Day 3 - Geysir, Gullfoss, and Þingvellir

I already mentioned how our day started. Great sleep last night. Here's the Hellishólar guesthouse:

We all got up and went to breakfast. The included breakfast here is great and goes along ways toward improving our somewhat diminished view of the place we had shortly after arrival. We ate in a big room with several tables and a nice view out into the rain. They have fruit, cereal, yogurt, mini-pancakes, waffles, toast and cucumbers, tomatoes, cheese and deli meat to go on top. We ate well and then sought some advice on what might be best to do in the rain---almost all of which we promptly discarded for a our original plan: the golden circle.

The golden circle is just a loop that has a lot of interesting sights that can be seen on a short trip from Reykjavik. We decided on Gullfoss then Geysir.

So we mapped everything out, packed up, and took off. Our first stop was unplanned. We came around a hill and were coming across a very nice little bridge and saw in the distance what looked like a church. We decided it was a good time to stop and we found ourselves at Skálholt Cathedral.

The site goes back to 1000 A.D. when the land was set aside "to be a seat of bishops for as long as Christianity survived in the country." There were some ruins from some of the original structures (or earlier ones anyway) and an interesting grass covered building which you can see just to the right. As we were leaving we listened for a short while to a small string ensemble practicing in the church. Beautiful.

Then back to the car and on up Geysir which we decided to stop for rather than stopping on the way back from Gullfoss. We got out and headed up the side of the hill with the crowds until we got to the Strokker geyser. It goes off every 3-4 minutes so we didn't have long to wait.

We then wandered further up the hill---through slick red mud, up and down a ladder set up over a fence and further on up to the top of a ridge. I took this picture:

before joining the kids to see this on the back side:

 The view was stunning.

It's a little disappointing sometimes to see my attempts to capture it with the phone. There are just so many big, wide-open, spaces. Anyway,  it was a great "danger hike". For those that don't know that is a Rosenquist Tradition that goes back to my first sabbatical when 3.5 year old Kai, Uncle Tregg and I went for a hike through the forrest surrounding the time share in South Lake Tahoe. We scrambled down some loose rock, then across some wonderfully spongey moss, then more red mud, and down to the bottom. We did our best to scrub the red mud off our boots in the almost painfully hot water running in the ditch along the road, then went into the tourist center for some pizza. Actually really good pizza.

Our next step then was Gullfoss.

 Another amazing sight, that was really hard to fit into my camera. There is a spot to view the fall up close that you can see in the photo above. The walk gets you a little damp, unless your Anni who just stopped and started crying when she started getting we until she was drenched. And then did it again on the way back! Good times. Oh and Kelli got wet because she had to go through the spray and then go back for Anni who'd stalled out again.

We were kind of waffling on whether to go back at this point or not. It was already 5:00PM, but we had lot of light ahead of us (as I right this at midnight, it's still light outside) so we decided to fit in Þingvellir. While Þ looks like a letter invented to make sassy faces ( :-Þ ) they use it around here for the 'th' sound. So when you go to google, type Thingvellir. This is a meeting place that goes back about a thousand years too. Look it up, it's kind of an interesting story. The other interesting thing to note is that this area is all located between the edge of the European continental plate and the North American continental plate. We hiked around for a bit, saw wonderful more amazing views:

saw the amazingly clear water flowing into Iceland's largest lake, :

and did hike up to the top of the ridge, just to say we'd been back to north america (and to use the bathrooms).

And then we went home. We had a nice meal on the way home, but you can probably tell I'm running out of steam.