The first day of our grand adventure was full of ups and downs – perhaps fitting for the land of ice and fire.

We flew out of Newark at 8:45 pm and landed in Keflavik airport at 6:15 am.

We thought we’d enjoy a full night’s sleep on the plane and wake up rested and ready for a full day of exploration first thing upon landing. Instead, I tossed and turned and shivered miserably on the plane for 6 hours, then arrived in Reykjavik exhausted, flustered and irritable. I left my passport on the plane, triggering a minor panic attack until I ran back to the gate and retrieved it. My phone couldn’t connect to the airport’s wifi, convincing me that my plan to use my phone wifi-only in Iceland (since I’m in between my American phone plan and the Spanish one I’ll be signing up for when I arrive) must be a failure and I’d have no way of contacting anyone. I started crying in the duty free store because I couldn’t text my mom and dad to let them know I had arrived okay, and was already missing them terribly. We couldn’t find the airport lockers. I was sick of dragging heavy luggage all over the airport, cursing myself for not following EVERY SINGLE PERSON’S advice to pack light.

And then, the Blue Lagoon happened.

A semi-natural hot spring spa, the Blue Lagoon is probably Iceland’s most famous tourist trap, but for good reason. It can easily be planned as a stopover between the airport and Reykjavik, and it’s the perfect cure for any kind of post-air travel blues. We slipped into the steaming, milky blue waters and all the stress melted away. Despite the chill in the air, the water felt as comfortable as a warm bath — and swimming up to the bar for a Gull (cheap Icelandic beer) at 9 am certainly did wonders for our anxiety level. We floated lazily, rubbed exfoliating silica mud on our faces, and giggled under waterfalls for a lovely few hours.

After we’d had our fill, on the bus back to Reykjavik through weird, jagged lava fields, my anxiety and exhaustion caught up with me again. We arrived fine and met up with our host, a friend-of-a-friend named Ryan, then headed back to his house for naps. I curled up in his comfortable guest bed ready for a rejuvenating rest, but instead found myself tossing and turning and unable to avoid a parade of bummer thoughts. For the first time since moving out of our house two weeks previously, I found myself badly missing my own bed, my own house, and my cats, as well as my family and friends.

Do I even like traveling? I wondered. Maybe I only enjoy it when I can return to my own home at the end. Have I made a huge mistake? What am I doing here in fucking Iceland? What am I doing moving to fucking Spain?

I drifted off eventually. After waking up an hour or two later and taking a shower, I felt better. We went out with Ryan, his boyfriend Joe and their friend Katie to an Icelandic restaurant in town, and things started to improve by the minute. It was fun getting to know these three Americans who’d all transplanted themselves to Iceland: Ryan (a barista and photography student who was close with one of my best gal pals Allison), his boyfriend Joe (archeology student and employee of the National Museum, he’d dreamed of moving to Iceland since he was a little kid), and their friend Katie (a student of medieval Icelandic who’d come here to study and wound up marrying an Icelander). Hearing them describe their own feelings about leaving our native country behind and pursuing a new life somewhere else across the sea was reassuring, and their stories about living here made me really excited again to get out and explore this strange land.

Haider and I split ways with them after our meal and wandered through downtown Reykjavik a bit. We were charmed by the foot- and bike traffic-only sections of its famous shopping street Laugavegur, its weird graffiti, its interesting little shops.

On my good friend Ericc’s recommendation we stopped at a spot called MicroBar, and discovered a little surprise he’d left for us on his own visit to Reykjavik just a few weeks prior.

We arrived back to the house and found Ryan and Joe still hanging out with Katie, as well as her Icelandic husband Axel. Axel helped us tweak our far-too-ambitious itinerary to better suit the time we had and the things we wanted to see; instead of a full circle around the Ring Road, we decided to cut our journeys into smaller chunks, stopping back in Reykjavik in between.

At one point while we were hanging out in the attic, Ryan popped his head out of a skylight-style hatch in the roof. “Hey, you can kind of see the Northern Lights,” he mentioned casually.

Haider and I both popped our heads up through the roof to take a look. Sure enough, despite the bright city lights, you could clearly see a greenish haze hanging in the night sky above us.

Ryan took us down the block or two from his and Joe’s house to the harbor. We passed the brightly lit gas station and stepped out to the dark shoreline. Above the ocean, a band of the aurora could be seen stretching all the way across the sky, drifting into different shapes and patterns as lazily as a cloud.

It wasn’t much, but as I’d expected to only maybe see the aurora far up north if we were lucky enough to be blessed with great conditions and perfect weather, I was awestruck by the opportunity to catch it on our very first night, even with the capital’s light pollution.

Although I’d left my negativity behind a while ago, this was the sign that I needed that my trip was truly off to an auspicious start, and everything was going to be okay.