We Take Ourselves With Us

 Reykjavik means "smokey bay" and our last day in the city lived up to this name. It started with a misty walk to one of the city's top bakeries, which was just a few blocks from our apartment: Braud. As always, in Reykjavik, the walk is its own destination, and we found more murals and charm along our route.   Braud, itself, is in a very colorful home with a great old-school shop window filled with all the day's best baked goods. As with most places in the city, despite its hipster red, everyone was super friendly and spoke English.  A note: I had my Google-translate app at the ready for this trip and had downloaded the dictionaries for the most common languages we would encounter (Icelandic; German, which Ned speaks a little; French, which I speak even less; and Italian).  The best (and kind of creepiest) is the ability to have all text in an image immediately translated. Given the gf/lf question, this has been very helpful on food labels. Highly recommend! Anyway-...

 So, several months ago, when it dawned on me that our flight was landing at 6:30 am Iceland time, which is 2:30 am at home, I had the foresight (likely because elves) to add the night before we arrived to our super lovely AirBnB. This decision initially seemed foolish when we landed because we were hopped up on travel adrenaline. Then seemed very, very wise, when we crashed--hard--and slept for several hours. When we pulled ourselves out of our duvet-cossetted slumbers before noon, glancing out our bank of living room windows we found a very bright and blue sky Reykjavik awaiting us. Three of us set out in search of food, while one of us was still dreaming. And, as 24 hour access Americans, we were surprised to find that most restaurants in Iceland are not open for lunch (even when their websites might suggest otherwise, ahem). Sidebar: this pattern would hold true throughout this trip--places would be closed kind of randomly, which made me wonder if this is an Iceland thing, an i...