Sitting day
Today it was mostly sitting. We didn’t do any sightseeing at all, unless you include going out in the rain to look at abandoned puffin burrows. Puffins are on land only four months of the year, the rest of the time they are out in open ocean. The place where we were staying was in the northeast of Iceland, so it meant that we had completed half of the circle around Iceland. It was lunch time when we arrived at the guesthouse in Blabfjorder Estryi, too early for check in, so we went to the Alfa café. We hung out there for three hours because it was warm, there was wifi, it was bright and spacious, and I got to have a waffle. Waffles in Iceland are actually a dessert because they put fruits and cream on them. There was a spa right below the guesthouse and we were already wet from going on a walk a little before so it sounded like a good idea. We ate our first self-made hot meal in Iceland, beans😜. There wasn’t much at the guesthouse to do and it was raining very hard so we played hearts, tried to make a TV work and then went to sleep.

Party night
The weather today was the most miserable we had had in Iceland, it was raining, it was windy, and it was foggy. We got to ‘see’ Iceland’s biggest waterfall called Dettifoss, but we only saw about a 20th of it because the fog was so dense. Krafla is the lands most dangerous attraction, which was where fissures in the ground erupted with lava and the flows covered 52 sq km of land. It’s now just really a hot spring, but what I thought was dangerous was the 6*C temperature combined with the very strong wind. Our hotel for the night didn’t really look like a hotel but more like a party house; loud, barren hallways; and cushions that fit in with the barren walls in the sitting rooms. It felt weird.

Hiking
I was really excited about today because we were going to do lots of hiking, we even got to walk up the side of a volcano to its top! The hotel we were staying at had breakfast from seven to ten, I was up and ready to go at 6:30. The first hike that we did was to look at these weird lava rock towers that had no slopes to them, it was about 5 km. On the second hike we saw lots pseudo craters, they are made by boiling water, not lava, it was 1 km. We had a lunch of sandwiches and carrots and then went to a bird museum with about 200 taxidermy birds. Almost all we collected by one man who died at the age of 37 from drowning. We had dinner at a cafe on a farm that had glass windows into where they kept cows. We got to see them being milked! We went on one last walk which I talked about in the first sentence. We were able to walk so late because the sun goes down at around 9pm. We got back to our hotel, and ended another day.

Almost There
We’re almost finished the circle around Iceland. Two more nights before we get back to Reykjavik! We did a lot of driving today, maybe 200 km. There weren’t many towns, but what we did see a lot of were farms, they were dotted around the fields in a valley that was carved by a glacier. There were a lot of hanging valleys too. Hanging valleys are valleys that a glacier retreated from and then another glacier went across it crossways and carved off the end and went and made another, deeper valley beside the first one. There was a waterfall along our way called Godafoss. It’s called Godafoss because there was a chieftain in 1,000 C.E. that decided all Icelanders would change their religion from Norse to Christian. On his was home from the parliament, he threw his pagan figurines into the waterfall and now people call it Godafoss. We found a picnic stop hidden away from the highway and had lunch there. I had a nap in the car after lunch while my mum went into a textile museum. We wanted to go to the sea ice museum but it was closed. We set up our tent and went to swim. The pool was closing in half an hour, but we swam anyway. There was only one restaurant in the town and I didn’t think it had very good food because the vegetables were microwaved. We went back to the campsite and went to sleep at 8:00 because we wanted to look at the aurora if it was in the sky but it was cloudy all night.

Getting Closer
Only one more night to Reykjavik😐! I don’t know if I want to get back to Reykjavik or if I want to have more time in the rest of Iceland. We went to a seal museum today, the main part of the exhibit was a video about two main types of seals, the gray seal and the common seal, their differences, similarities and how they live. That was all we did before lunch besides driving, if you consider that an attraction😜. After lunch though we went on a walk to some old lava tubes and a crater, and then to a golden beach and took a picture in the Arctic Ocean. We saw two lighthouses, one of them was the normal, tall type, and the other, well it was short. We had dinner at a hotel because it was the only choice, set up our tent and went – to – sleep.

Back at Reykjavik
We got back to Reykjavik tonight, but that’s the end of the day, not the beginning. We had a breakfast of yoghurt and granola in a metal shipping container which served as the kitchen for the campsite. Nearby there was a hike to see some ruins of sheep baths for when there was a ‘disease’ called sheep scab, the ‘disease’ made the sheep have huge scabs, well that’s what I think but we weren’t sure what it really did. Lunch was on the side of the road and I had cold beans and bread. There was a Settlement Center in Borganes, which had a audio guided tour that showed how and where the Vikings settled on Iceland and also told a saga about a boy. It took a total time of about one hour to complete. We went to the cafe beside it where I had an amazing chocolate cake. We got to go underwater in a tunnel to get back to Reykjavik, it was really cool but it smelled like diesel and gasoline because there was little air circulation in the 6 km tunnel. The hotel that we were staying at was the Travel Inn Guesthouse where we got the loft room in the attic-that-wasn’t-really-an-attic but exactly like the other hotel rooms. Dinner was in the Old Reykjavik area of Reykjavik and was very good, I had a huge burger that my dad had to finish off. The restaurant wasn’t far away from the guesthouse so we walked to it and walked back. It was around 8:45 so I went to bed.