On our journey through Iceland, we saw beautiful scenery, including glaciers, grassy mountains, volcanic sands, and marshmallow hay bales. Sophie spent ages developing a creative story about the marshmallow Haybale trying to convince Aiden that they were really marshmallows
Thingkerville National Park a UNESCO world Heritage site helps us truly understand tectonic plates. There is an area between the two meeting plates where people scuba dive and snorkel. Kim and Trevor enjoyed doing this when they visit Iceland a few weeks ago. I was so distracted by the beautiful scenery I ended up falling flat on my face, luckily it was not too painful and there were no significant injuries, other than a bruised ego (and an incident my teasing husband will remind me about for years to come). Aiden and Sophie jumped across a chiasm, enjoying scaring their mother. The walking trails were beautiful, particularly the ones that were not paved and off the main tourist track. We were surprised by how similar the flowers and fauna are to home, recognizing many of them. The immense grandeur of the natural world is striking as you walk between the tectonic plates and marvel at huge waterfalls.
Great Geysir, the largest is called Strokkur
Our family really enjoyed the geyser park on the Golden circle. We were amazed by the many natural hot pools, and then the largest geyser. Initially we saw a shot of about 5 m which we thought as good as it got many people started to walk away luckily, we hung around for another few minutes and after four minutes, there was a huge blue bubble and geyser shot about 10m, repeating itself with another similar shot a min later. We were able to climb up the hill and see the geyser from many different heights allowing us to appreciate how large it is. Watching a few unsuspecting tourists get soaked in the splash zone was delighting Sophie and Alastair.
Gullfoss Waterfall
It was shocking how many tourists were also doing the golden circles and how large the gift shops were. Aiden would arrive at a special site and request to go into the gift shop as his biggest priority. Luckily, he was really working on managing impulse control and seems to be getting a better sense of how much things cost. Seeing the amazing “golden waterfalls”, Gullfoss reminded Aiden of a miniature Niagara Falls.
As we finished our driving tour of a small part of Iceland Alastair joked that his memory from Iceland was going to be. “500 m at the next roundabout take the second exit”!