Our summer vacation was to Europe to visit Italy with a stopover in Iceland. The route from Boston to Reykjavik crosses over the southern tip of Greenland and there beneath the clouds we could see the icecap.
Reykjavik's latitude is 65 degrees north and arriving 2 weeks after the summer solstice meant that the sun "set" at 11:30pm and rose at 3am. After landing, we caught the sunset on the way to our hotel.
The low angle light allowed for great photos
Apparently Icelanders love a good hot dog and we stopped at the most famous hot dog stand in the country for a midnight snack
The next day we self-toured the Golden Circle of sights around Reykjavik. On this map our path was straight northeast from the city to Thingvellir, Geysir, and Gullfoss (ignore Erin's hand).
Thingvellir has many water-filled rifts that are geologic faults of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and Eurasian titanic tectonic plates meet. It is a spreading center plate junction, meaning that new magma from the earth's mantle is continually rising up and cooling as continental crust. The rate of spreading away from the ridge in both directions is on the order of a few centimeters per year. This doesn't sound like much, but consider that the process started 200 million years ago, breaking apart the supercontinent Pangea and creating the vast Atlantic Ocean in between. Another crusty thought is that last summer we stood on the other end of the North American plate where it is stuck sliding against the Pacific plate in the San Francisco Bay area.
One of the few true Icelandic words to make it into the English language is geyser, named from the town of Geysir, which contains a famous one called Strokkur. (Other Norse-derived words are berserk, blunder, ransack, slaughter, and heathen, which sort of encapsulates a Viking conquest, don't you think?)
Strokkur is Iceland's Old Faithful and goes off every 6 minutes or so
I have to say that Iceland's national park visitor centers, like this one at Geysir, are pretty fantastic. In addition to all the usual visitor amenities, they have cafes with great food and coffee.
Gullfoss is about as far as you can go into Iceland's interior by car. In fact behind us you can see the edge of the ice sheet of the big glacier that caps the center of the island.
Gullfoss is the most beautiful waterfall I've ever seen
Iceland has thermal hot springs everywhere and we ended our day in a giant outdoor hot spring pool
The next day we split up and the older girls and I ice-climbed on a glacier
To ice climb, you first jam your toe spikes into the ice wall and when they stick, you stand up and then smash your ice axe into the wall and pull up a step or two. Hearing the axe thud into the wall and feeling the rain of ice cubes is immensely satisfying.
We were going to climb on the ice hole but upon inspection our guide moved on
and we set up at an enormous pit where meltwater had carved a deep hole down to the bottom of the glacier
Further down, the hole reduced to an elevator shaft of beautiful blue-white ice
Poor Erin hadn't packed enough base layers and had to be outfitted in our guide's emergency puffy coat to stave off hypothermia
Meanwhile, Tessie and Heather visited the horses. Icelandic horses (they are NOT ponies) are raised everywhere on the island. The breed is known for their gentle nature and unique gaits. If taken out of Iceland, they cannot return, in order to protect the homeland stock from disease. There are no mosquitoes in Iceland (!!) and without tolerization to these pests, transplanted Icelandic horses often suffer from skin complications.
Tessie took a lesson on one, and experienced the special "tolt" gait, which is a running walk so smooth that one can supposedly drink champagne while riding
The next day we all rode Icelandics on a beautiful section of the north coast
We followed a river down to a black sand beach
and the horses snacked on the salty seaweed and cool river water
The human food in Iceland was universally delicious and expensive. At 138 ISK to the dollar, that reindeer burger and fries for lunch would set you back $38
Our most paleolithic snack was from the Laugarvatn Fontana geothermal bakery. They strategically place a pot of bread dough in sand directly over a steam vent, and the next day
they unearth it and serve it up to tourists
With some butter and smoked trout it was geolicious!
Erin needed to jog to keep up her fitness and one day on the flats in the perfect 55 degree weather, I reached a new PR of 6 miles
On another day, the weather turned and it was in the 40s and raining sideways. My outfit of thermal underwear top and bottoms, running shorts, raincoat, and hat kept my old bones comfortable.
We ran up into a giant volcanic cinder cone
and watched Erin do an extra lap around the rim for good measure
Up in the North, we walked until we reached the Wall. Last time we saw columnar basalt of this magnitude, it was at Devil's Postpile in the Sierra Nevada mountains
The winds almost fully supported Tessie's weight
On the windswept beaches in the North, we looked successfully for seals and unsuccessfully for puffins. There were many seebirds to sea, but as sub-amateur ornithologists we couldn't appreciate them. Then it was time to pack up our winter gear and migrate south to warmer climes
The elevator shaft went waaay down
I think that these protective dive-bombing birds are arctic terns. We'll go with that, because it lets me marvel at these amazing creatures that migrate 40,000 miles every year from the sub-Arctic to the Antarctic.
Extreme training run with Erin
Tessie tolting
1 comment:
That really is a smooth ride on that Icelandic horse!
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