Icelandic Horses
Today was a horse day. We went on a tour around the mountains of Iceland – which, are not really mountains, but dormant volcanoes – on Icelandic Horses. I stress the Icelandic horses part because there is only one breed of horse on all of Iceland, the Icelandic one. The reason there is only one breed of horse is because they are a pure breed and they don’t want to lose their native horse, so you can leave with the horse but you can’t get back into the country with it, the same goes with sheep. We were on the horses for about four hours and now my butt is hurting a lot, but I’d do it again tomorrow.
Sight Seeing Day
Today we went on a road trip and saw some of the sights of Iceland. The route that we took was called the Golden Circle. It’s not a circle, it’s more like an oval. We didn’t even do the oval, we did more like a sickle because we went east, instead of south. We saw the oldest geyser in the world, a not very interesting waterfall, and the place where the North American and Eurasian plates are pulling apart. It was mostly driving because that’s kinda what you do when you are sightseeing, as far as I know. We decided to camp and there was only one place to go to that was in our area. It turned out that it was in the middle of the mountains, hidden in a bowl. There were only two other family’s at the campsite with us.
Travel Day
We started our trip around the whole outside of Iceland today! There is a special road for this ‘trip’ and its name is the Ring Road, no, it’s not the actual name of the road, the actual name of the road is the number one highway. We went inland to Stöng before moving to the southern shores of Iceland. Stöng is the oldest properly done archeological dig in Iceland, and is of a Viking farm. We kept walking further than the longhouse and came to a small valley with hundreds of waterfalls, otherworldly caves, and cool rock formations. After the hike we saw a replica of a Viking farm house. A hydroelectric plant was not far away from the Viking home replica and it had a visitor center. We saw how the electricity is produced. The city Vík is a very, very, very windy seaside city and we are staying the night in a tent there. I’m worried I won’t be able to get to sleep.