All Eyes on Iceland

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND – The sky was blue and the crowd was buzzing at gate C55 Thursday, May 16, as Icelandair geared up to launch its inaugural flight from Pittsburgh International Airport to Keflavik Airport.

Passengers milled between stations to nibble on pieces of theme cake and cookies, pick up PIT airport swag, and pet some of the airport’s gentle therapy dogs. Some posed for photo shoots with the Icelandic flight team in front of a gigantic balloon wall resembling the country’s flag.

Icelandair’s inaugural flight marked the return of nonstop flights between Pittsburgh and Iceland for the first time in five-plus years, and a lucky group of six media folks (myself included) got invited along for the ride.

We then spent five days and four nights falling (or re-falling) in love with one of the globe’s most sparsely populated countries — a land full of mystique and magic, waterfalls and volcanoes, not to mention a population of kind, hearty folks who are prolific readers and (largely) believers in elves, translated to “hidden people.”

After a comfortable and easy five-and-a-half-hour journey, we landed among the otherworldly lava rock landscape that immediately gets one’s sense of adventure and imagination flowing. These Icelandair flights will run four days a week seasonally, through late October, providing a great way not only to visit Iceland but to stop over there en route to a bounty of enticing European destinations, from Copenhagen to Madrid.

Here are some tips we picked up along the way.