No Hallgrimskirkja interior this morning. I suspected there might be mass and…there was. Ah well.
Today looked like the weather would not cooperate with the travel plans, but it did! Here are some impressions of the experience of driving southeast on the 1:
If you rent a car for your trip to Iceland, make sure to use extreme caution on the roads, even if they look just barely wet. There’s a lot of black ice and almost instantly changing road conditions. (Wrecks are extremely common here, one of which I witnessed and it was no fun for the vehicle occupants. They seemed to be okay fortunately.) Also, if you’re coming in the winter, splurge on the four-wheel drive, studded tire, SUV vehicles. They are much safer. You don’t want to know how many Toyota Yaris-es (or Yarii for plural?) there were on the ice and snow packed roads. I was so grateful for the beast, otherwise known as the Toyota Diesel Land Rover, attached to my pedal.
I stopped for the evening at a B&B just outside of Vik and its black sand basalt beaches (stunning, see gallery above). After a delicious meal in the village, myself and a few others at the B&B had the extreme privilege of witnessing aurora borealis, something I really hoped to see during this trip! What’s interesting is that with the naked eye, the lights look white. With a time exposure on camera however, the colors show beautifully.
A fellow B&B-er from Lebanon showed me how to use my camera settings to best suit the lighting conditions. Two others from Singapore joined us on the porch and we spent a good hour taking photo after photo. The only bummer is that many of the pictures are blurry because I didn’t have a proper tripod. But you get the idea!
Afterwards, we went inside and talked about the differences in food, countries, culture, and politics between Lebanon, Singapore, and the US. Very interesting and not accessible in your average news report—in any of the respective countries.
Anyway, tomorrow is supposed to snow/rain, so we’ll see if I make it to Jökulsárlón or not. It will also be quite a trek back to Reykjanesbaer but locals have confirmed that the glacier bay is much more compelling to see than the Golden Circle. So we’ll see if it works!
Immanuela
p.s. If you need a good resource to help plan a trip to Iceland, many of the other travelers I spoke with mentioned I Heart Reykjavik.
