Compared to the stress of yesterday, today was much nicer. I don't have to worry about where I'm staying and....I booked a tour. So no planning on what to do today besides "make bus".
Unfortunately I had to start with moving the DANG car. I hate, HATE, city parking.
And I had to move it or get a ticket. :(
Then I searched for free parking (found it on the other side of town) and once safely parked I was able to enjoy my morning. I ended up at a coffee place to finish my blog where I had some GREAT hot chocolate, and like the best lemon muffin ever.
But I smelled like coffee after I left. :( Sorry coffee lovers, I don't like the smell.
Reminds me too much of my first job.
But after that, it was already almost time to get on the bus!
So the tour...I haven't said what it was yet. It took us to some lava fields....then we went caving in an old lava tube.
Yeah, a cave made from volcanic eruptions and the resulting lava flow.
It was dark, and cramped in a lot of places, and icy in the beginning and end and my pictures were..... unfocused to say the least. But it was awesome! It was just the right amount of challenging.
P.s. Didn't hurt myself.
And the way back, the other people and I chatted about seeing Bono in Iceland ,
( Yeah apparently he's here), eating fish jerky and shark and whale. You know things I'd probably get yelled about at work if I ate any if it. (Well I did have fish jerky.)
This is what it looked like, but this is a new bag.
They were a good group of people. And I'm not joking when I said it was a 3 hour tour. It was literally 3 hours. We were caving for about 2 1/2 hours, +plus travel time. They would have been a good crew if a Gilligan's Island event happened.
Alas our time ended, and I had some downtime before my.....dun DUN dun dun DUUUNNN.
Aurora tour. Yeah, I caved a little.
(HA. I did literally cave a little)
The caving tour had an Aurora option if you wanted to add it, and I'm clearly not finding any on my own. If you can't do something, hire someone who can.
My downtime was me and another girl from the hostel getting drinks and dinner. I know we're all strong, independent women who can travel by ourselves, but....I think it's nice when we can spend time with other people, even if they might be strangers.
I'm glad she agreed to join me! She was fun, made dinner enjoyable, and has an underlying enthusiasm about life. It's neat,the people you meet. (Hi Debbie if you find this blog!)
When dinner ended, I had just enough time to get to the bus stop.
So, they had about 20 of us in a group.
Big comfy bus and I got the back row all to myself. (#Sololife)
They gave us good odds, but warned us that it's hard to predict.
Barely even 30 minutes out into our tour, they find some.
We pile out into some snowy landscape that might have been a field leading up to a farm? Hard to tell in the dark...there were two houselights down a road. That's all I got.
And up in the sky is a white glow stretching from East to West,? It was a long horizontal line anyways. And it's kind of just an arc, gently floating above us. It's not going nuts, just stretched out. I don't know if my eyes adjusted or if it got stronger but green started to creep in.
For quite a while, that's all it did. Beautiful still, but honestly I was kind of freezing. I'm taking pictures mostly with gloves off to fiddle with settings and I'm wondering if we need to move on to find stronger lights.
Kids, this is why I don't do this for a living.
I don't know JACK. Because I'm kind of noticing something in the far distance, but don't think much of it. But the guides point it out and are saying how it's really about to start.
Steadily in the distance, the Aurora starts changing shape, extending a 2nd tendril of light, reaching from the sky towards us down below.
And then it really started.
Offshoots, spirals, different colors (mostly green still but oranges and yellows joined). Curtains that looked within a hands width of the ground. Like if I had gone to it I could reach out and touch it.
It shimmered and rippled, and they had said it could last from 2 to 30 minutes. We were out there for an hour. (When we got pile out notice-9:30. When we started getting back on the bus around 10:30ish. )
And even as we drove away, it was still going. It had wound down a bunch, but it was still visible.
It was wonderful.
And then I came back to the hostel and promptly went to bed.
(Pics and updates to come!)