Month: August 2026

Today, Thursday, we picked up our Toyota RAV4 rental car from Hertz and drove southwest from Reykjavik along the Golden Circle route to see three of the iconic natural and historical places in Iceland. We got a late start, first because I overslept a little after suffering a 2-hour wakeful period in the middle of the night due to jet lag. That only made us about 20 minutes late for breakfast in the hotel. But then the Budget driver was an hour late, picking us up at the hotel at 9:30 instead of 8:30 to take us to the rental off. But it all worked out alright.

Nathan drove us out of the city to our first stop, Thingvellir National Park, where Iceland’s original parliament was held. It’s also a place where the North American and European tectonic plates are being torn apart by the Earth’s geological forces and the rift can be seen, walked in, and viewed by diving underwater. The weather was rainy all day, but we had brought our rain gear so we were ready for it. It was green with moss, grasses and bushy vegetation, which covered the volcanic basalt. There were quite a few tourists but it was never terribly crowded and we found places to park in each of the lots we visited to see the sights.

Next we drove to Geysir, the origin of the name for all geysers. There were two periodically erupting geysers, one of which erupted every 5 minutes. There were also a few boiling water pots nearby and the sulfur smell was strong.

In the late afternoon, we went to the last icon of the day, Gullfoss waterfall. It was large and spectacular, with lots of spray ascending up from where the water hit rocks below.

We visited the Gullfoss restaurant at the site of the falls to get tea and snacks, and rest a bit from descending the stairs to view the falls and then climbing back up them again. We were all pretty wet by that time too. About 5:30 p.m., we started the one hour drive to Selfoss, the town where we would spend our second night. Dinner was in a food hall with many small restaurants that was a short walk down the street from the hotel, still under rainy skies. We chose another place that served traditional Icelandic food, in which I enjoyed fish and chips. It was a wet but enjoyable day.

My trip to Iceland began with a red-eye flight on IcelandAir to Reykjavik that took off from SeaTac at 7:30 p.m., about 30 minutes late. The flight was fine, at about 7.5 hours long, except that I couldn’t sleep at all and they offered no free snacks or juices. For an international flight, no snacks was unusual. I landed at about 9:45 a.m. Iceland Time.

I was due to meet my friend Nathan at the airport plus two Australian women, our traveling companions who had seen Nathan’s offering of the trip on Facebook but did otherwise know either of us. My plane was the last to land of our group’s and I disembarked into an airport with an unbelievably long line waiting to go through passport control. It wound around inside the farthest reaches of the airport and took me an hour to get through. When I finally made it through and collected my suitcase, one hour had elapsed and the tour agency and my three traveling companions were waiting for me.

It was an overcast day in Iceland but relatively warm at 50 degrees F. Our driver took us on the nice four-lane highway into Reykjavik, driving for about 45 minutes. We traveled through a rocky, mossy landscape with essentially no trees.

In Reykjavik, our hotel is near downtown, the Hotel Klettur. Since it was only about 12:30 p.m., we had time to kill before the hotel’s 3 p.m. check-in time. We were all hungry and all but Nathan were sleep deprived from our flights (Nathan had flown in the preceding day), so we walked nearby the hotel to find a restaurant for lunch. We found a nice small restaurant and enjoyed some Icelandic fish soups. Mine was “plokkfiskur”, more like a fish gratin, that was very good. We stretched out lunch with conversation to get to know each other, plus desserts and tea, then returned to the hotel and checked in.

Nathan and I decided to walk around downtown to explore, but one of our companions had twisted her knee so didn’t want to join us. Nathan and I walked around the iconic Hallgrimskyrka, the huge cathedral-like church in downtown and found the touristy pedestrian streets and shops nearby.

We ate dinner in a restaurant featuring more Icelandic food, where I ate another version of the fish gratin “plokkfiskur” that was better than the first and Nathan had Scandinavian fish and chips that was pretty much just normal fish and chips. That was as much sightseeing as my tired body could take, so we walked back to the hotel and called it a day.