Day 2 / Iceland Golden Circle

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After a great nights sleep I think we are dialed into this time zone. Never seeing darkness is still a little strange though. Took a couple hour drive up the coast then inland to the Golden Circle. Drove through lava fields that looked like Martian landscape. I could count the number of trees we saw today in one hand (slight exaggeration). Lava rocks aplenty combined with logging and erosion turned a once vibrant birch forest into grassy open fields. Amazing how far you can see.

First stop was Kerik - a large crater lake left from a long ago volcano. Very cool. From here we headed North towards the town of Geysir - the town where the western word for geyser came from. Along the way Geneva noticed what looked like low lying clouds on the horizon and asked if that was a glacier. Turns out she was right! Wow. Glaciers the size of mountains off in the distance. We'll visit those later.

Decided to stop at a farm for fresh-from-the-cow ice cream then took an hour hike to a waterfall called Hlauptungufoss (and no I didn't just randomly hit letters). We thought it was pretty amazing until we saw Gullfoss later in the day. The pics below don't quite do it justice.

Had overpriced lunch (everything is overpriced), paid $8.00 per gallon for good Icelandic gas then watched geysers and hot spots. Signs everywhere warning about scalding hot water and no hospital in the vicinity. Steam just poured out of the group and the main geyser shot up 30 feet or so every 5 minutes. Scared my son half to death the first time we saw it. As the mist plume went towards him he ran off into the field. We all had a pretty good laugh afterwards.

Last stop was Gullfoss. Holy moly. Truly amazing. Most impressive waterfall system I've ever seen. Check out the pics below. Like last night, the last picture was taken late at night when the light turned to..... more light. Ahhhh!

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