After 26 days traveling around the UK and Iceland, our trip definitely ended on a high note.

We had booked our final two nights in Iceland at a place called Guesthouse Keflavik. Before arriving, I had received an email instructing us to check in across the street at the hotel. The hotel and the guesthouse are two separate accommodations but they’re owned by the same company. Basically if you’re on a budget, you book the guesthouse; if not, you book the hotel.

However, when we got to the front desk, the lady informed us that they had given us a complimentary upgrade to the hotel instead of the guesthouse! It was such a nice surprise and we seriously thought it was a joke at first.

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Hotel Keflavik was so beautiful. Marble floors, red velvet carpeting, gold accents… we felt so lucky to stay here!

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Our room was equally as beautiful. It was so bright and airy.

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As our trip was coming to an end, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t purchased any sort of souvenir for myself. I wanted to find something authentically ‘Icelandic’ to take home – something that would remind me of this country every time I looked at it. Luckily, I came across this wool blanket at a place called the Nordic Store. There were a few different color options, but ultimately I decided on this one because the colors had meaning to me:

Blue, for the ice and the glaciers.

Black, for the black sand beach.

Red-orange, for the volcanoes.

Yellow, for the trees (we went in September so there were fall colors)

 

 

To top it all off, on our very last night, we saw the northern lights. We left our hotel room around 10:30pm and walked down the block to the waters edge (the string of lights that you see in the photo below is Reykjavik). It was the most incredible thing I had ever seen. The entire sky was lit up and they were moving so quickly that every few seconds, it’d be a different shape.

 

It was an amazing ending to an incredible trip. Thanks mom, for sharing it with me.