SLEEPY LAGOON

Final day and all packed up. Just time for a coffee before we had to vacate our rooms.



One of the worst things about the last day of a foreign holiday is the hanging about, waiting for the trip to the airport and home. All your stuff is in your suitcase and you may sometimes get to share a vacant room with everyone who is leaving that evening. Otherwise it's thumb twiddlingly boring.

We however had a trip/trick up our sleeve.

The Blue Lagoon.



Iceland is powered by 99% renewable energy, thanks to all its waterfalls and geothermal activity. Some years ago it opened a power station near Keflavik airport. This is entirely powered by the heat from beneath our feet. It bubbled away happily for years before someone had the bright idea that the huge forty million gallon outflow lake with the temperature of a hot bath could be turned into a tourist attraction.

So the Blue Lagoon was born.

You board a bus from Reykjavik to the power station, where you fling your bags into a shed and head to the pool.

After a severe and systematic wash of your various parts (see earlier blog about public ablutions), it's on with the costume and a special wristband that not only opens and closes your locker but keeps tabs on everything you buy, from drinks at the bar to meals. You settle up on leaving.

We spent two glorious hours bobbing about in hot water, sipping drinks and smearing ourselves with naturally occurring silica mud (it does wonders for the complexion) then washing it off under a hot waterfall.

We exited through the gift shop, Dark Lady buying a couple of tubes of mud and back to the bus pausing only to rescue our badly dented cases from the luggage hut. Then it was a twenty minute trip to the airport and home.

To top off a perfect trip we flew low over central London along the Thames, so we had a bird's eye view of all the landmarks from the Houses of Parliament to St Paul's and the London Eye as well as a packed Hyde Park crowd getting down to Paul Simon.



We touched down just after 8PM, and after we cleared customs and headed to the car we noticed something a little odd. It was beginning to get dark!