day six: heimaey, blue lagoon, and garður

Our last full day in Iceland (or what was supposed to be our last day...) was meant to be as relaxing as possible. We woke up early to catch the early ferry out of Heimaey. While we waited for the boat to leave, I explored some other cool places near the harbor—the ruins of a 15th-century fort called Skansinn (most of it was buried by the lava from the 1973 eruption), the maternity hospital Landlyst, and a reconstructed medieval wooden stave church. Landlyst was especially interesting to me. It's now a medical museum, but it used to be where a midwife named Sólveig attended to patients. Until the 1840s, the infant mortality rate on Heimaey was 80%, until Sólveig was sent abroad to learn midwifery. She brought her skills back to Heimaey and drastically turned around the number of infant deaths. That's pretty cool, as my girl Miley would say.

After we arrived back on the mainland, we sped off to the Blue Lagoon, the only thing on our Friday itinerary. I had seriously been looking forward to this the whole trip. Blue Lagoon is a spa that was created after locals realized that the runoff water from a nearby geothermal plant was mixing with seawater in the earth, and then spouting back up to create these warm, milky blue pools full of silica and algae that were really good for skin ailments. Now they're just making a pretty penny by getting people like me in there. Ahhh it was amazing. We spent something like seven hours there. I was so sore and tired from driving all week and it was just what I needed (especially after I, um, had an unfortunate incident driving the car while we were taking a sharp turn on a gravel road). The water was full of minerals that I could feel on my skin and in my hair for days (seriously, my ponytail grew a size) and they had mineral masks that you could massage into your skin. Pretty awesome, and my skin totally cleared up the next day. And I got a sweet tan because it was a sunny day. They also had a relaxation room that I fell asleep in a couple of times. It was really perfect. Bless you, Blue Lagoon.

Our campsite was close to the airport, on a peninsula in a town called Garður, where we camped under a lighthouse. Really idyllic. We also found out later that Garður was Iwo Jima in the movie Flags of Our Fathers (one of our friends from the Reykjavík branch was an extra—he played a soldier and he had to go through boot camp and everything, which I think is hilarious), which is cool.

Anyway. I guess that's it for Iceland. The rest of the days we were there were so low-key I never even got out my camera. We just hung out with our friends and slept in every day. It was a perfect vacation.