When we came to Iceland, we each had our “Puffin”. My puffin was an actual puffin — I really wanted to see a puffin “in the wild”. SweetiePie’s puffin was that U.S. Navy plane that was wrecked on the beach. When we couldn’t find it, TheFirstChild had the brilliant idea to ask at the desk of our hotel and see if there was a private guide that we could hire for an hour to take us to the plane. Sometimes big disappointments turn out to be the cream on the pudding, and that was certainly the case here. The hotel desk referred us to a fantastic tour guide, Johann.
After our buffet breakfast at our hotel, we met Johann at his hotel (which we will definitely be booking if we ever manage to get back to Iceland). Johann offers all sorts of tours and he’ll even customize them to whatever you want, which is what we did. We followed him to the farm field where we’d turned off of the road the previous day. It turns out, we had been in exactly the right place — we’d just made our mistake by heading west instead of east as we worked our way toward the beach. After we left the road, we parked our car and got in his “superjeep”. It was rainy and windy and by now we’d learned how to park into the wind to prevent the car doors from being ripped off the hinges. Johann took us right to the plane and we got out and took lots of pictures.
When we got back in the truck, he took us farther down onto the beach — a gorgeous black sand beach — it was kind of sad that the weather wasn’t nice enough for us to get out and take a stroll. Then he took us to a whale carcass that had washed up on the beach. The whole time he was driving us around he was telling us all these amazing things about the area. He grew up around Vik, so he knows just the perfect places to take you based upon your interests.
We asked Johann a lot of questions about the volcanos and what it was like to live in this area. He’s part of their civil defense program. He said everyone has an evacuation plan and they receive alerts on their cell phones. If something happens, he’ll get a message with house numbers and it will be his responsibility to evacuate those people to higher ground. It was amazing to me to learn that they don’t worry so much about lava or ash, but rather flooding. The volcanos are under the glaciers, so, when they erupt, the hot lava hits all that ice and creates a massive body of water that will flow toward the sea. Then, once it washes out to sea, they have to worry about the returning tsunami. Currently, there is a lot of worry about the volcano Katla. Katla erupts roughly every 80 years and her last eruption was in 1918, so she is overdue. Katla is one of the largest volcanos on Iceland and Johann said something that I thought was really interesting — “Eyjafjallajokull is just a baby” and they think the 2010 eruption is a precursor to “the big one”.
Anyway, if you’re here because you’re planning a trip to Iceland, do yourself a favor — figure out what you would like to see in Iceland and book Johann for at least a day. Our one little hour with him was one of the highlights of our trip. We were so impressed — we’d only asked to be taken to the wrecked plane, and he gave us so much more in our hour. If only I’d read about him before we made our trip! If we make it back to Iceland, we’ll skip directly past go and book a trip with Johann.
According to our original travel plan (before our travel delay), this day would have been our last day in Iceland and we would have driven to the Blue Lagoon and then headed to a hotel near the airport. But since the plans changed, this ended up being a make-up day for the things we had missed at the beginning of the trip. We’d missed seeing Gulfoss and Geysir, so we headed that direction as we worked our way back to Reykjavik. More pretty horses along the way — this time with babies.
We stopped at Gulfoss first. It was VERY cold and windy, so we didn’t stay outside very much. There is a really nice giftshop at Gulfoss, so we tucked in there and warmed up with a little lunch. I had the lamb stew and it was delicious.
Our next stop after Gulfoss was Geysir. Geysir is in an area with other geysers, but it is apparently the most famous. It doesn’t erupt very often though, and didn’t erupt while we were there. Strokkur, another geysir, erupts much more frequently, and it erupted three or four times while we were there. Gulfoss and Geysir were both beautiful, but maybe because we’d seen so many gorgeous sights in Iceland during the previous week, they didn’t really seem that exciting.
Geysir.
Strokkur.
While we were standing on the hill at the geysers, I looked north and could see the red roof of a little church. When we left the parking lot, we made the quick detour to the very pretty little Haukadalskirkja.
On the way back to Reykjavik, I tricked my little family into stopping at Alafoss. It’s just off of the highway into Reykjavik, and I knew I’d be sorry if I didn’t stop and at least look around for a few minutes. It worked out ok though, because we found some very nice Icelandic souvenir sweatshirts in the yarn shop.
We arrived back in Reykjavik around dinner time. We checked into our hotel, Centerhotel Arnarhvoll. The location was perfect, just across the street from the Harpa music center and we had a gorgeous view of the harbor from our third floor hotel room. Centerhotel Thingholt (the hotel where we spent our first two nights in Reykjavik) is closer to all the shopping/partying action, but Centerhotel Arnarhvoll is only about three blocks away. It was an easy walk to the Laugavegur main shopping street and I’m guessing it would be a little quieter on the weekends.
After check-in, we walked up to Laugavegur and checked out a few more shops. We had a little trouble finding a restaurant that didn’t have a wait and we ended up at Fru Berglaug. Our dinner was delicious. After dinner, we did a little more shopping and stocked up on our very favorite cookie discovery for the trip home. Toffeepops! All stocked up, we went back to our hotel room. It may have been our first evening where we were back to the hotel before 11 p.m.!
Hello Kitty. (Not a real kitty!)
