NO VOMIT! We had an entire night with no one vomiting! Breakfast bright and early again and then we hit the road, big day today.

We drove for about 30 minutes and bagged our first geocache at a place called Tveir Brú and then did a nice hike up to a waterfall:

Said geocache was NOT kid friendly so again, if you’re ever in Iceland driving around Tveir Brú with small children, make sure they walk up to the edge of the 50 foot cliff where the cache is hidden with their head up, not staring at the GPS.

Second stop was at Krafla which apparently is a “caldera”, where we did a short (2 miles?) walk out over a flat plain:

to a small hill with a bunch of fissure vents and bubbling pools of waters:

On the way to the hill Reed made friends with about 10 lovely Japanese people, all of whom gave him (or he gave them?) a high five.

A 10 minute drive later and were we at Námafjall, which is a geothermal area with boiling mudpools and steaming fumaroles and if you’re not wearing disposable booties over your shoes like all the people getting off of the tour buses were, a giant mess for the car. Beck couldn’t take the smell and had to go back to the car (pretty sure he just wanted to finish the book he was reading) but we forced the little dudes to walk around with us. Mud pots were cool but I think this was my favorite:

We did lunch out of the trunk (peanut butter and jelly, apples and if you finished your sandwich, a cookie or two) and then we were back on the road again on our way to Lake Mývatn. Our first stop was at a place called Hverfjall, which is “… a tephra cone or tuff ring volcano in northern Iceland, to the east of Mývatn” as my friends at Wikipedia say. We did the 4×4 gravel road out to the base of the volcano and after a bit of prodding to get up this trail:

everyone made it to the top of the mountain, although not without us having to break out the “You’re a mountain lion! Growl like one!” strategy to get certain people up the hill that weren’t excited about climbing the mountain:

which everyone had to join in on:

but eventually all led to this:

Cool spot.

Our slave driver navigator then proceeded to direct us to Dimmuborgir (a large area of unusually shaped lava fields east of Mývatn) where we did yet another short hike out to see one of the structures which supposedly looks like an old cathedral:

Pretty sure at this point that everyone was really cold and tired and we completely lucked out because the very next thing we did after getting back into the car was a bath in the natural hot springs:

which was AMAZING for all involved, especially people that had floaties. Highly recommended if you’re ever driving through northern Iceland after a long day of volcano hiking and mud pot viewing.

Day only got better though because I found an amazing restaurant / farm on Foursquare called Vogafjos Cowshed Cafe, where we (adults) not only had an EPIC meal (braised lamb shanks and pan fried artic char) but we got to watch cows pooping and peeing and then eventually get milked which if you’re between the ages of 2 and 5 is PRETTY COOL:

Finally, we drove to the hotel, which was another 30 miles away and everyone hit the sack.
Stats:

• Weird mud pots and fissures: too many to count
• People that had to be encouraged to make mountain lion sounds to bring out their inner lion to make it up the mountain: 1
• People vomiting at night: 0 (WOOHOO!)
• Geocaches: 2