Pyjamafoss

On the second-last day of our Iceland trip, Brahm and I finished our loop of the country.  We decided to check out the Blue Lagoon before heading back to our hotel in Reykjavik, so we went and floated around for a while, put mud on our faces, watched people eating popsicles in the pool and made a list of the grossest foods to possibly find floating around in a pool (I believe the winner was scrambled eggs), and then drove back to Reykjavik for our last night in Iceland.  I should mention that before arriving at the Blue Lagoon our swimming gear had been stored in our suitcases, and after digging my stuff out of my suitcase, I left it unzipped for easy re-packing after swimming.

   

 (The Blue Lagoon.  That cage-like thing is a bar in the pool where you can buy drinks and popsicles.  In the top picture I have some moisturizing mud on my face that they have buckets of sitting around the pool.  The amount you take a handful of and put on your face in the pool costs like 50 bucks in the gift shop.)

As we neared our hotel, we realized we did not know where we should park our rental car - the hotel had no parking lot, and there was no parking allowed on the street in front of the hotel.  We had a lot of stuff to unpack from the car as it needed to be returned to the rental place the next day, so we decided that we'd quickly unload in front of the hotel and I would take everything in and check in while Brahm went roaming downtown Reykjavik for a parking spot.

This part of the story is fuzzy, but I'm going to say it's true because it makes things funnier, but in front of our hotel where we stopped was a definite no parking zone and probably a no stopping zone as well.  We started rapidly unloading bags and suitcases onto the sidewalk so we wouldn't get a parking ticket.  Suddenly I heard Brahm cry out "ROBYN!"  I looked back, and the suitcase I had left unzipped in the trunk was spilled out all over the street.

The only thing I could do at this point was start laughing, but Brahm was not amused.  As he grabbed up my underwear off the road (and I watched and laughed and laughed), a bag of candy that he'd stuffed into his jacket pocket opened up and chocolate caramels rolled every which way, into the mix of pyjamas and toiletries.

 

(The very busy street where pyjamafoss occurred.)

We eventually got everything cleaned up with no trouble or parking ticket and looking back almost 8 months later (WTF?????  How was it that long ago!!) it is a story we reminisce about as one of our funniest moments of the trip.  That night Brahm created an Icelandic word for the incident: "pyjamafoss" meaning "a pyjama volcano" except "foss" actually means "waterfall" so it's not even that correct but whatever.  We now have many regrets about not taking a picture of pyjamafoss as it occurred but at the time we were trying not to look like idiot tourists. 

The lesson we can all learn from this story:  if you are already looking like an idiot tourist, you might as well risk looking more idiot touristy and take a picture.