensive--when my parents ate at a Pizza Hut in Rekjavik, in 1990, it cost them around $40.

Within a relatively short distance of Rekjavik (an hour's drive or so) there's Gullfoss, one of the coolest waterfalls in Iceland. There's Thingvellir, site of the first Icelandic parliament in 930 (the Althing, still the longest-running parliament on Earth) and also where the mid-Atlantic plate is splitting. It's weird to just, y'know, stand in it. There's the Blue Lagoon, aka "let's go swimming in the waste of a geothermal plant," which is a really cool place, if a tad stinky until your nose goes numb. *lol* There's a national park with geothermal stuff--the Geysir that all geysers are named after, boiling mud pots, pools of oddly-tinted water. It's far more interesting than it sounds, I swear. ;^) And they're all part of what's apparently called The Golden Circle, which is just all the most famous spots in Iceland.

After that, there's just visiting all the towns and settlements on the Ring Road. 900 miles of mostly middle-of-nowhere. Now, it's 900 miles of beautiful middle-of-nowhere, broken up by little towns and settlements. And every single place with more than four people has a swimming pool. I'm barely exaggerating--it's more like every settlement of more than a hundred people. The pool is always outdoors and well-heated, there's always at least one "hot-pot" (like a hot tub, except usually no bubbles and often far hotter!). They're not chlorinated as heavily as American pools, which means you're required to take a real shower, sans suit, with lots of soap before getting in. At the Rekjavik pool there's somebody watching you to make sure you do so!

Akureyri (second-largest "city" in Iceland, I think it's got, what, 2,000 people?) has the Northern-most botanical garden on earth. Myvatn has a place where you can walk through spectacular and freaky rock formations. There are waterfalls everywhere--I'm not kidding, they're everywhere, some don't even have names. There are sheep wandering around. There are glaciers, it can be neat to see where they meet the water.

One more note on waterfalls--they are awe-inspiring. The site I linked to with the pictures, there are some with people in them for a sense of scale. Don't get me wrong, Multnomah Falls and the others nearby are quite pretty, but after seeing so many in Iceland, it seems kinda puny.
Anyway. Yup. Maybe I'll start saving up after I get my apartment.

More Iceland, of course

http://www.cyclingaroundtheworld.nl/iceland/re_iceland.htm
Aka: how crazy am I?

Hee hee hee.... Or maybe a full circle pass?
http://www.hostel.is/displayer.asp?cat_id=176
There are two major bus passes--one allows you to travel the ring road (all 832 miles of it) once in any direction. You can take as long as you want, get off and on the bus (the busses travel on a daily schedule, with several coming by every day at each stop) as often as you want, but you have to pay extra to backtrack or go anywhere off the ring road. There are variations that come with pre-paid nights at hostels. The other is for a certain amount of time--between one and four weeks--and you can take any bus anywhere during that time period.

I googled "vegan Iceland." It'll be tricky in places (aka, pretty much anywhere that's Not Rekjavik) but I won't starve.

Oh, and amusingly enough, the exchange rate right now is pretty close to what it was when I lived there--61 krona to the dollar.