Iceland: Day 7
Day 7 Itinerary:
- Kerio
- Thingvellir
- Strokkur + Gysir
- Gullfoss
On day 7, we drove south to the Golden Circle, which is a popular tourist route near Reykjavik because of all the attractions you can visit in a short period of time.
Our first stop was Kerio, which is another crater. The road there was probably the most dreadful. It felt like we were driving over boulders! The crater was huge, and we were able to walk around the rim then walk down to the water where we spotted small tadpoles/fish. Also, once you got down to the bottom of the crater, it was completely silent. You couldn't hear the wind, people above, or cars driving by.
Afterwards, we went to Thingvellir National Park, and walked through the Almannagjá gorge in the rift valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland sits at the boundaries of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, where they are slowly drifting apart causing large fissures and faults.
Then we went to Haukadalur, a geothermal area that is home to Geysir and Strokkur. While Geysir has been inactive for some time, Strokkur continues to erupt every 5-10 minutes. When we were there, it seemed to erupt even more frequently than that, but sometimes it would just be little "baby" eruptions. Of course, the one time Ebenezer and I turn our backs to it to take a selfie video, it erupts in a massive plume and hits us hard. We were soaked! But the resulting video was hilarious.
Our last stop, and last waterfall of the trip, (after getting dinner and ice cream at Geysir) was Gullfoss. It was massive, and two tiered which made me think of slices of cake stacked on top of each other.
We spent the night at Golden Circle Apartments. The apartment was huge, and pretty empty apart from the basics. It was very clean, but because of how close we were to a lake, there were a lot of huge spiders and mosquitos.
