ísland

One time we were looking at flights home and came across a Paris to Minneapolis with a stop in Reykjavik. Do people actually visit Iceland? Who seeks out winter temp vacations in the middle of summer? After a little research, instead of celebrating Bastille day in France, we opted for a long weekend in Iceland. At first we planned to base ourselves out of Reykjavik and take day tours to see what we wanted, then we watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty illustrating what Iceland has to offer and decided renting a camper was a much better way to discover the country! Only six weeks out, we cancelled our Reykjavik accommodation and rented a camper-van from HAPPY CAMPERS...

Þingvellir was the first stop along the Golden Circle route. It's a national park where in AD 930 Vikings established the world's first democratic parliament. It was pouring rain when we arrived but we decided to get out anyway, mostly to check out the two continental plates (North America and Europe) that are drifting apart up to one inch a year.

Next on the list was Geysir, the original hot water spout that named all the other geysers in the world. Geysir hasn't actually erupted for a few years but Strokkur is just next to it, much smaller, and erupts frequently.

We took a very very muddy trip to the top of the hill... very muddy.

In between stops, we took in a lot of scenery and made a few snack stops. There are a lot of tales of trolls and elves throughout Iceland. We didn't really get into it, but there are complete trips dedicated to "troll hunting" for those interested. Mark made a buddy during one of the pit-stops!

As you can see, there was a lot of traffic...

Last on the "tour" list for Friday was Gulfoss, Iceland's most famous waterfall. The width of it was most impressive. We thought it was awesome but little did we know we'd be seeing more magnificent waterfalls throughout the whole trip. Still worth the stop though.

It's hard to understand the scale of most of the landscape but if you look very closely, you can see two itty bitty dots on top of the rock to the left of Mark's shoulder... those are two people!

We didn't have a concrete plan for the trip; just ideas of places to stop and things to see. It was nice not having a schedule and having to stick to it. After Gulfoss, we hopped in the car and started driving. We knew we wanted to make it to Sulfoss (another waterfall -  foss means waterfall) sometime on Saturday to hike part of a trail we'd read about. We ended up taking the road a little less traveled south and after two hours arrived in Sulfoss. Called it a night, set up camp, fired up the grill and enjoyed this view out our "back porch"...