The second day of our trip started with us dragging ourselves out of bed and chomping down on hotel breakfast. Unlike the ones I’ve had in America, this hotel breakfast was surprisingly good, which was a nice way to prepare us for the blizzard that awaited us after we left the bus.
Our first stop of the day was Þingvellir National Park, where we hiked between two receding tectonic plates to reach our destination. As we walked, we were able to see the patterns on and caves in the dark, rocky walls beside us, remnants of when the place used to be made of lava. After some slight slipping and sliding, we soon ended up at Axe Falls, Öxarárfoss. This waterfall was actually a man-made over a thousand years ago, bringing water to Iceland’s early Parliament.
Afterwards, we headed out to see some rye bread getting made. After mixing up the ingredients, the bakers there wrap up it all up in a pot and then bury it for 24 hours, letting the boiling water of the nearby hot spring slowly cook it. Despite the bad-egg-smelling steam coming off of the sulfurous water, the bread was rather delicious (once the baker remembered which of the dirt mounds to dig up, of course).
Seeing as the raging blizzard clearly wasn’t chilly enough for us, we decided some nice, cold ice cream would be the perfect dessert. We spent a nice ride in the bus hearing about Icelandic livestock and elf cows (which you apparently must bite if you would like them to stay) before arriving at the farm, where the ice cream was tasty and the young cows were adorable.
With the snow calming down on the ride back, we ended up heading to Kerið, a volcanic crater in Iceland’s Golden Circle. There, we got lucky with beautiful skies, lighting up the crater and letting us see all the way into and across it. It was a great way to end the second day of this trip, even though I didn’t get to take any of the interesting-looking red rocks littered around the crater – after all, I wasn’t going to get on the bad side of the land spirits already.
Swanson School of Engineering 