The plan for today was to
experience the Golden Circle. Think of it as something similar to driving
the loop in Yellowstone, even with a few of the same sort of sights. We were up
early (I think we were out the door around 8am) and our first stop was the Faxi
waterfall. This wasn't one of the main sights on the circle, but one that
was right off the road and a great way to start our morning.
Gullfoss Falls was next and
made Faxi look incredibly underwhelming.
And just in case the dozen
pictures above weren’t enough here’s a short video of Gullfoss – amazing!
Geyser was next and felt very
Yellowstone-ish without as many crowds or safety precautions. The
Skokkur geysers erupts every 8-10 minutes so we were able to catch that a few
times. One eruption was a 2-for-1. Just to compare size, the
Skokkur reaches 25-35 meters compared to Old Faithful, which is 25-55 meters.
The
Geyser erupts after earthquakes, the last time being in 2000 – it reaches 70-80
meters so that would be incredible, and very dangerous to see
I like watching the water get
sucked back into the geyser. Very
cool!
Justin and Drew really wanted
to hike up a hill above the geysers. I wasn't necessarily thrilled about
it cause I didn't think it would give us any better few of the hot pots, but I
was glad we made the climb when I saw the view on the other side of the hill.
It’s interesting to me how few
safety precautions there were – like zero actually. Carly’s here helping Drew navigate across the cooling water
on our way back to the van.
Iceland gets its name for a
reason. I thought these big vehicles were pretty funny to see driving
around in the summer, but I'm sure they are much needed in the winter months.
We really didn't eat out much
on this trip or indulge in any extra treats; so our next stop was a real treat
for the kids. A real Icelandic dairy farm that makes their own ice cream,
which we enjoyed as we watched the farmers unroll the hay to feed the cows in
the barn next to us. We saw lots and lots of hay and sheep in Iceland -
we got a kick out of finding new colors of "marshmallows" in the
fields. Iceland had pink, purple, green, black, white and blue
marshmallows.
There were several points of
interest we visited in Thingvellir National Park. I thought the deep
canyons were particularly interesting.
One
of the few pictures of the whole family
Since we'd gotten such an early
start this morning we'd completed most of the Golden Circle by 3pm. There
was a restaurant I'd stumbled upon during my research of Iceland that I really
wanted to try out (we'd passed it early in the morning as we headed north on
the circle) I figured if we beelined it we could make it there just minutes
before it closed at 4pm. I called just to make sure they would still seat
us at 3:57pm and they told me we'd be good. It was decided the kids would
hang out in the car. We knew it would be expensive and dropping a couple
hundred $$$ on dinner isn't how we roll so they hung out in the van feasting on
snacks and junk food and Justin and I enjoyed a lovely dinner. Friðheimar is a living greenhouse
that produces nearly 20% of the tomatoes in Iceland. It was such a unique
experience to be seated at a nice dinner table surrounded by tomato plants being
nourished by thermal heat underground and electric lights to make up for the
lack of sunlight in Iceland. The perfect growing environment has been
created for optimal produce. Super interesting and incredibly charming.
Justin and I both ordered the buffet tomato soup that they are known for.
The soup buffet also includes all the delicious homemade bread you can
eat. Sadly, since we were so late to dinner they didn't replenish the
bread during our feast so we didn't get as much of our favorite variety as we
would have wanted. I think Justin ate four or five bowls of soup.
Each table also had a basil plant with scissors to cut fresh basil into our
soup. It was all very good and we were so glad we were able to fit it
into our stay.
We had one final stop at Kerið crater - we walked all around the top and down to the bottom then called it a
day.
The littles were thrilled to
get to spend some time in the hot tub tonight before heading to bed. Such
a perfect end to the day. Seriously living the good life.
