NYC New Year 2012

I need to post these photos from my NYC NYE trip before January slips away.

I totally jinxed myself - the day before the trip, I told my mom: "I have never had any problems with the bus to NY.  Never ever!  It's never broken down."

Cut to Joe and I standing in the cold at some gas station off the New Jersey Turnpike, as passengers loiter around us and the bus driver negotiates for someone else to bring a different bus to pick us up...

So the trip started inauspiciously.  But we got there eventually, that's the important part.

A castle on the Upper East Side! OK, not really a castle, but still cool.

Where were you when you found out Katy Perry's marriage was kaput? This made me really sad for some reason. Why couldn't those crazy kids make it work?  I want Katy to be happy and continue churning out guilty pleasure pop chart toppers.

Also, I love to ask Joe questions like this: where were you when you found out Michael Jackson died? Where were you when you found out John F. Kennedy Jr. died? Where were you when you found out Gary Coleman died?*

He just rolls his eyes and tries to change the subject.

Here I am with my bestie Debie on NYE. So fun! I wore my black sequin shorts. Every so often, like for New Year's Eve or Lady Gaga concerts, they make their way out of the back of my dresser.

We went to the Guggenheim and saw the Cattelan exhibit.  The sheer scale of it was incredible.  As you walked up the ramp, you could see everything in greater detail.   Highly recommend!

My complaint, though, is that they created an incredible iPad app, but you had to pay $4 for it.   Why couldn't our free audioguide have more information?  Or could they put more text on the wall?  I understand that might ruin the aesthetics, but I wanted to know more about all of the art and and the meaning behind it.  I felt like I was missing out. We already paid $18+ to get in!

I spotted a celebrity at the Guggenheim while we were there - Mena Suvari!  I did my research to verify: Twitter confirms she was in NYC and she had a pretty distinctive neck tattoo.  My mom said it was like bird watching, you look for noticeable features, or in the case of celebrities, distinctive tattoos.

On New Year's Day, we ate a leisurely brunch at the upstairs restaurant at Eataly.

Love this silver pig!

My wonderful friend Amy at the High Line.  Amy, thanks so much for letting us stay with you!  She is the best hostess.  And her cat is a cutie.

How pretty is that?

Now for the "NY is expensive / NYC Screws Over Tourists" section of the blog post.

Joe drinks orange juice from a glass that looks like it belongs at a doll's tea party.

We wanted to go to a Jewish deli, but the line stretched around the block for Carnegie Deli.  We went next door to Stage Deli where they scoop up the Carnegie Deli stragglers.  Take a close look at that menu.  Why is the turkey sandwich $15.95???

OK, that's a lot of turkey, but still!

Our NYC friends grin even though we are taking photographic evidence of their presence in a tourist trap where most New Yorkers would never think of darkening the door. Not pictured: Joe's friend Dave, who said, "No photos, please."

I love our New York friends who always show us a wonderful time whenever we visit! I'm so lucky to have such great friends.

Guest Post: New Year Sure Sure - Radio for an Iceland Road Trip

Happy Friday everyone! Julie, my super cool friend from San Francisco who traveled with me to Iceland, is taking over today. I thought she could write about the radio stations we listened in Iceland, mainly one that seemed to be called "New Year Sure Sure" but my Icelandic is a little spotty, so take that with a grain of salt. Here's Julie's rundown of Icelandic top 40 and beyond:

Greetings everyone, this is Julie, guest blogging on GGG this week. Adele graciously asked me to write about something “cool” in music and all I could really think of is Kreayshawn’s viral single “Gucci Gucci”. Clearly I should just stick with writing about Iceland.

Besides basking in the magic that is Iceland, we spent a good chunk of our time there driving around in our rental car. Like all our past road trips, we forgot to bring our own music and had to heavily rely on the radio. You can learn a lot about a place from its local radio stations and Iceland’s radio stations were like a breath of fresh hipster air with a hint of Norwegian Death Metal.

Bon Iver, Mumford and Sons, Adele were on heavy rotation, but not much of Katy Perry or Britney and strangely enough, not a single Bieber song on the radio! That makes me wonder where those Icelandic Bieberers get their fix and why is he everywhere but the radio, I just don’t get it!

Over the course of five days of driving, we switched from our favorite station that sounded like “New Year Sure Sure” to their top 40 station with lots of Lil Wayne and Rihanna. Every once awhile we would hear the latest single from Cake. Yes, you heard me, Cake and it has nothing to do with short skirts nor going for the distance. Cake, have no fear, Iceland has not forgotten you yet, while the world has since the 90s.

