Iceland Day 2 (Part 1)

ICELAND DAY 2 . . .Part 1

After an awesome night sleep we decided to rent a car and explore outside the city.  In all honestly, if I had to plan this trip all over again, we would have rented the car from day 1 instead of making Reykjavik our home base.  On a map Iceland does not look like a very large country, but it is quite the opposite.  So not having any sort of plan, we ate breakfast, walked to the rental car company, loaded up, and within 10 minutes got lost for the first time. No problem, we backtracked, stopped for directions, finally figured out the map, and somehow got on our way.  When I say we had no plan, that's exactly what I mean, we had our map, a couple of tour books, and figured it out along the way.  The only thing that I knew was that we had booked a tour for the evening to see the Northern Lights, so we needed to be back at the hotel by a certain time.

 

As we ventured outside of town the scenery changed dramatically.  The landscape is dotted by steaming lava fields, icecaps, glaciers, hot pools, and geysers.  It is amazing.

Hanging out in the Lava Fields

The road to nowhere

Iceland has over 8,000 miles of roads, and we actually covered 300 miles in 1 day.  The one thing that I noticed was that there are waterfalls and rainbows everywhere.  Our first stop was Skogafoss waterfall.  It was absolutely beautiful and we wasted no time in taking advantage of a photo opportunity.  There is a trail that leads you around the waterfall so that you can actually walk behind it, but because of the weather lately the trail was about 6 inches of deep mud, so we weren't able to venture that far.

 

 

Next stop was a little village called VIK.  Vik is a small town around 300 people along the coastline.  The black sand beach here is actually rated by Islands magazine as one of the top 10 beaches in the world.  As we pulled up I was taken back by the pure beauty and serenity of this place, and immediately decided to test the waters.  Although my travel companions thought I was nuts, how often do you really get the chance to experience Arctic waters.  If I had my bathing suit I probably would have gone for it, but since I didn't think that far in advance my feet will just have to do!

 

 

 

 Next on the agenda was to get gas, and wouldn't you know that while pumping gas a rainbow appeared. 

 

 

 

So On the road again and back on the Golden Circle this time heading to GULLFOSS (golden falls.)  However before reaching the great waterfall we decided to try and drive up to the Solheimajokell Glacier.  Once we got off the main highway the road went from bad to worse, and we made an executive decision not to put our little rental through it, and admired the glacier from the bottom of the hill.

 

 

 Our final stop before getting to the Gullfoss Waterfall was to check out Eyjafjallajokull.  This glacier was responsible for closing down European airspace for over 6 days back in 2010 when it's underlying volcano erupted, throwing a black ash plume up 7 miles.