Golden Circle Time...

So, the Golden Circle tour is the one thing that all tourists seem to do in Iceland. Makes sense - it's only a day trip, but it takes you to very beautiful and iconic places. First up, Gullfoss.


I do like waterfalls, and this one is pretty cool. However. The midges were enough to drive you off the cliff and right into the water. They weren't biting insects, but they certainly liked to swarm. I had one even get between my camera lens and the lens cap, at one point. Yuck. As you can see, someone else was also highly unimpressed by the maddening bugs.


But he cheered up once we told him that we were going to see superheated explosions next.

Geysir (yup, it's the one that all the others in the world are named after) is a short drive down the road from Gullfoss, and we saw quite a few cyclists while making the trip between the two. Apparently, it's quite a big thing to cycle through Iceland. Personally, I felt bad for the cyclists...it looked like no one told them that the rain in Iceland is pretty much constant, and they were very soaked. But I bet they dried off pretty quickly once they reached the steamy grounds of Geysir.


Nifty, eh? This is actually Strokkur, another geyser close to Geysir. Geysir's been blocked up by rocks thrown by tourists in the 50's...so it doesn't go off that regularly. But Strokkur's pretty reliable - every five minutes or so, it goes off with a biiiiig whoosh.

After some time oogling the pillars of water and steam, we hopped back in the Jimny and made our way over to Þingvellir. We did make one side stop, though.


This is a cave that's been in use since Viking times. (The yellow and blue smudges are Mr. Ninja and Mr. Munchkin, respectively.) Used as a temporary shelter for shepherds and travelers, it was used as permanent housing by a few families at different times during the 1900s. But the neat thing about this place is that it's also inhabited by elves. Yeah, hokey, I know. But I think that if there's any place that there would be elves, trolls, dwarves, and so on...it would be Iceland. After exploring the cave (which was filled with the poop of half-wild sheep), we continued onto Þingvellir, home of the Althing.

I should mention that it was on this "highway" that I apologized to my husband for being skeptical about the need for a 4x4. We would pass rental cars that were driving the other way, and you could see the white knuckles of the drivers through their windshields. The road was closest to being a rough gravel road, and when driving on a sharply inclining road that is barely hugging the side of a mountain...let's just say that I was glad that I packed Gravol in my bag that day. In the end, it was worth it.



We wandered around the park for a good three hours or so, then made ourselves a picnic at the top of the mountain. Since everyone was pretty much wiped out at this point, we headed home for more hot pot soaking. Oh, but I have to show you this:

There were beautiful purple lupins EVERYWHERE in Iceland.


And sheep.


Fluffy, tasty sheep. Baaah.