Iceland

I think my favorite place in Iceland is the Black Beach near Vik (“Reynisfjara”) and we stayed three nights at the nearby Black Beach Suites; here are photos from both Reynisfjara and the other Black Beach in Vik on the other side of Reynisdranger – the same rock formation is seen in the water from both sides, though the different angles make it look different.

The final pictures are returning to Reynisfjara when the wind was wild and stirring up very aggressive waves (as well as throwing hail pellets at us!), and views of Reynisfjara from Dyrhólaey

Of course there’s water everywhere in Iceland, and we repeated visits to a number of waterfalls that we’ve seen before, as well as returning to Geysir which was very helpfully repeating about every six minutes so we didn’t have to wait long!

We headed back to Iceland to experience it in the winter – and we hoped to see aurora … but before that, here’s a lot of general views from our trip including of course many repeats from previous visits!

These views are from throughout the trip, starting with hints of sunrise about 9:30 in the morning! Sunrise wasn’t till after 10am and it was gone again shortly after 4pm – and when the sun was visible, it was really low in the sky; we would not want to live here throughout winter! There’s also a few pictures of a very icy morning drive when it was about -6c (21f) and very slippery (luckily there’s rarely other cars to deal with once you leave Reykjavik!)

We visited a power station; it was interesting to learn the multiple ways that energy is extracted from the hot Earth!

We visited hot springs nearby the power station (proof of all the heat in the Earth!):

We returned to Thingvellir (always worth visiting!):

And in Vik we visited a Lava Show where real lava is made (by melting down rocks from lava fields); it was amazingly hot when they poured the lava into the exhibit room! The last pic is of the furnace that takes about five hours to get the rock up to liquid temperature …

A few more posts follow …