Here I am with about one week left of our vacation and no hope of ever catching up on my blog posts. I am still posting about Iceland!
I forgot to take photos of our apartment before we unpacked so we quickly took some photos as we were leaving. It was a decent place to stay for under $200/night and I would rent another apartment in Iceland again. Next time, I might pick an apartment that was one of the stops on the FlyBus so we don't have to walk 2 blocks with all our luggage and being super tired.
Our apartment was on the second floor and right at the landing where the column is.
Our third and final stop on the tour was something I found rather fascinating. I had no idea about the history and uniqueness of this area before coming here. Our tour guide gave a short speech about this area but I missed the first part because we all had to go to the bathroom when we arrived. However, I read the signs and loved learning about Þingvellir or Thingvellir if you don't know how to pronounce the Icelandic letter "Þ".
This was the site of Iceland's first Parliament in 930 AD and marks the beginning of Iceland as a nation. Iceland was settled some 50 years earlier by mostly Norse and Celtic people and soon there was a need for settling disputes and establishing laws. This is the place that they selected due to a number of reasons. It was a central location for many settlements and it had plenty of firewood, grazing for the livestock and fresh drinking water.
I thought one of the funniest comments from our group was, "Why are there no buildings?" I guess maybe it was a fair question because when someone tells you this is a "Parliament" you think of a grand building like many other countries. Well, I guess in 930 AD things were rather rustic (duh) and they never bothered to build anything as nature did a good job of providing for them. I loved our tour guide's answer of, "Well, the Icelandic people are rather hearty and they can handle the harsh environment."
The other really neat part of this area was being able to stand on top of the Eurasian plate and look down on the North American plate. As the tectonic plates move away from each other, the land in between falls away and creates these straight cliffs and flat valleys. Plus, the view was simply amazing.
One of the things we saw on our way to Þingvellir was one site where they filmed The Wall in Game of Thrones. I believe the structure at the bottom is the remains from the filming of the gate into The Wall. Much of The Wall was CGI (like the massive height) but I can see why the show makers picked this site.
The 2nd stop on our tour was at the Geysir geothermal area and I found it to be like a mini Yellowstone which we visited a few years ago. It had the familiar smell of sulphur and pools of hot water. It even had it's own version of Old Faithful called Strokkur which is not as big but you also don't have to wait as long to see it erupt again. Strokkur erupts every 8 minutes or so and you can get a good splash of water on you too if you stand close enough.
I thought it was interesting that the word "geyser" originates from the Icelandic word "geysir" which is the name of a single Geysir in this area. It is a little confusing because "geyser" is such a generic word for us but for Icelandic people, it means a particular geysir named Geysir!
After going through the geysir area, we stopped at the little cafe and souvenir shop to eat a small snack and did some window shopping. The kids got some drinks and candy while I had mushroom soup which was actually quite good considering it was in a pot in the buffet. We didn't have much time to do more than glance at a few items in the shop. The most common items were made of wool which I am allergic/sensitive to so it didn't really interest me anyway.
The top photo is the beginning of our walk through the geothermal area. Off to the right is Geysir and the bottom is Geysir up close. It wasn't active and hard to take photos with all the steam.
Our first stop on our bus tour was the Gullfoss waterfall and it was pretty impressive! It was also very cold even in the middle (end?) of summer here. Most of the days were in the low 50F or around 10C but at the falls it seemed quite a bit colder. There was a small walk down to the falls and you could walk up right next to the impressive 105 foot or 32 meters drop. There was another path that went to a viewpoint above the falls but we didn't have time for that path.
When you first approach the falls it looks like it is falling into the middle of the earth! We tried to capture the beauty of the falls by camera but it was hard due to the mist generated by the falls. I uploaded a video that might be a better representation of the majesty of Gullfoss.
The top photo is the path walking to Gullfoss and you can see where the falls are by the cloud of mist directly ahead of us. The bottom photo is the path down to the falls where another road is.
Yeah, so I am still behind on my posts but hopefully I will catch up at some point. I blame my husband who just bought a new camera for this trip and is taking 1000's of photos for me to sort through.
This is our third and last day in Iceland and it was not nearly enough time to do everything we wanted. I guess there is always next time! Today we all woke up at a reasonably normal time and barely made it out the door in time to find a place to eat breakfast/lunch. We didn't have time for our light breakfast in the early AM because today we all slept in!
