Iceland Part Three

The first photo I'm posting today is the 360 degree view from "The Pearl." You can see the village of Reykjavik and the mountains behind it. Keep in mind this is ONE of the shots I took here. Those of you who know me know there are quite a few more.


The next day, after a breakfast of skyr (kind of like yogurt) and muesli, we hopped on the tour bus and took off at 9:00am. We drove by the President's house - he lives at the edge of the island, right on the ocean. In front of his house is a beautiful church with stained glass windows that tell the story of the Vikings. We saw
Lake Kleifarvatn and took some photos, saw some hot spots, and


drove past some lava rocks with moss that was about 5 inches thick.



We drove on to lunch, and the Blue Lagoon. The Blue Lagoon itself is a man-made geothermal spa of warm, therapeutic water to relax in. It's runoff of some kind from a plant. It actually does have a bluish cast to the water. If you look at this photo, you can see a tiny head in the water on the left hand side of the picture. People were actually down there, you just couldn't see them because of the steam. From what I surmise, the steam was from the cold air temperature - I don't believe it always looks like this. We had a funny time getting ready for the pool - you have to shower naked before putting your suit on and going into the pool. I'm from a Catholic school that didn't even have locker rooms for girls, much less showers - so that was a hoot! Anyway, we swam in the lagoon for about 40 minutes, and the one photo we didn't take was of us in the water, with the silica cream on our faces. We think it's a trick they pull on newbies to the Lagoon. The water was amazingly warm and felt heavenly. We kept saying it was surreal. There were a lot of people in the water, but we heard in summer, people are side by side.

That evening, after a walk through town, we went to the Seafood Cellar for dinner or the Sjavarkjallarian. It's one of those places you can order an entree that serves the entire table a course from all their menu items. They had a unique presentation for the desserts. First a creme brulee came out in flames, and then they poured something onto dry ice around the other desserts to make it steam for about 5 minutes. It was a cool effect.

Tommorrow: Geysir