Iceland
Babymoon

The overnight flight

• An evening nonstop from Seattle, about 7½ hours, landing early the next morning. Sleep as much as you can on board.
• We parked at the airport for the whole trip with prepaid self-park, so there was nothing to arrange on the way home.

Red-eye in, nap, then OTO and the northern lights

• The overnight flight lands around 6:15 AM. We pre-booked a taxi rather than drive a rental car straight off a red-eye in the dark. Sunrise isn't until about 9.
• We stayed at The Reykjavík EDITION on the harbour, next to Harpa. Ask for an early room and sleep until lunch.
• Afternoon: an easy, flat walk around the Old Harbour and Harpa.
• Dinner at OTO, a Japanese-Italian sharing-plates place in the Michelin Guide, about 10 minutes' walk from the harbour. Good, though heavier on pasta than Japanese flavours. Get the mocktails: Bītsu (beetroot and mint) and Virgin Midori (kaffir lime and vanilla).
• Walking up to Hallgrímskirkja after dinner, we got our first northern lights, right over the rooftops of the city.

Look up even in town. We saw the aurora from a lit street on night one, with a bright moon. Check the aurora and cloud forecast each afternoon.

Turf House soup, Sky Lagoon and Skál!

• A slow hotel breakfast, then fish soup and bread from Turf House, the food truck beside Hallgrímskirkja. A 10 out of 10: deep seafood flavour without being a heavy cream soup.
• In the afternoon, Sky Lagoon, a short taxi ride out to Kópavogur: an infinity lagoon on the edge of the sea. The water is cooler than the hotel hot tubs, so about 10 minutes at a time felt fine.
• Dinner at Skál!, the Michelin Bib Gourmand counter inside the Hlemmur food hall. Icelandic small plates, and the best meal of our Reykjavík days: get the buttered lettuce, the seared lamb and the baked cod.
• Dessert round two at Valdís, the ice cream shop everyone in town seems to queue for.

Þingvellir, then tomato soup in a greenhouse

• Picked up the rental car in Reykjavík in the morning instead of at the airport, which saved a dark drive after the red-eye.
• Þingvellir National Park: the walk down the rift between two tectonic plates is wide, gravel and gently downhill. Öxarárfoss is a short walk off the main path.
• Lunch inside the Friðheimar greenhouse, among the tomato vines. Book ahead.
• We skipped Geysir and Gullfoss today, checked in early and used the hot pool instead. Both moved to tomorrow.

Parking at the big sights reads your plate. Pay at the kiosk if there is one, since the app adds a small fee. No kiosk means a QR code on a sign, which goes through the app.

Rain morning, then Geysir and Gullfoss

• Heavy rain until late morning, so we slept in, soaked and didn't leave until after lunch.
• Geysir in the mid-afternoon: a flat five-minute walk. Strokkur erupts every 5 to 10 minutes. Stand upwind. We ate at Geysir Glíma, the restaurant across the road.
• Gullfoss around 5 PM, from the paved upper viewpoint only, as the light went. Hoods up for the spray. The café at the top is a warm place to wait out a squall.

Behind Seljalandsfoss, dinner at Hotel Rangá

• Pastries for the road from Flúða Bakarí in Flúðir, the village just down the road from Torfhús. It's known for its cinnamon buns, and there's heated seating if you want to stay. We also bought two jars to take with us: pickled chilies and a garlic butter with confit garlic (hvítlaukssmjör), which was really, really good.
• Seljalandsfoss is two minutes from the car. We did walk the path behind the falls. Expect to get wet, and wear grippy boots on the rocks.
• Then a few minutes' walk north along the cliffs to Gljúfrabúi, the waterfall tucked inside a narrow canyon. Easy to miss, and worth the detour.
• Hotel Rangá by sunset (about 5 PM in November): hot tubs, dinner in the hotel, and the northern lights wake-up call.
• We got lucky: Rangá has free EV charging, and our rental was a plug-in hybrid. Two nights of charging meant we didn't need our first fill-up until Costco on day 8.

