Arrivals

There is something surreal about modern travel -- it took me longer to get to the airport Saturday than it did to jump to another country on another continent.

It's so deceptively easy to book a hotel, book a flight, plan a tour, only to be tripped up by the smallest things. Like, for example, finding the hotel room number that corresponds to the key they handed you at reception and starting to suspect that it doesn't exist. That's the situation that inspired this photo -- the tiny, darker red square is my suitcase at the end of the hall, waiting patiently for me to find the goddamn room already and come back to claim it. (I discovered the next morning that there were indeed signs with room numbers and directional arrows, but they were next to the elevator rather than facing it, so you weren't likely to see them before managing to find the stupid room on your own.)

It doesn't matter that it was only 10 pm by my hometown clock and I shouldn't have been so tired. By the time I got through immigration and baggage claim and obtained some kronur and traded my voucher for a bus ticket, I was completely out of Spirit of Adventure and I was ready for bed. And that was before the hour-long bus ride in the rain, and the transfer to a smaller minibus for the hotel drop-off.

Fortunately, when I finally found my room, this is what awaited me -- a little bed tucked under the eaves in the historic portion of the hotel, with skylights instead of windows, beamed walls and old-fashioned whitewashed wood furniture.

And suddenly everything about this trip was fun again -- because I hadn't realized how much I wanted exactly this bedroom until I saw it.