Day 2 of our Iceland adventure started bright and early (2 year olds don’t seem to care about the time change), we had a great breakfast at the hotel including Icelandic yogurt (Skyr?) and then Beck and I got picked up to get our rental car. We got a Nissan Pathfinder with third row seating (2 adults, 3 kids) and 4 wheel drive, 25k miles (or kilometers maybe, I need to check) and diesel. I wish I could have said that this:

was our truck, but apparently they don’t rent those. Either way, our little truck runs like a champ and looks like it’ll handle most anything we throw at it. We packed everyone and everything up and headed out at 9:20, the sun only having come up an hour earlier.

We hit Þingvellir as our first stop, nabbed a couple of waterfalls:

and had a nice little hike around the river:

and the old church and graveyard:

Wind really picked up and I think we all were pretty surprised at how cold it was with the wind. The sun never gets seems to get above 30 degrees, staying low in the sky all day. Completely forgot about getting geocaches.

After that we piled back into the car and drove to go find some geysers, on the way we stopped at a super market / fast food joint and had the customary American hot dogs and hamburgers and then Karen found a farm that made their own ice cream so we stopped because… homemade ice cream.

After a quick pit stop there (and some frolicking with a friendly farm dog), we made it to the geysers (Stokkur) which erupted a couple times for us in the 20 minutes we stood around watching it. I even got one on video, which I’m sure will win awards in some kind of video competition for people with horrible phone cameras. Good number of people with their backs turned toward the geyser attempting to get a selfie with said geyser as it erupts. Kind of misses the point of going to see the geyser in the first place.

Last visit of the day was a gigantic waterfall called Gullfoss, which was wet and windy and really cold but we all made it down the stairs and back up again:

The hotel for the evening was out in the middle of absolutely nowhere and was perfect. It probably had 10 rooms and was / is attached to a farm. The ladies running the place were both there for the summer from Germany and took great care of us, even into the middle of the night when the oldest son proceeded to throw up into the wee hours of the evening, which is always a good sign when you’re about to drive around an island in a small car with 4 other people for 8 days.

Stats:

• Geocaches: 0
• Waterfalls: 3
• Ice cream: check
• Hot dogs: 3
• Hamburgers: 1