Day 63-Bill and Jean arrive

   March 7-Sally and I drove out to meet Sally's folks at Keflavík International Airport early this morning.  Interestingly, all of the Icelandair flights from the U.S. are scheduled to arrive between 5:30 and 7 am, so the airport was pretty active when we showed up.  We got some coffee, sat down, and waited.  Bill and Jean's plane had caught a favorable wind, so it
landed half an hour early.  Unfortunately, one of their bags had not made it onto the plane, so they used that extra half hour reporting the lost baggage.  
   Once Bill and Jean got through customs, we picked up their rental car and made the 45 minute drive back to the hotel in Reykjavík.  The kids had gotten up and were anxiously awaiting the arrival of their grandparents.  Since Bill and Jean had not gotten any sleep on the plane, they wanted to lie down for a spell.  Once we got the kids to leave Bill and Jean alone, they did lie down, but they didn't really go to sleep.  So they got up and we took them out to eat breakfast at the Laundromat, which is the same place we had our first breakfast in Iceland and remains our favorite breakfast restaurant.  We hoped that a good breakfast would help trigger their bodies to think it was morning.  It certainly is not perfect, but it (and copious amounts of caffeine during the day) seemed to do the trick, because Bill and Jean stayed awake almost all day long.

   The weather had not improved substantially from the night before, meaning it was still windy and snowy.  Consequently, we decided to mostly do indoor activities around Reykjavík for the day.  After breakfast, we ran the whole group over to the Reykjavík City Hall.  Since the Laundromat hands out old bread to feed to the waterfowl, we remained outside briefly to watch the ducks, geese, and swans swim through the ice to get to us and the bread.  The Greylag Geese were the most adventuresome and ate right from the kids' hands!  The Whooper Swans arrived back in Iceland last week and are supposed to herald the arrival the spring.  They may have been a bit early this year. 

   Inside the City Hall is a large 3-D map of Iceland.  Since the horizontal scale is only half of the vertical scale, the map does a good job at conveying Iceland's dramatic, rugged landscape.  Bill and Jean were also able to see the relative locations of Keflavík, Reykjavík, and Bifröst in Iceland.  For these reasons, I think that we will make City Hall a first stop for our future visitors as well.

   While the kids played in the kids' area and the grandparents relaxed in the café (yes, the City Hall has both), Sally and I retrieved the cars.  We picked everyone else up and drove over to the National Museum of Iceland.  Most of the artifacts from around the country of any real importance have become part of the
museum's collection.  As grandiose as this sounds, the museum is actually not overbearing.   It only consists of two floors of exhibits (and a kids' area and a café, see a pattern here?), and in the few hours we were there, I managed a fairly thorough viewing of the exhibits on one floor.  The displays were modern and very well done and arranged logically, with the first floor covering the Settlement Age through the 1600s.  Bill and Jean managed to keep going most of the time with the help of some coffee and the kids spent most of the time with the hands-on displays in the kids' area.
   By the time we left the museum, it was only snowing intermittently, so we headed to the Perlan (pearl) to give Bill and Jean a nice view of the city and the surrounding areas.  The Perlan is a water tower on a high hill in Reykjavík that has been expanded to include a restaurant, a cafe, a museum and a viewing deck.  The passing clouds kept us from getting any great views and the winds were very strong, so we did not spend much time there before heading back to Bifröst.  We were quite happy that we left before nightfall, because we hit some snow and some ground blizzards on the way back.  Bill and Jean finally hit the wall and both took short naps on the drive.  After that, though, they managed to make it through supper before they went to bed at the same time that the kids did.