Waking up today was hard. Not jetlag hard, but I was up at 3AM two days ago and then awake all night on Saturday (because, let’s face it, sleep did not happen on the plane) hard. Iceland is five hours ahead of Nashville and our itinerary for day 2 was one of the busier ones which means that we were up and moving at 7 AM (okay, 7:20) local time and 2 AM our time.
We packed up the car, grabbed a quick bite to eat at our hotel restaurant’s delectable breakfast buffet and headed out. Today’s plan was checkout: 8:30 AM, drive to Geysir (the original namesake of all geysers): 10 AM, continue on to Gullfoss (an amazing waterfall): 10:30 AM, Drive to Laugarvatn Fontana (geothermal spas anyone?): 12:00 PM, and finally, arrive at our hotel in Vik: 4:00 PM.
The Drive to the Golden Circle
Today went, almost, according to plan. Let me start this portion by saying, I’ve never been in a sand storm. I want to say the closest I’ve ever gotten is either a vicarious experience through a movie or maybe when sand pelted me in the face during a mild breeze across the great sand dunes in Colorado.When we started driving today, we knew the following things: today would be colder, today would be snowier, and today would be driving through less inhabited portions of Iceland as we made our way across the top of what’s known as the Golden Circle.
What felt, at the time like a wasteland of just snow and ice everywhere. At several points it was so windy we couldn’t see the car in front of us as the snow blew across the road.
What we did not know was that our GPS has a delightfully Icelandic road trip guide with fun tidbits about the history and culture of the land we were about to drive through. We also did not know that said guide would try to hijack GPS navigation girl’s directions in a tug of war for our attention (no worries we didn’t get lost). But perhaps, most importantly, we did not know that just outside Reykjavik the land evens out into a beautiful near wasteland of uncultivated space. The long road stretching in front of us and the breeze swirling snow made us feel like isolated beings on some sort of frontier-land (with a nicely paved road to follow) until the pleasant breeze grew strong enough to push the car around (in Michael’s capable hands, we were fine). But the snow assailed us until I found myself thinking, this is what it must be like to be in a sandstorm.
Thankfully, the windy-snowy blind didn’t last long, but certainly long enough to get my adrenaline kicked in and push us about an hour behind schedule. The sun came out, making the rest of the drive to Geysir bright and beautiful.
Þingvellir National Park
Þingvellir National Park (pronounced Thing-vel-ear).