Reindeer burger for breakfast

Thanks for your patience as I waited to find a good internet connection.  For some reason, sheep farms on dirt roads on the Icelandic coast do not all have the latest and greatest in internet technology.  Go figure.  :)

So then, we have been doing a lot of driving the past few days!  As I wrote in my last entry, we made it to Myvatn and the hot springs there and stayed in Elda Guesthouse.  The next day, Saturday, after sleeping in a bit, we drove around Myvatn Lake to see the pretty scenery, as well as the birds!  There are a lot of neat bird species around Myvatn Lake, and one description that I read indicated that there are more duck species in Iceland than anywhere else in the world.  After that, we drove on to go even further north towards Husavik and Kópasker.  The scenery in Iceland is dramatic on a very large scale, and is ever changing.  We have been amazed at how the scenery has reminded us of vastly varied climes in just a matter of minutes, everything from the rolling hills of rural Vermont to the steep and ancient terraces of Macchu Pichu to the desert plains of the Sahara, and most places in between, as well!

We drove all the way up to Kópasker, which is a tiny town of maybe 25 houses right on the edge of the sea.  We got some sort of tangy Icelandic yogurt called Skyr to eat at the tiny little convenience/grocery store and asked what people do for a living in such a remote location.  The store clerk told us that most of the economy in that area is built around the fish farms on the coast and the local lamb slaughterhouse.  Yuck... but a necessary yuck, I suppose.

We kept driving and came upon a little coastal town called Raufarhöfn, where we stopped to take a picture of a cute (and tiny!) church.  We met the church organist, Stephania, a very sweet woman who showed us the church and played us a hymn on her organ.  We chatted with her for a while and as she told us about her life there, it was really interesting to get a little closer glimpse of the culture of such a small, remote town.

We had a goal of a certain distance for the day, so we drove, drove, drove until about 11pm and then stopped for the night in Egilsstadir at Lyngás Guesthouse.  We slept in again since we had been up so late, and by the time we ate breakfast at the local gas station and restaurant (a very common pairing here!), it was getting close to lunchtime again, so we had a reindeer burger for breakfast.  It was delicious!  After that, the mission was to see the puffin colony at Borgarfjordur Eystri, about an hour away from where we were.  After driving through a ridiculously steep mountain pass (it is amazing what Icelanders *don’t* put guardrails on!), we made it to puffin heaven.  There were hundreds of the little guys darting around on a tiny grassy peninsula full of nest holes.  Puffins are so cute!  Part of what makes them cute it how awkward they are on land and in the air - they are excellent water birds, but they have to work hard when they’re not submerged!  

We drove on through fjord after fjord and started getting glimpses of Iceland’s enormous glaciers.  At one point, we rounded a bend and saw a river full of icebergs that had broken off from a massive glacier that was upriver.  The ice was that quintessential rich blue color and the ice field in the river was shifting and breaking and moving - so amazing!  At one point, we even heard a huge crack and then a booming splash of a new iceberg being “born” after calving off of the 
glacier.

We made it down Hvoll Hostel (on a sheep farm) in Klaustur after driving through an eerie desert-like flood plain that was hazy and featureless.  We got a good night’s sleep and then played with some fuzzy baby lambs before we left the next morning.  There are about 15 orphaned lambs whose mothers had triplets and abandoned the third little runt, which is very sad to me, but the owners of the hostel/farm are caring for the little orphaned flock of rejected babies. 

We continued on our trek and had another full day of sight-seeing.  We first visited a place where you can hike up onto the glacier, which was super cool.  We scrambled around for a while, and since the top of the ice was quite dirty, we did have some traction.  Someone told us that some of the grit on the ice was actually still ash from the volcano eruption two years ago that pretty much brought Europe to a standstill!  As we drove further on, we actually went right by that volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, as well as the farm at the base of the volcano that sort of “hosted” the event.  They have posted a couple of signs for visitors, and the pictures of that eruption are incredible.  We continued on and went to an impressive waterfall called Skógafoss.  We went right up to the base of it in our raincoats and got blasted by the mist and spray, then hiked up to the top to get the bird’s eye view.  It’s a lovely, impressive place.  We drove for another while to get to another waterfall, Gullfoss, which is massive and beautiful and incredibly powerful.  I can only post so many photos in a single blog entry, but if you have any interest, I encourage you to look up some of the sights that I’m writing about... they’re really beautiful and interesting and might be worth a Google image search.  Anyway, we moved on from Gullfoss to Geysir, which is a collection of hot springs and one really cool geyser that erupts every 10-15 minutes or so.  We were standing there waiting for it to blast, and we may have been a bit too close, as the smelly sulphur water drenched Jim (while I jumped to safety)!  :)  To finish off the day, we went to Thingvellir, which is an ancient meeting place and is the site of the world’s first “parliament” or general assembly for the leaders of the various Icelandic settlements.  The first meeting took place in 930AD... talk about a historical place!  We had dinner in Reykjavik and are now at our hostel.  On to Scotland tomorrow!