Iceland Day 1: Reykjavik . Geysir . Gullfoss . Storinupur

This is the first in a series of blog posts about our Aug. 2007 trip to Iceland. All posts can be found by typing "Iceland" in the search bar.

I figured it was about time I blogged about Iceland.

We tried to sleep on the flight to Iceland because we knew when we arrived it would be morning and several hours off of our schedule of when morning was, so we wanted to be as rested as possible. But, honestly, it was hard to sleep beyond all the normal reasons it's hard to sleep on a plane. I was excited.







We picked up our rental car at the airport and headed to Reykjavik, where we had breakfast. It was the most expensive meal of our entire trip and consisted of what we'd consider a pretty normal breakfast buffet of eggs, sausage, potatoes, breads, jams, butter, milk, juice, cereal and apples and oranges. Iceland, you have a beautiful country, but your food, frankly, stinks. It isn't really your fault, though, because only 1% of your land is tillable soil and you're far away from everything else.







As we left Reykjavik we wandered down a long street that bordered the bleak sea, dark rocks and road made from those dark rocks separated us from the sea. We realized we weren't going the right way and Joe stopped to ask this woman walking her dog for directions. They chatted for quite some time. I think because she really didn't know which way to tell us to go.




We headed out but quickly grew tired, so pulled onto a large gravel parking area and took a nap in the car. Finally, we headed to Geysir, the geyser after which all others are named. Now elderly, Geysir erupts only about twice a day and sits watching over the much more regular, Strokkur.


(view large for full effect)







Then, with little sun left to light our way we headed to Gullfoss, a large nearby waterfall.










There was a long path to a visitor center where we found this diagram that explains how the falls was made:






We used the final shards of sunlight to find Storinupur, the farm where we were staying. Though it was only one family's farm it had its own road sign, just like larger towns. There was also a church nestled into the short hillside with it.



We ate something, pushed our twin beds together and went to sleep.