Iceland Highlights - Part 1

Ok, even though it took me weeks now to put them up (partially because there were so many to choose from), here are some highlights from 64° N...

Day 1
Land in Iceland at 6:30 in the morning their time, grab something that looks like breakfast while marveling at other products in the food kiosk store thing at the airport.

Got to have the Cool American flavor

Leave right from the airport on a bus for an all-day tour.  On this tour we saw...

A waterfall we were able to walk behind - Skogafoss

Waves crashing on the black sand beach that could have come all the way from Antarctica (that's the only thing south of where we were in Iceland)

Crazy basalt formations off-shore - the legend is that those are trolls that were frozen by still being out at dawn

An amazing lagoon filled with icebergs - I think this may have been my favorite thing we did (no, I did not alter the coloring on this photo)

The iceberg lagoon was quite far from our hotel, so, including stopping on our way back for a nice dinner, we did not get to our hotel until around midnight.

Day 2
The weather was very windy and rather cold (we were told 14°F after the windchill was taken into account), so many of the tours (this was going to be a choose your own adventure day) were cancelled.  However, we were able to switch our days' plans around and still able to do some neat things.

We visited the Blue Lagoon

My sister and the rest of the group and I relaxed in the Blue Lagoon (the temperature in it varied from warm pool to toasty hot tub), but the air temp was still really cold!  You wanted to have as much of your body be under the water as possible

We took another bus tour, this time around Reykjavik, and took this photo of Bjork's house (no joke)

Finally, this was one of the few meals where we were on our own, so we tried a fish & chips place not too far from the hotel - YUM

After dinner we wandered around a little, but since it was still cold and windy and we had had a long Day 1, we headed back to the hotel pretty quickly to use the marvels of Google Talk to call the US for free and to go to bed.