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Our plan for the day is to drive out towards Snaefellsjokull (jokull=glacier) and see if the weather will permit a glacier tour. Those of you who are classic Science Fiction fans might recognize Snaefellsjokull as the spot where Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth began (at least the journey part.)
We've stopped here in Arnarstapi, Snaefellsnes at this sod roofed house serving as a visitor center. Building materials in Iceland are scarce, so the people have historically built with sod as it is plentiful and insulates well. We stopped here and Biggi made inquiries about the conditions up on the glacier, but as you can see behind the houses: the cloud level is very low and the conditions aren't particularly great, so we bail on the glacier tour and head for some other sight-seeing right here.
Now Paige is standing in the spot from which David took the previous two pictures, seeing how the sea water is getting in. WOW!
There is an arch that you can just make out beyond the U on this side of the cliff. Many of the rocks in this area are have the hexagonal crystalline structure like David has seen at the "Devil's Postpile" in Mammoth, California.
Paige and Biggi standing in front of a grave/memorial for two locals.
Biggi's planning to do some more fly fishing later this summer, so he's scoping out the river for salmon.
Waterfall carving its way through the terrain as we head toward Olafsvik for lunch. We've been seeing *many* small waterfalls as we've driven along the coastline. In this picture this fall appears rather small... I need a person in the picture to give some perspective ;-) but it's fairly high up above the road. During lunch the sun came out and lit up the area. David tried to take a picture of the beautiful church in Olafsvik, but it was "misting" water and in his attempt to keep water droplets off the camera's lens he messed up the camera's light sensor and the picture didn't come out :-(.
We were aiming for a boat tour at 4 pm, but when we got there Biggi called up the tour company and found out that nobody had shown up for the tour, so they canceled it. Not surprising given the grey rainy day we've had. So instead of the boat tour we headed to a naturally heated swimming pool and hot tub. This was interesting because they don't use any chlorine in the water because there are natural bacteria-killing minerals in the water. Unfortunately they hadn't let in much hot water into the hot-tub, and we got a little chilly before too long.
After our swim we headed back to the cabin where Biggi grilled up some salmon that he had caught the previous weekend. Fresh grilled salmon... there couldn't have been a better way to cap the evening!
I wanted to get a picture of how light it was as Paige was napping at 11:30 pm, but the camera's "bee, blee, bloop" sound caught her attention and she looked over. Yup, that's about as dark as it ever got outside at night.
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