Extreme Iceland: Day 3

The third day in Iceland starts again with an early wake up , and surprise surprise we again have "menemen" for breakfast . No time for grocery shopping that early in the morning, not the time to be picky. According to the plan we have quite long drive; making our own "golden circle tour" including some geothermal spa!
The weather was good as it could be for Icelandic winter. We were glad to welcome some sunshine in an infinite white roads. 

The scene was breath taking, so that we stopped to enjoy it more. 

Thingvellir national park was our first stop, afterwards we drove to Geyser and Gullfoss waterfall, Fontana geothermal baths, and Krid volcanic crater.

Thingvellir has small waterfalls, lake and nice hiking areas in general, faults and fissures creates amazing view of tectonic plate boundaries of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Why don't we walk around with some pictures?

 

As I mentioned before the park has some small waterfalls around, and since we have this information we decided to find one of them. We parked our car next to a sign says Öxararfoss. Great it seemed like in a walking distance, but there was something weird about the whole situation. Besides the sign there was no path showing the way, or an evidance that people were walking there so far. All the field was covered by snow and didn't really looked like there was a waterfall around. Well, we said why not discover what is going on!

We started walking in a deep deep snow, for about 10 min. An the results was frozen watercourse and probably somewhere around the frozen waterfall, couldn't really see it. In any cases it was fun to walk in a snow and be stubborn tourists, insist that we know better than locals.

Before we go to our next stop to the famous Geyser Strokkur, we realized our time management was good enough to have a coffee break for all, smoking break for Pata, and a stop for my photo session with Icelandic houses. Although we had Pata; the Frappe expert Greek, we were quite well equipped with special tool to warm up water for coffee and make instant soup.

The geyser area is just like a place from another planet. From different points of the ground steam and sulfur smell was spreading around, could even see water boiling in there. Especially the Strokkur Geyser was having this steam and sulfur explosions every 5-10 minutes up to around 12 meters. So if you are looking for this place, it is not possible not to find it.

 

Well, we needed more space in the car, so decided to get rid of Darius.

Enough of smelling sulfur, it is time for lunch. We didn't need to search a lot, the souvenir shops and restaurants were all around. We decided to try a traditional dish, Iceland's amazing lamb soup. Well, if you ask me I don't know why it is so special, lamb meat is available everywhere so do the dish. But I admit that it was great, except the price. Iceland's prices are just crazy! If you go there you will see what I mean.

And of course my fish lover friends this time as well manage to find some dried fish! What a surprise for me! It is either smoked or dried, every trip we do together, always the same. We cannot live without fish smell in our cabin, car or apartment.
Our next stop, Gullfoss (Golden fall) waterfall, I really don't have words to describe how beautiful and giant it is.

Instead, I will let some photos talk.

After all day walking around in the cold required some warming up! Next stop was Fontana geothermal baths. The place is not comparable with the Blue Lagoon but still worth passing by. Especially having sauna first and jumping to freezing lake. Well the lake is not only freezing but some parts of it is boiling. So nothing in the middle. They also offer mineral steam cabins, don't even try it, nothing different than a toilet.

Hot part of the lake.

Jumping to freezing water after sauna!

The day light is almost over, we are heading to see Krid volcanic crater. When we arrived there, the sign saying "admission free today" made us happy, but then we understood why. The water in it and the paths through downhill were frozen. So not much to see. Pictures from summer shows  the different colors of soil around the crater. I hope to go back one day, but summer time.

On the way back to Reykjavik, the kids are tired.

On my previous post I forgot to mention, after Blue Lagoon we had a dinner in a nice Icelandic restaurant. What we ordered was horse steak, whale steak, lobster soup, snacks of snails. Not that we tried to match the tastes but wanted to try everything exotic that Iceland's cuisine is offering.

Day three, dinner was home made spaghetti with some ready sauce. Yeah, saving money, Iceland is crazy expensive. But still for the night we had something interesting that we bought from supermarket, famous Icelandic rotten shark! Personal idea; it is horrible!

Later in the evening we went out for a walk in Reykjavik. Here some pictures;

 To be continued...