Back to rainy and cloudy.

Our day began with the car rental - a silver 4-door Toyota Yaris. Kamilla’s co-worker Tommi hooked us up with a sweet deal through Iceland Music Export. Then we were back at Prikið for breakfast because frankly, nothing else was going to compare at this point. Also, we were ready to get going on our rural Iceland adventure, so sourcing a new breakfast spot was out of the question. We began the adventure with the Golden Circle.

Note to those in the ad business with a car company client: you should really shoot your ads in Iceland in late September. Everywhere we stopped, the parking areas were empty and the vistas were always amazing.

We stopped before the park entrance to climb down into Þingvellir National Park to see Öxarárfoss. Turns out we could have driven down the road a bit farther, gone into the park through the main entrance and hiked up to Öxarárfoss, but we would have missed

walking down this trail

and climbing around on these rocks with this view.

Once we got to Öxarárfoss, it was fantastic.

It was our first waterfall experience in Iceland (there were many more to come), and if it hadn’t been raining, I would have climbed out as far as I could on those rocks for more of a close encounter.

We headed back down the path to the car and drove into the park properly.

We saw Öxarárfoss continue down two more levels and then flow into the Öxará river. We spied HUGE salmon (seriously, 3 feet long at least) in the deeper waters of Öxará from two bridges on our way to the area at Þingvellir where the Icelandic Commonwealth was founded in 930 AD.

Here’s Þingvallakirkja which sits adjacent to the first meeting place of the original Alþing (the Icelandic Parliament) which met at Þingvellir until 1262. There was a small graveyard with great gravestone typography.

The rain was intermittent at this point, and not unbearable, but it was time for a coffee so we headed to the visitor center for just that. Inside they had 20-odd laminated maps of Iceland that depicted its geology, topography, flora, fauna … a great collection which we poured over. Finally, it was time to go. We had an interesting drive ahead to get to Geysir.

As a tourist, most of the roads you travel in Iceland are paved, but there are exceptions. We chose one of those exceptions on our way to Geysir: road 365. If it had been sunny or even just cloudy, it would have been less dicey. Instead it was a black gravel road in the pouring rain with potholes that would have given Houston streets a run for their money and which also turned out to be under construction. We managed it in a little Toyota Yaris. It was only about 10 miles long, but it was a tense 10 miles. You hear warning after warning about tourists and gravel roads in Iceland and how careful you should be and how dangerous they are. It was a lot of build up, and in hindsight, it would have been a lot easier of a drive if I hadn’t had all of the fear-mongering running through my head as I tried to avoid as many potholes of undetermined depth (they we all filled with water) as I could. Because, you know, even without the warnings I still would have tried to avoid just as many potholes.

We made it to road 37 unscathed, but now the rain is pretty steady and it’s getting windier too. We pull up to Geysir in a bit of a downpour, but it lets up and we get moving. On the walk up to the entrance I revert back to the brain of a three-year-old and put my finger in the water run-off that’s trickling down the side of the path. Yep, that was boiling water about 15 degrees ago and I am officially an idiot.

Geysir is a geothermally active area in Haukadalur valley. Geysir was the first geyser ever described in a printed source and the earliest geyser known to Europeans. The word Geysir is where the English word geyser comes from.

Unfortunately, the geyser called Geysir doesn’t erupt much anymore, but it’s neighbor Strokkur erupts at least 30 feet into the air every 5-7 minutes.

The holes filled with boiling water were everywhere, and the steam clouds you walked through smell like sulphur. It was so cool to be that close to the inner workings of the earth.

Back on the road, we headed to Gullfoss, a giant waterfall and the last stop on the Golden Circle.

By this time, we were soaked. We had rainproof jackets, but we did not expect how wet our pants would get. We were also cold and not the happiest photographers in the world considering the light was completely flat and we kept having to wipe off our lenses. We actually contemplated skipping Gullfoss as we sat in the parked car in the pouring rain, but we reasoned that we were already wet and we’d change pants once we got back to car.

It’s probably hard to see at this size, but at the end of the cliff that juts out into the falls, there’s a man, and there’s a reason he looks like a little spec on the lens - that waterfall is HUGE! We would have loved to have walked out to where he did because then we would have been able to see where all that water was going, but it had been a long, long day and we were ready to get dry and get to our final destination for the night: Arhús in Hella.

As we drove south, the weather began to clear up some.

The drive was beautiful and we stopped in the town of Laugarás for a quick breather. Realizing how close we were to sunset, we sped down to Hella in hopes of catching it.

Our timing was impeccable. This was the view out over the Ytri-Rangá river from our cabin just after we checked in. We ended the evening at Café Arhús with hands-down the best meal we had the entire trip. Lamb for me and steak for Eric. Our waiter was the same person who checked us into the cabin. We also discovered Thule, which became Eric’s favorite Icelandic beer.