In Which I Lose My Few Remaining Marbles

So as some of you may know, I am living my dreams this summer and spending three months in Europe. Oh, and did I mention that my five children, ages 3-12, are with me? Yes indeedy, folks, we are truely making a splash. Guess if 5 kids and twelve bags in a line in Iceland´s Keflavik airport are a common sight? Especially when some of the bags are bigger than some of the kids?

You may wonder how this all came about. So does my husband, actually. Quinton is a patient man and has never been the type to stifle my personality, even when it desperately needs stifling. So when an opportunity came up to trade houses with a Swedish couple for three months during the summer, he gave me the go-ahead.

At some point during the planning process I realized that IcelandAir has a free stopover option, where you can stay a few days in Iceland before travelling further without paying more for your plane tickets. Perfect for me, since it is always very frustrating to me to fly through a place without getting to experience it! So I planned to stay four nights in Iceland. With the kids. Did I mention that Quinton is meeting us once we arrive in Sweden?

A word to the wise... Google´s currency converter is NOT reliable. Not even close. I had actually done some research before I made my decision and noticed how cheap lodging was in Iceland. Fancy hotels for $45/night! Wow! Remember that saying about no free lunch?

My first inkling something might be wrong was when I went to actually make a booking and couldn´t find anything, and this includes hostels where they don´t provide bedding and you share rooms and bathrooms, for less than $100/night. So OK, I lowered my expectations and booked at a guesthouse, somewhere in between a hostel and a hotel. And then the cars that could fit 6 people were getting up there too, but I worked it out after some phone calls. So we were set to go.

Waiting at PDX

The plane ride was uneventful. My 3-year-old, Drew, hadn´t been on a plane before and was nervous, but he thought it was fun once we got started. And the first little hop from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington was fast enough that we hardly had time to drink our complimentary apple juice.

The seven-hour fight to Iceland went well, too. I have to say I was proud of how the kids acted. We had two rows of three seats each, and there was really a bare minimum of fighting and whining. We made many, many trips up the aisle to the bathroom (Drew´s diary entry for that day, which I helped him with, consisted of very few sentences that did not involve potty stops.) IcelandAir serves free meals to the kids under 12, and I snagged a hamburger in Seattle for Gunnar, my 12-year-old. Personally, I got Starbucks.

I made one of many mistakes when I decided that the kids would probably be tired and fall asleep. See, for the week before we left I had been (with a pharmacist´s advice) giving the kids Benedryl one hour earlier every night, and waking them up one hour earlier every morning. I can actually recommend this method. It works really well to make up a large time difference. If you DON'T then stay up all night on the plane. Which we did. All night. A few of the kids slept just long enough at the end to be groggy and grumpy. I didn´t get to sleep at all, of course, since I was ostensibly the authority figure.



So we showed up in Keflavik at 7 AM their time, went through customs while they held the bus for us, and retrieved our bags. All of which showed up, amazingly. But the person who was supposed to meet us with our rental car wasn't there. Fortunately someone was there from the same company, and he gave us a ride to the rental company.

So all five kids, all twelve bags, and most importantly, all six passports made it into Iceland. We only lost my marbles. And some would say they were already gone.