Enjablog

We took a gravel road down the middle of the country with instructions to fill up on gas before leaving because, well, there aren’t gas stations in that part of the country.

We passed between 2 glaciers, Langjökull and Hofsjökull. Along the way, we stopped to look at a map and found some sheep a few meters away hiding from the wind. They stuck around long enough for me to take a picture and then walked away. We also stopped in Hveravellir to see the hot springs and mud pools.

This video is kinda boring, but it’s a synopsis of our ~6-hour car ride. I used my camera’s time lapse setting to make a video using a picture taken every second and included videos I took in the places where we stopped. Because of the distance and areas we traveled that day, this video shows a lot of the different landscapes in Iceland. Most of the roads we traveled on were gravel, with some areas worse than others as becomes apparent in the video when it looks like I’m filming an earthquake.

Coming back into civilization, we made stops to visit Gullfoss and Geysir. Gullfoss is a popular tourist attraction, since it’s more easily accessible than Dettifoss. It’s also a pretty strong waterfall, averaging 140 m³/s of water running over this waterfall in the summertime.

The word “geysir” is derived from the Icelandic word for “to gush.” According to the tour book, it’s the only Icelandic word that has made it into the English language (I guess Bjork doesn’t count). Iceland’s Geysir, or The Great Geysir, was the first geysir found, but is now only active following earthquakes. The active geysir remaining in the area is Strokkur, erupting every 8-10 minutes.

We made it to Reykjavik just in time for dinner (the hotel knew of 1 restaurant that was open). The wait staff at Þrír Frakkar (3 Coats) were super nice and seated us without a reservation and brought a book out for Julia to play with while we ate. The decor was very fishy, including a cod clock and other types of fish mounted on the walls.

Ian and I shared the Arctic charr appetizer, while Sune and Cassia tried the whale sashimi. The Arctic charr was served with scrambled eggs and chantilly sauce, which was good, but definitely did not sate our craving for scrambled eggs. For our entrees, I had the cod in mustard sauce and Ian had the redfish with wasabi sauce. We got a couple desserts to share and they were garnished with a fruit I’d never seen before: gooseberries. They taste like a tart plum, but with the texture of an apple, the size of a blueberry. Craziness. All around, very good!

photo by underbunny

After dinner, we got back to the hotel for Internet! Granted, we only had connection from the stairwell to the lobby. But it was worth the trouble after going days without!