twangster

It's just after 11pm as I prepare to post this. At 11:01pm I looked out and saw this: Since I was heading up for a slice of pizza I thought I'd check out the sunset on the other side of the ship. At 11:05pm the sun was obscured behind clouds but sort of visible in the sky. It's not dark exactly. I could probably read a book out there. The moon is moving sideways across the sky. Time: 11:34pm and the moon is now over the airport terminal. So cool.

I walked into town to find some local beer after the excursions. I found a bar but it was packed wall to wall with mostly locals. It's the only bar I could find, so I guess that explains why it's packed. With nowhere to even stand I headed back to the ship.

It was a pretty great tour and well worth the money. The lunch was pretty tasty. A long day and pretty exhausting but we saw so much.

Back on the ship with my view of the airport I wondered what the impact, if any, the ship presented to aircraft using the airport. It turns out not much. This plane climbed high well before reaching the ship.

Our route from a GPS tracker.

Back to the ship just after 7pm. After wearing a hat most of the day, most of us looked like this bird.

What a beautiful day this turned into. Back into the tunnel. It's only three or for years old.

Back on the bus we pass some horses. Then we rejoin the road we had taken in the valley after the tunnel. From here we can see another waterfall from the bus. Goðafoss waterfall wasn't included on this tour so we didn't stop. The outflow below the waterfall was pretty cool too. That's as close as got as we needed to get back.

Back on the bus to drive towards the coast before arriving at Húsavík. First we cross a section where an earthquake in 1996 created a new lake and altered the landscape. This gap formed in the otherwise flat land before the quake. It runs for miles in each direction. Húsavík is becoming a whale watching hotspot and we had a short ten minute stop to check out the harbor. I'm not really sure why we stopped here. Perhaps the local business owner or chamber lobbied to be included. It's a pretty little spot but ten minutes wasn't enough to really do anything.

By this time it was nearing 4pm and lunch was in order. We stopped at Veggur restaurant which served soup and fish. There were no choices, everyone received the same dish. The fish was Arctic Char. No pics, too hungry.

Back on the bus to our next stop, Langavatnshöfði. This is an overlook 300m from the parking lot on a paved trail. It's thought there was once a glacier here with a volcano under the glacier. The volcano became active and melted the glacier creating massive volumes of water that altered the landscape. This was thought to occur around 5,000 year ago, again around 4,000 years and another time around 3,000 years ago. The effect has been to cause the land to sink sharply as seen from the cliff faces.

Video from Dettifoss:

Turning around and heading back from Selfoss and you can see Dettifoss from above it. To get there, there is 600m more of rugged terrain before reaching a man made walkway. Dettifoss:

Video from Selfoss:

This brings us to our next stop at Dettifoss. It's a bit of hike this time of year and this spring has melted like others we are told so there was a lot of snow on the path. There are two waterfalls here and the first wasn't technically included in this tour but I took the opportunity to check it out. Selfoss waterfall first:

Back on the bus or guide points out a geothermal electric generating plant. Basically they drill down into the earth and once they find steam they pipe it into a steam generator to produce electricity. Some of these go down 3,000 to 4,000 meters. Around the corner he points out where two tectonic plates meet. On the left is the North American plate and on the right is the Eurasian plate. The gap is because they are spreading away from each other. Right around the corner from that are naturally occurring geothermal geysers. Then just a bit a further along some active venting was occuring.

Our first stop was at Dimmuborgir. Here we can explore the rugged lava formations up close using easy to navigate paved trails. The crater is the background is thought to be unrelated to the lava flow that created the formations. They think it came much later. Basalt rock up close. Bathroom break here at this stop for those that needed it. It is after all an 8 hour tour.

It's a little cooler in the valley and some lakes still had ice on them. This is a pseudo crater and in the world of volcanoes there are pretty rare, except in this region. So much of Iceland involves volcanoes. Our guide points out the rough lava formations from thousands of years ago. At some point thousands of years ago an eruption occured and lava was flowing through this valley. The valley most likely had wetlands or water so the hot flowing lava had an dramatic encounter with the water in the valley leading to these sharp formations.

We board a bus and begin an hour long drive to the first stop. We'll use that tunnel I spotted earlier. It's 7.5km or almost 5 miles long. Once through the tunnel we enter a valley. Lots of water flowing with the spring run off from melting snow.

With a mid-morning meeting time there was time to spare so I ventured up top. The included TMobile service works pretty good here.

Eight hour tour. Eight. Hour. Tour! Just back to the ship, processing photos in the darkroom now. Spoiler alert! Iceland is awesome.

No worries.

No!

The general area of my excursion today:

Temperature 42°F or 6°C. Sunset 11:08pm Sunrise 3:13am