Day 7 ended up being a relatively low-key day. We hadn’t planned much to do in the Peninsula, and all the driving and sight-seeing was starting to catch up with us. Still, there was one spot we had to see.
Kirkjufell and Kirkjufellsfoss
One thing we’ve noticed is most names for places in Iceland follow a pattern. Usually, they’re amalgamation of smaller words. In this instance Kirkju- means church, -fell means mountain, and -foss means falls. So Church Mountain, and Church Mountain Falls (see also on Day 5, Kirkjugólf = Church floor). Knowing a couple word fragments, you can quickly start to understand if what you’re going to is a waterfall (foss), a mountain (fell) or a glacier (jokul).
Anyways, I had seen many pictures of the gorgeous waterfall and steeple shaped mountain and knew we had to get a couple pictures there.
Kirkjufell is named because it vaguely resembles a church steeple. You can see some of the waterfall in the left corner.
The falls with Kirkjufell to our back.
A snow storm started back up, so we decided to headback to town and grab some food.
Local Eats
There’s just a couple restaurants to choose from in town. We ended up doing lunch at local cafe called Laki. They had wonderful panini’s and drinks. I got a hot chocolate (all photographing in the snow required a warm comforting drink) and Christina had a “Ice Cream Coffee.” Still not sure what exactly it was, but it was delicious.
After lunch, we headed back to our hotel caught a nap as we knew we would be out late hunting for the Northern Lights.
For dinner we stopped at another cozy local restaurant called RúBen (shockingly, no actual Rueben’s on the menu). The food and service were wonderful. If you find yourself in Grundarfjördur, make it a point to stop here.
Aurora hunting
After dinner, it was time for more Aurora hunting. We geared up in our warmest snow clothing and headed back out to Kirkjufell. Within 5-10 minutes of arriving, the sky started putting on a show for us. We hadn’t even gotten a chance to make our way to the locations we had scouted out earlier.
The colors were a mix of green, purples and pinks and it was wonderful. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.
Christina also noticed a strange glowing cloud on the horizon. She’s calling it a volcano, but we’re still not sure what it was. It appeared a few times throughout the night and didn’t quite fit with anything else happening in the sky.
You can see the glow over the mountains in the bottom right corner.
Today, we are heading back to Reykjavik where we will do some shopping during the day and have a guided Northern Lights tour in the evening.