Another popular band was called Awolnation, which we had never heard of before Iceland. If AFI and Bassnectar had an emo angsy dubstep lovechild, it would be them. I’m assuming they were very popular there since their single came on like a broken record. Somewhere between being wet and cold from our horseback riding and getting lost on our way to the Blue Lagoon, I saw Adele’s angry fingers fumbling to switch stations when that song came on for the fifty-millionth time.

The radio highlight? Going apeshit for Bjork. What would Icelandic roadtrip be without Bjork?! Not gonna lie, it was epic when her songs came on the radio. Something about the combination of the desolated landscape in Snæfellsjökull and her music made us realized, “holy shit, we’re in muthafuckin’ Iceland, AHHHH!” It made me want to just pull over our VW and break out running with the sheep and smallish horses! But instead Adele just filmed us going gaga with her iPhone (a much safer alternative).

Who knows what would’ve happened if Sigur Rós came on, we might have made a beeline straight for the ocean. Too much Iceland to handle!

Editor's note: We never heard Sigur Rós on the radio, so that theory wasn't tested. Instead, they played a lot of Jessie J, who just doesn't inspire the same reaction. And here's that iPhone video with Bjork playing on the radio whilst driving in the Icelandic countryside.

Iceland Souvenirs

The customs officer asked me what I purchased in Iceland. "Stuffed animals and a bottle of vodka," I said.

He gave me a look and sent me on my way. Yep, that pretty much sums it up. Except I forgot to mention the bow tie. Sorry, U.S. customs officials!

I bought this as a joke. I really wanted to get the Skipper's Pipe, but I couldn't find it at the airport shop on my way home. So I had to stick with Salty Fish. Sure enough, Salty Fish are salty - it's black licorice encrusted in salt, not sugar. Blech! Most people who've tried it have spit it out.

If you want to try it, I'll mail it to you. Seriously. First person who emails me gets dibs on the already opened box of salty licorice. Don't all volunteer at once.

More Touristy Stuff in Iceland

After a couple days in Reykjavik, we hit the road and headed to the Golden Circle to check out some of Iceland's most popular tourist attractions.

Þingvellir went way over our heads in terms of historical/cultural importance. We got out at a rest stop, went in an uninformative gift shop, snapped a few pictures, used the bathroom and left. Tourism in true American fashion.

Next stop: Geysir. Oh, hello gift shop that I thought would be tacky but turned out to be a hipster, urban-farmer clothing store mecca.

I've never been to a windier place than this.

I wondered, "How do I know that the wind isn't going to change and blow this steam right in my face?"

Gulfoss was our favorite of the three attractions by far. So beautiful! So Lord of the Rings.

I don't think these pictures do it justice.

We randomly pulled over here and happened upon a giant 3,000-year-old crater.  That's just another roadside attraction in Iceland.

I really wanted to go hiking in the steam valley at Hveragerði to a heated spring where you can go swimming, but let's just say I am no Mark Trail. I was confused about where the trail started and ended up leading us on a trail from one parking lot to another parking lot. That took an hour and we didn't have time to go on the actual trail because we had to book it to dogsledding. So a scenic parking lot trail it was. Thank God Julie is a patient person!

This is a neat little stepladder over a barbed wire fence cutting through the trail.

After dogsledding, we stopped for dinner at Fjöruborðið, which is renowned for their amazing lobster. Holy cow, that was the best lobster I've had! They were miniature lobsters swimming in butter, as lobster should be.

I think this picture Julie took is so cool, but it looks like it was taken during the Great Depression. Why do I look so doleful? I'm about to dig into a lobster feast!

We went horseback riding at Hestar on our last full day. It was cold and rainy, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways and stings your face. To say I was miserable would be an understatement. Not only miserable, but really scared of the whole endeavor, which could not end soon enough. I keep forgetting that I hate horseback riding. It always sounds fun, but in practice, I never have fun. As soon as the horse starts galloping or even walking quickly, I'm holding on for dear life and imagining myself just bouncing out of the saddle and into the mud.

My problem is that I know that I am not in control, and that it's the horse whose calling the shots, and that is not a good feeling. I admire those who are good at horseback riding though! Julie was a natural, and at least she had fun. I on the other hand, refused to dismount from the horse during our break because the instructor said, "Be careful, the horse might run back to the paddock with your foot still in the stirrup." I just assumed my horse would do that and refused to take the chance.

Touristy Stuff in Iceland: The Blue Lagoon

The people in our hostel dismissed the Blue Lagoon as expensive and touristy, which it is, but they left out the part about it being really fun!  And beautiful, of course.  I say, if you are a tourist in Iceland, you ought to go.  This is the Disneyland of pools.

