Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Iceland is foss-some

Day two of our adventures in Iceland was another unmitigated success! We had a long day of driving, and there were several waterfalls that we wanted to see along the way. The word for waterfall in Icelandic is foss, thus forming the basis for my excellent pun of a blog post title.

The ring road of Iceland, Rt. one, is pretty much the only option for winter tourists, as many of the smaller roads can have pretty dangerous conditions. We set off south after a quick stop for groceries, and had a couple of hours in the slowly breaking dawn light. Weather continues to be very forgiving, so we had clear and dry roads with very little traffic. Our several stops along our journey are shown below in picture form. A short summary would be waterfall, waterfall, waterfall, random field with horses, beach, waterfall. For hiking around near the waterfalls, wearing our studded orienteering shoes made for much safer trekking. Many of the other tourists were slipping and falling, I felt pretty smug about zipping past on the thick sheets of ice that built up from the spray (drizzle, as it stated on one sign) of the waterfalls.





Tonight we are staying in a hostel type place, several friendly groups all sharing the kitchen. We chatted a bit with a group from Moscow, and they gave us a very cool looking fridge magnet with Russian nesting dolls on it. I am busy folding some origami to give them in the morning.

Too cloudy to make it worth going out in search of the northern lights tonight. Here's hoping we get a lucky break soon! Tomorrow we're heading into an ice cave with a guide company. There are a too many neat things to see and not enough daylight hours in which to see them.
Our first foss



On this foss, we could walk behind the curtain of water

Still great weather for fossing

We forgot to buy carrots at the store. Ponies were uninterested in us

Cool rock formations at the black sand beach

Finally a break from all that sitting in the car

Cave at the black sand beach

Starting to get dark




Two giants, towing their 3 masted ship to shore were turned to stone: According to legend

Windy

So much beauty off towards the horizon

1 comment:

John Hilston said...

Iceland is one of my favorite places to go.
Luton airport cheap parking