Again we walked down the main shopping street (Laugavegur) and we ended up finding a little French bistro that served brunch. Sounded like a perfect solution to our late morning start! Both Fredrik and I had an "English Breakfast" with scrambled eggs, sausage (more like a mini hot dog), bacon, baked beans (how is that "English"?), Icelandic black pudding (yuck), tomatoes, mushrooms, potatoes, fresh fruit, and orange juice. It also came with a huge basket of pastries like croissants, pain au chocolate, bread, jam and butter. We ordered another basket of pastries for the kids and shared some of our meals with them. I am not sure we needed the extra basket of pastries though but the kids devoured the basket of goodies. My husband and I were quite pleased with the breakfast even if some of the items were questionable. There was plenty of food to fill us up!
Our "English" breakfast brunch which was quite delicious. It was a place called Le Bistro and I would definitely recommend it.
Soon it was time to board our boat. It was a decent size boat and can hold 130 passengers but it didn't feel like there were that many people. However, most of the seating was taken so maybe there were at least 100 people on the boat? There was an area you could sit outside on the top and two levels inside where you could sit. We chose the middle level right above where it says "WHALE WATCHING" on the boat. There were some snacks and drinks that you could purchase but since we just ate lunch and brought our own, we had no need to purchase anything on the boat. We left the harbor and it took about 45 minutes to get to the spot where the whales were feeding. It was quite amazing!
I got behind again on my blog posts. I am recalling this a week after we went on this tour. Hopefully, my memory is still good! I had to split up this day into two blog posts. So many photos!
Today we woke up at a decent time but since I slept a little after we got back from the Blue Lagoon yesterday, I went to bed very late. I was the last one to wake up but we were all out of the apartment by 10am. We had just enough time to walk down the main shopping street (Laugavegur) and do a little tourist window shopping while we tried to find a place to eat lunch. We settled on a little cafe that seemed to be busy and the menu looked attractive enough for all of us. I had a yummy green salad with freshly cooked chicken breast, the kids shared an order of fish and chips while Fredrik had a burger. It was pretty good and we were all pleased with the meals here.
TOP: We are walking down Lanugavegur and took a photo of a road where we could see the water. BOTTOM LEFT: Just strolling down Laungavegur. BOTTOM RIGHT: A typical tourist shop that we only did some window shopping.
This is the same day we arrived in Iceland but it feels like a new day because we napped. I made everyone wake up at about 2pm (7am our time) because I was determined to make it to the Blue Lagoon Spa today. We had a bus transfer scheduled for earlier in the day but I emailed to reschedule it for later but forgot that they wanted us to be there 30 mins before the scheduled time. I should have said the time to have the bus come get us and not the time I would be there. My fault but it was fixed as we caught the next bus and still made it to the spa on time.
We have arrived at the Blue Lagoon Spa! It is a man made lagoon which is a side effect of the geothermal power plant's run off and the water is renewed every day.
Well, today was pretty awesome all considering. We arrived on time in Keflavik (Iceland's airport), cleared customs, picked up our luggage and made it to our bus without any problems. We arrived around 7am Icelandic time or about 12am our time.
Keflavik Airport and a view from our bus on the way to our apartment.
It is about a 50 minute bus ride from the airport to downtown Reykjavik.
I just was looking back at the last post here and I stopped in the middle of our trip to Oregon. I just ran out of steam posting I guess! So now ... here I am at 5:30am ... the only one awake and thinking ... what should I do? Hmm, maybe start blogging again? Yeah. That is a good idea. The only problem is that I usually do this at the same time I am going through my photos so I can remind myself what we have done. Well, Fredrik bought this new fancy camera and I don't know how to get the photos off of it yet. Hmmm ... bugger. Here goes nothing!
How far back should I go? Well, there was an exciting thing that happened on the way to the airport on Thursday July 30th. We left in plenty of time because the Blue Angels were scheduled to practice at the same exact time we would be driving to the airport. They close down one of the floating bridges so they can practice for the air show at Seafair this weekend. This causes traffic of course as all the bridge traffic gets redirected to the freeway we will be traveling on.
So, we are on the freeway and yes there are a lot of cars and it gets REALLY slow at the I-90 interchange. Expected. Well, as we are sitting there waiting in the sea of cars on the freeway ... all the sudden a tight formation of the Blue Angels appears right before us and zoom off to the east over the bridge. Unexpected! Good thing we were already at a standstill because if not, I might have ran into someone. Whew! Of course, there was no time to snap a photo!
There was nothing else really noteworthy on our plane ride. No one slept as usual. We forgot the melatonin at home even though my husband ran to the store late last night specifically to pick some up. I have a short video of the northern lights that displays at night in our airplane. That is pretty much all for today.