The entrance looked foreboding.

And the water was an otherworldly blue.

Everyone scurried out of the changing rooms and jumped into the warm water. The air was freezing. But there was a secret door from a hot tub inside to the outside pool, which was a nice touch. We wished that the temperature of the blue lagoon could be cranked up just a tad, but perhaps that is too much to ask.

Here's Julie relaxing in the indoor hot tub. She has silica on her face, as a beauty treatment. There's boxes of silica around the lagoon, don't grab mud from the bottom of the pool, which we contemplated doing at first. We also got 20 minute massages in the Lagoon, which was really nice, even for someone as uptight about massages as me. When in Rome, right?

And if you go to the Blue Lagoon and value your hair, PLEASE wear a swimming cap. The water in the pool absolutely destroyed my hair. I put leave-in conditioner on it before I got in, but the next day it felt like straw. It was so dry and disgusting. I told my mom that when I got home, and she said "Yes, I was going to say that your hair looked weird," a statement which was definitely true, but still put me in a terrible mood. I wish I had sprung for the 100 kroners or whatever it was to get a swimming cap, and then I wouldn't have had to buy $26 hair mask from Sephora when I got home (this one is awesome though) and gotten 1.5 inches of damaged hair cut off. Learn from my mistake!

The inside of the spa was uber modern and sleek. Very lovely. They had fancy lockers that opened via a wristband. Of course it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to use it, grumbling the whole time. They are very serious about showering in public pools in Iceland, which I can understand. We went swimming almost every day at the geothermal pools around Reykjavik and I became a lot less prudish about public nudity, ha. Oh, the ravages of age that I have to look forward to. Just kidding. Sort of.

The first time I went to the pool, at the gigantic Laugardalslaug complex, I made the critical error of wearing my glasses instead of my contacts. I have terrible vision, so when I took off my glasses, all the naked people turned into pink blurs. Ha. If I couldn't see them, they couldn't see me, right? Maybe that was a good way to ease into the spa scene.

But I really loved the Icelandic swimming pool culture. Pools are open most of the day and night, and swimming was a fun thing to do when we had a spare few hours. We were often the only tourists at the public pools, which was great. It is the exact opposite of American pools in the summertime - instead of jumping into a cold pool to escape the heat, we ducked into a hot tub to avoid shivering in a bikini. I thought it was interesting that Icelandic children and pregnant ladies hung out in the hot tubs. Your fellow swimmers would probably have you arrested if you tried that in the U.S.

The night before we went dogsledding, we checked into a hostel near Laugarvatn Fontana, a brand new spa. It was gorgeous, Scandanavian-chic, overlooking a lake with a bunch of different saunas, hot tubs and pools. We were the only ones there, and I walked briskly from the locker room to a long, rectangular pool, trying to avoid hypothermia. I hopped in the main pool, and quickly realized that the water came up only to my knees. Ahhh!! So freezing out. I thought the water would get deeper so I could swim, but no, it was still knee-deep. I ended up sort of frantically half-crawling, half swimming the length of the pool toward the hot tub. I'm glad there was no one around to see that. What is the point of a 3-foot deep pool? No clue. Please weigh in, Icelanders.

Dogsledding in Iceland

We checked off goal after goal for this trip - pet horses on the side of the road?  Done.  Dogsledding?  Done.

I had visions of gliding through the snow on some glacier, but it turns out that by September, all the snow has melted and it's already too icy and dangerous for the dogs to go up on the glacier.  So instead we drove to the Southwest coast and went dog "sledding" on gravel in a cart.  Close enough for me.

When we arrived, the dogs were barking like crazy. They were ready to run. We got to help put on their harnesses and get them ready to pull the cart.

What I learned from this experience - it is very difficult to get 10 dogs to all do the same thing. There were a lot of stops and starts in the beginning. One of the dogs was a seven-month-old puppy and it was his first run with the cart. He would run for a little bit, then get tripped up and fall on the ground, the other dogs dragging his prostrate body. His first day on the job, poor little thing. This happened multiple times and was upsetting, but the dog trainer gave him a longer lead and he got the hang of it.

Some pictures from the "Photo and Petting" segment of the tour. Ten dogs pulled a cart and four people, which is pretty amazing.

Here's a video of Julie getting a lesson on how to drive a dogsled. As you can see, it's a bumpy ride. I was scared to drive because I always assume I will crash whatever I drive, but I was able to clear the mailbox to the barn and coast in smoothly. Yah! Mush!

Stretch it out!

After the ride, we got to coo over two-week puppies. The trainer popped the top off the dog house, to the pups' mother's chagrin.