We'll finish up Iceland now. We've done so many things that I've gotten behind on my chronicle. If you're following along on Instagram, you're up to date (@lboatsman).
We went on a Golden Circle tour our second day in Reykjavik. We were picked up at our hotel by the Troll Tours small bus, which luckily had room for us since the hotel clerk had reserved for the next day by mistake. Our driver was a perky and entertaining young woman who drove rather exuberantly and nicely didn't talk constantly the whole day. She likes to do the tour in reverse so as to avoid some of the crowds. It was a cold, rainy day.
Our first stop wasn't one of the main attractions but was a mall in a small town with an unpronounceable name. She stopped there to show us where, when the mall was being built, a crack was discovered that was actually the edges of the North American and European tectonic plates. We would see much more of these rock walls on a later stop today.
There was a small cafe and bakery there where we saw bread that had been baked by being steamed underground. There are lava chambers underground which make the ground so hot that things can cook in it.
Our next stop was at the Gullfoss waterfall. This is an immense, powerful waterfall, whose gorge was formed by flash flood waters that forced their way through cracks in the basalt lava layers. The average water flow in Gullfoss is enough to fill 60 transportation containers with water in one second. It was amazing.
Then we went to see Geysir, an area of boiling and erupting pools reminiscent of the ones at Yellowstone. The main geyser doesn't erupt now but we saw another one and some steaming pools. We were told that the word geyser came from the name of this ancient-named Geysir (pronounced gay-zir).
We had lunch here and probably spent $40 on two bowls of soup...Iceland is nothing if not expensive! There was much knitting inspiration in the shop :)
The last stop was at the Pingvellir National Park. This was interesting as it was the seat of Icelandic government from about the 900s and also the place where the two tectonic plates are very visible. Very scenic. And we saw the lady who had my coat for the second time that day!
We were told that Game of Thrones used these walls in their filming.
We had a good dinner at the hotel; lucky since it was still raining and we didn't want to go out again.
Our third day in Iceland was mostly taken up by moving closer to the airport but we did some walking in the morning and visited a section of Reykjavik we hadn't seen before. The city hall goes across the pond and is an interesting building. We found a Viking (Saga) museum which was fun and then caught a bus to the airport and a taxi to our next hotel. 
It was a scenic little place right on a marina and we had a good dinner nearby. We had to be up before 5:00 am the next day for our flight to Glasgow so our night was early.
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