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The longest day! We got up in Iceland at 8:00 am, left for Minneapolis at 4:30 pm, caught our connection to Albuquerque at 8:30 pm and arrived at 10:45 pm MDT... a mere 4:45 am Iceland time. Our late afternoon departure meant that we had some time to do a little more sightseeing before we left.
Here we are at the edge of a lava cliff up above where the next few pictures were taken. Down below us is the site of the "Old Althing" which is the site of the original parliament of Iceland.
We drove down from where the previous picture was taken, an down here there's a small waterfall where we took this and the next picture.
Biggi says: The chasm is called Almannagja (almanna = public, gja = chasm) and leads down to the site of the Old Althing, founded in 874
A short distance away from the waterfall is this gash in the landscape that is filled with crystal-clear water. There are many coins resting at the bottom, so David made a wish and tossed in a Krona.
After that stop we headed across the countryside once again headed toward the "original geyser Geysir" and the other geysers that are in the same area. The drive was interesting as it took us across an area of National Park where animals are not allowed to graze. I wish I'd takes some pictures because there was much more vegetation around this area with some "trees" hugging the ground. Biggi said that the whole country would look more like that area, except that the horses and sheep graze the rest of the countryside down to the low grassy landscape we've seen so much of over the past days. And we've seen plenty of horses and sheep! At some point two days ago, and again during this drive today there have been ranchers driving horses along the roadside. Two days ago we saw them drive (herd?) a bunch of horses across a lake!
Unfortunately, Geysir isn't active now. They had been pouring soap into it to make it work, but they've stopped doing that because the soap was dissolving some of the rock. Here Biggi is stopped at the map that tells the names of all the geysers (which I can't remember now...) and Geysir is up to his right where the group of people are standing.
Just after I took the previous picture the smaller geyser that does erupt went off and I snapped this picture a few seconds too late.
This is a picture of Geysir. Note the "electric blue" color that this picture barely does justice to. The geysers all have roughly the same structure: a shallow bowl with a hole in the middle. The hole in the middle is where you can see the blue color.
And this is a picture of a group of three small geysers that also weren't erupting. Here you can see better the "hole in the bottom" of the shallow bowl that is filled with water.
And finally, Strokkur, the geyser that *is* erupting every 15 minutes or so. After we waited to get this picture (taken by Paige) and and APS picture, we walked in close and stood to watch an eruption close-up. You get just a bit of a warning of an eruption, as big bubbles rush upward the blue-color becomes even more intense. We *really* lucked out and got three eruptions in a row while we stood there (two largish eruptions and a smaller splutter.)
That was the end of our trip... time was getting short so he hustled back to Reykjavik and our flight home as fast as possible. David wrote several postcards in the car along the way, but we forgot to mail them before we got onto the plane! Our good-bye to Biggi was hurried, we didn't nearly thank him enough... it was really a fun three days!
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