Iceland

As mentioned earlier, we were in danger of losing all of our Iceland pictures to a failed hard drive.  The lesson is to back up early and often!  Fortunately, we got them back, so here goes!

We went to Iceland!  In December!  With only 4 hours of sunlight!  Yeah, when you say it like that, it doesn't sound like a great idea, but it really was a great trip.  We found a deal online to go to Iceland to see the Northern Lights and stay in Iceland for 4 days.  Julie's parents and my parents took turns watching Noah while we were gone, he probably would have been really cold if he came!

We took off from Denver in the late afternoon on Sunday, and landed in Iceland on Monday morning.  We checked into the hotel to take a nap and eat some breakfast, and we hit the town after that.  We got a bit lost at first, but found the big church in town and walked along the main shopping street in town.

The church has a big statue of Leif Erickson outside

The Church was mostly gray except for the organ pipes

A row of houses from the Church Tower

If you look real closely, you can see the Noodle Station, where we ate

The new opera house in Iceland

That night was our Northern Lights boat cruise, and we were super lucky to catch them right before the tour was over.  It wasn't as green as it looks in pictures, they say that the camera does a better job capturing the colors than your eyes do.  Despite that, the ribbon of color stretched across the sky and danced around.  It was wonderful.  Unfortunately we were on a boat, so pictures were entirely impractical.

After our boat cruise, it was chilly! 

The next day we had scheduled a long tour of the Southern coast of Iceland. This tour included a hike on a glacier, a tour of a viking museum, a lamb stew dinner, a few waterfalls in the area and a drive around to try to find the northern lights.  We stopped at Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano that shut down Europe in 2010, and found out that the farmers at the base of the volcano didn't evacuate!  Crazy!

The glacier hike was amazing and probably one of the highlights of the trip, but we didn't get to see the Northern lights this night.  That's a shame because we had our tripod ready for pictures!

The volcano is up to the left, these farmers didn't evacuate! 

Julie geared up for the hike

The moon over the glacier

A neat tunnel in the glacier we got to hike through

Our last full day in Iceland didn't have any plans, so Julie found a nice local pool for us to go visit.  The pool has hot mineral spring water in it.  There is a main pool with a basketball hoop, a few waterslides and pool toys in it.  The side pools were all hotter, and labeled by their temperature.  The hottest ones were a bit too hot for me, but the whole trip to the pool was wonderful.  We spent the rest of night shopping, packing and ate some Icelandic dishes, like puffin and lobster.

A neat statue on the bay

The next day we flew out, but not before a stop at the outdoor hot spring called the Blue Lagoon. We had found out earlier that it was heated by waste water from the geothermal plant next door, so that kind of took the excitement out a little bit.  It was also incredibly windy the entire time we were there, which made being out of the water a bit miserable.  The Blue Lagoon was fun, but I think I liked the pool in Reykjavik better.  Unfortuantely we then boarded the plane and headed home.  On the plane we met a nice Norwegian guy named Liev (like Leif Erikson, just with a 'v') who was visiting the US for the first time.  We told him about Chipotle and the local brewery in Breckenridge!

The Blue Lagoon, it was super duper windy

We had a great time in Iceland, and wouldn't mind going back in the future...just in the Summer next time!