The alarm went off at 07:30 this morning, not the kind of time I usually like to get up, but we had a ten hour excursion planned for today, so time was of the essence. We couldn’t have picked a better day, since Reykjavík dies a death on Sunday.
Eloïse slept for most of the first phase of the journey, as we headed out of the capital and down along the south coast.
In addition to the sites I mentioned yesterday, our driver was cool enough to take us to the Sólheimajökull glacier, which this particular tour usually only stops at during the summer months. We’d been there before, but it was great to go back and compare it in the winter.
The light on the snow-capped mountains down there was very eery, first with a blueish tint and then a faint orange hue before sunset. The sun barely made a visible appearance, crawling just to a shallow angle above the horizon.
I won’t go into detail on the trip here, so suffice it to say that it was a great day out and Eloïse was a trooper throughout.
Back at the hotel at just after 19:00, there was scarcely time to make dinner reservations and head out the door. Dinner tonight was at Þrír Frakkar, which means Three Frenchmen, named after the former owners. Yet again, it was a fabulous restaurant, serving a wide variety of fish dinners in a homely atmosphere. It also serves up puffin breast starters and gigantic whale peppersteaks, neither of which I can (hypocritically) bring myself to eat, but I’m sure they’re delicious.
We were considering another excursion for tomorrow, but Sarah’s pretty knackered, so I think we’ll just lounge around and try to get into the frame of mind that we live here, and try to accurately sense what that would be like. I think we’re actually getting pretty good at that now, with this, our third trip to Iceland.
Incidentally, Iceland is full of Russians at the moment, most of them apparently members of the Russian Orthodox Church. Quite an effort is made by Iceland to attract them for their church’s Christmas, which actually falls on 7th January. This effort has evidently been hugely successful.