Skógafoss, glacier edge and soup in Vík

• Skógafoss in the early afternoon. The falls are a flat walk from the car park. Lunch was fish and chips from Mia's Country Van in the Skógafoss car park.
• Sólheimajökull, the glacier tongue, a short drive further east. Our first glacier.
• Dyrhólaey, the headland above the black beaches, for the big views west along the black beaches and the rock arch. The lower lookout has its own lava arch you can walk right up to.
• An early dinner at The Soup Company in Vík. Go for the lamb soup or the spicy lava soup, and skip the bread bowl.
• We skipped Reynisfjara, the black sand beach. By the time we got there it was getting dark, rainy and windy, so we drove back to Hotel Rangá for the night.

Check the wind warnings before driving toward Vík, and give Reynisfjara daylight and calm weather. If you go, stay far back from the water at Reynisfjara. The sneaker waves there are deadly.

Costco fuel, then The Retreat

• On the way west we filled up at Costco in Kauptún, Garðabær, which we'd read is the cheapest fuel around. The pumps sit closer to IKEA than to the Costco store, so follow the IKEA signs. You need a Costco membership card; our US one worked. We grabbed a hot dog from the food court after filling up.
• We left Rangá late morning and stopped at IKEA first for a little bite and a drink: fries with brown sauce and a can of Malt og Appelsín, the malt-and-orange-soda mix Icelanders drink at Christmas. It's known as one of the cheapest sit-down meals in the area, and an easy toilet and stretch stop.

• At The Retreat by 4 PM. They valet the car, so you walk straight in. Afternoon tea runs 4 to 5 PM in the lounge, looking straight out over the milky-blue lagoon. Then the lagoon itself as the light went. The spa is open 8 AM to 8 PM.
• The Moss Junior Suite has floor-to-ceiling windows onto the lava field, and everything in the room is included, down to the minibar of small Icelandic drinks. Best hotel experience we've ever had.
• Dinner at Lava, the Blue Lagoon's restaurant set against a lava cliff. Don't skip the free bread; it's really good. The grilled salad is delicious too.

The lagoon, then dinner at Moss

The day started slowly with breakfast at the hotel: soft scrambled eggs with chives, baked beans, croissants and fruit, and a pot of berry tea.

We spent the day in the Blue Lagoon, and it was a really nice experience. A bonus of coming in early November is that it isn't as crowded, so the milky blue water felt calm instead of packed.

We did the three-step facial in the lagoon: a scrub, then a lotion, then a final mask. The Retreat also has its own four-step body scrub ritual that we haven't tried yet.

Dinner was the tasting menu at Moss, the Retreat's restaurant, as our big babymoon dinner. After a round of snacks came Autumn Vegetables with 60-month parmesan and hazelnuts, Blue Fin Tuna with macadamia and wasabi, Icelandic Cod with cauliflower, miso and sesame, Icelandic Lamb with spiced celeriac, and Coconut Textures for dessert. Petit fours arrived on a bed of lava rock, and a last plate said Til hamingju, Icelandic for congratulations. Instead of wine we had BLÅ, a sparkling tea from Copenhagen.

The Reykjanes lava fields and home

Our last breakfast at The Retreat looked out over the lagoon. Then we checked out and took the long way to the airport, across the Reykjanes peninsula through miles of mossy black lava fields.

Our one stop was the Bridge Between Continents, a short footbridge over a sandy fissure between the North American and Eurasian plates. It's a quick stop right off the road, and the whole drive from the hotel to Keflavík with it is under an hour.

Flying Saga Premium gets you into Icelandair's Saga Lounge at Keflavík. It sits after security but before border control, so leave the lounge about an hour before your flight to be sure you make it. Keep your expectations modest: the food was pretty sub par, and the only warm option is a tomato soup. That soup is good, though, and by far the best thing there; they restocked it for us when it ran out. The room is just okay. There's plenty of seating, but about half of it feels like a cafeteria. The drinks selection is good if you're into that; we aren't big drinkers. The showers stock Blue Lagoon products, which is a nice touch before a long flight.

On the flight home we had dinner on a tray, fish with potatoes and edamame, and watched the sun set over the clouds as we came into Seattle.