Good Bye Snæfellsnes Peninsula

The day of day eight is somewhat un-exciting. Our last morning at the Framnes hotel began with me shivering and refusing to get out from under the down comforter. Michael stuck his hand in the snow that had collected on the window sill and happily announced that he could easily submerge his entire finger. After breakfast and writing the blog post for day seven, we packed up our bags and left them in the lobby while we dug the car out of the (more than) foot of snow that had fallen over night.

Unlike Nashville (which is my only point of reference) snow fall in Iceland doesn’t mean a thick blanket of ice covering everything. Sure, we pushed a foot of powder off the roof of our car, but we didn’t also have to melt down and scrape off inches of ice beneath it. Which meant that all in all, it didn’t take us long to get back on the road.

The drive from Grundarfjörður to Reykjavik, which was the first stop in our journey and will be our last also, takes about two and a half hours. Snow fell fairly consistently throughout, but the wind didn’t try to push us around this time. We arrived in Reykjavik, roughly as planned, and checked into the hotel.

Quick Trip Out On The Town

Because we were on the second-to-last full day in Iceland, we’d saved the time in between driving and our Northern Lights Mystery Tour to do some souvenir shopping. We went down town and stopped at one of Iceland’s famous hotdog stands, Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur.

All around us people were snapping selfies with their faces pressed close to the Icelandic hotdogs in their hands. Michael and I scarfed ours down without even thinking of pulling out our phones. It was then we’d realized he hadn’t taken any pictures yet today. We debated getting back in line to purchase a second round so that we could properly document this culinary experience before scarfing them down again, but decided to hold off.

Northern Lights Mystery Tour

The Northern Lights Mystery Tour is the only actual tour that we’d scheduled before we stepped foot on a plane. One of the main reasons we booked our trip when we did is because the northern lights have a few habits. First, they are typically brighter near an equinox. Second, there’s something to do with eleven years. Every eleven years they are brighter, or every eleven years they show up more frequently or something like that. This was the eleventh year. And Third, the northern lights are only visible at night.

Iceland is one of those funny places that doesn’t really have a night time during the summer, and doesn’t really have a day time during the winter. A lot of people who come to Iceland wait for the summer when the puffins and the seals and the flowers and the warmth are out to play. But we came at the tail end of winter (risking the ice caves melting and the weather being difficult) because the equinox was our target.

Already this week, we’d felt lucky to spot as bright of northern lights as we’d seen. Every night that we’d hunted them out there has been a mixture of regular bands (whitish to the eye but brilliant on camera) and a few brilliant bands (where even the naked eye can pick up some of the colors). We expected last night to be much the same. We were wrong.

As the bus drove us out to a not so deserted lighthouse, we began to see faint glows of the lights in the sky. They were dancing in almost 180 degrees by the time we had parked. We pulled the camera and started shooting. Every time I moved the lens, there were bright streaks of the northern lights waiting to be captured.

Michael was kind enough to figure out all the tricks needed to get good lights pictures in the previous nights. So, he handed the camera off to me for the night they were the brightest. Michael played look out, re-directing my focus, whenever a new, brilliant band of lights sprung into existence. I snapped away, marveling at each new angle I could capture.