It has been over two weeks since I wrote my last post so this one is well over due. We haven’t just been idle though, we have been travelling in Iceland for the past ten days – something we haven’t done enough of.
A wonderful couple, Deepak and Judith, came from Switzerland to visit us for ten days and we took them around Iceland with stops in our favorite places. It was the first time we have been able to travel with foreigners in our own country and kind of see it through their eyes – which was great.
Due to the eruption in Eyjafjallajökull our guests had to land in Akureyri and drive for four hours to Reykjavík. Therefore we started off with a quite day in Reykjavík before jetting off to a summer-house in Biskupstungur – just over an hours drive from Reykjavík.
On the way to the summer house we stopped at Þingvellir. The Icelandic Parliament was formed in Þingvellir in 930 and was held there for the next 850 years and is one of the oldest democratic parliaments in the world. Þingvellir stands where the North American and Eurasian plates meet and is a truly beautiful place.
We explored the old parliamentary sites where the chieftains of old laid the law and argued before the court and we also walked through the crack that separates the two plates. We hadn’t been there since we were kids so it was great to sweep the dust off our memories of the place.
After Þingvellir we drove to Selfoss to buy groceries for our stay in the summer-house. Selfoss is the Mecca of pop music in Iceland and has produced many of the most popular pop bands in Iceland. All the young people are really tanned and wear highlights in their hair and are easily recognizable in a crowd but they sure know their pop music there.
At the summer-house we started what became a habit during our trip – we stuffed our selves with both food and candy. It wasn’t until we drove our guests to the airport eight days later that we felt a hint of how it feels like to be hungry :)
After dinner we went to the hot tub and watched the eruption in Eyjafjallajökull that was spewing out ash and gases 70 km away. It didn’t get properly dark until around 02:00 in the night but fortunately we were still in the hot tub and could see the explosions and the magma coming up from the volcano. It was absolutely amazing to see the orange flames so clearly even though we were 70 km away. I saw later that the eruption was at its high that day so we were lucky to be there.
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