The tricky thing about Iceland, is the distance from the airport to the capital city. Keflavik Airport is about a forty-five minute drive away from Reykjavík, which poses a problem for those expecting to arrive directly in the beautiful Northern city. Before you leave, you need to budget for additional airport transfer and transportation.

There are a few different ways that you can do this, and I’m going to talk about the methods that I used!

Our flight from Boston to Keflavik went smoothly, and we coasted on to the Icelandic runway without a hitch. It was after 11:00pm, but the sun still showed a faint light-show of reds and oranges on the distant horizon.

We de-boarded the plane, made our way through customs, and began to wait for our luggage. It never showed up. Too excited to let the mishap ruin our moods, we continued on to the arrivals hall. Greeted with a sign marked with “Seattle Dredge“, we met Kristján from Iceland Unlimited.

SUV

Kristján led us to the parking lot where we climbed into a shiny new Porsche Cayenne SUV. I hopped into the front seat where I could stretch out my cramped plane-legs, and thought to myself, “Wow–I’m so glad that I’m not in a taxi right now“. We pulled out of the airport and set off toward Reykjavík on highway 41.

By this point, the sun had fully set and the sky was dark. I could see dark volcanic shadows and dim rocky-reflections from the car headlights. The thing about arriving in a new country at night, is that you can’t really get a very good idea of your surroundings until you wake up. However, it was certainly new to me to see signs like “Kálfatjörn“, “Reykjanesfólkvangur“, and other names that I could not pronounce.

After a comfortable ride through the lava fields, we arrived in Reykjavík. It was a Friday night, and things were just starting to get busy in the city centre. Kristján took us on brief tour through the main streets, and pointed out all of the great places that we should visit (which we did, later!).

We then said our goodbyes, as he dropped us of at the HI Hostel Downtown Reykjavík.

BUS

On the way back to the airport, from Reykjavík, we decided to try something a little different. Thanks again to Iceland Unlimited, we were now going to take the Fly Bus from the Reykjavík Bus Terminal.

We caught the #6 bus, at the bus stop by the corner of Lækjargata and Austurstræti, downtown Reykjavik (across from the office of the Prime Minister). On the third stop, we got off at the BSI bus terminal, and arrived just in time to catch the 1:30 bus (buses leave every hour).

We walked through the terminal, past the ticket counter, and out to the bus-loading area. We loaded our luggage (which arrived during the week, thankfully!), and took our seats inside the large coach bus.

Over the course of the forty-five minute journey, I managed to fall asleep about three separate times. After my sequence of random cat-naps, we arrived at Keflavik airport. We got off the bus, headed to check-in, and said our last goodbyes to Iceland.