Beauty and the Beard:
Bound to Wander

Get ready for a two-dayer! Day 9: Like every other blog post before this one, we woke up. The breakfast at Fosshotel wasn't very substantial, and the options were pretty limited. The continental breakfast was a few slices of cheese, meat, and cucumbers. Kaylea had some lackluster pancakes. We had a glacier hike to get to, so we ate as much as we could. After that, we spent a little time working on the blog and getting ready before we made our way out. We put on all of our thermal gear, and a bunch of layers, and hit the road.   We were only about 20 minutes away, but 20 minutes in snow gear in the car gets pretty hot. We pulled up to the meeting spot for our tour, and our guide was just wearing a long sleeve shirt. We got out and asked how cold it's going to be on the glacier, and she said "It's like this. Maybe just bring a light jacket." So we had to take off a bunch of layers in the parking lot. We met some of our fellow tourists, and hopped in a van to head to

Since we were starving from the night before, we got to breakfast as soon as we possibly could. 9 am is pretty early for us when we vacation. We had already sat down with our plates when a man asked us our room number. He couldn't find our room number on the list, but we let him know that it was alright for us to be there. Not sure if it was our American assertiveness, or our Jedi mind-tricks, but he just kind of sheepishly agreed then walked away. In actuality, the dude at the front desk from the night before did tell us breakfast was included with our room. The guy who bugged us looked like the actor that plays Dexter. The way he meticulously organized the breakfast buffet was very... Dexter-ish. It was all we could talk about.  After breakfast we actually had time to go back to the hotel room. Kaylea got to nap while Aaron worked on the blog. Our schedued activity for the day was a geothermal bathhouse called Vok Baths, which was just down the street from our hotel, and our slot

The big plan for the day was a whale watching tour! It was an hour and a half away, with a quick stop in between. We woke up, had a quick breakfast, looked for a novelty coffee mug, and we were on the road again. Our first stop was another waterfall. We're not sticking with the rivers and the lakes that we're used to. Suck it TLC! The place was called the fall of the old gods. Apparently some historic person threw all of the old idols down the falls to get his village to convert to Christianity. Neat, but we had humpbacks to see. It was another 40 minute drive into a harbor surrounded by snow capped peaks. We listened to Asgier while we drove. There's something about listening to Icelandic music while driving in Iceland. It just works well. We checked in for our whale watching tour, and the guy told us to put on some warm clothes and meet back in an hour or so. We asked if we needed gloves. "Yes. If you have anything to keep you warm, you should wear it!" We took

So this "sunlight all the time" thing got real old, real fast. After dinner last night we tried to go to bed, but were kept up by the sunlight streaming through the cracks between our black-out curtains. Aaron didn't fall asleep until around 1:30 and it was still dusky.  We haven't really taken the time to explain what we've been up to. Long story short, it's a road trip. There's a company called Guide to Iceland that has lots of different tours, and we picked a 9 day self-drive tour around the ring road. They rent a car for you, book all of your hotels, book a bunch of activities, and give you a roughly 40 page itinerary and a bunch of vouchers. It usually takes us a lot of time researching and planning our vacations, but we also don’t like our vacations to be too structured. This let us skip the planning phase, and get straight to the adventure. It also left us with a pretty good amount of flexibility. Given how many of our blog posts begin with some for

The sun didn't go down until 11pm last night. At midnight, it was still pretty bright outside. On top of that, we're pretty jet lagged, so our circadian rhythm was out the window. All this to say, we slept in a little late this morning. We had a nice, but hurried breakfast, then threw our stuff in the car. We were out of the hotel by 11. Our first tour was 2 and a half hours away, and it was supposed to start at 2pm. The drive over was amazing. Picturesque sweeping plains. Villages at the foot of the mountains overlooking the ocean. Incredible rock formations. You get the idea. The entry to the national park was through a large lava field at the base of a volcano capped by a glacier. You could also see two large rocks near the sea at the edge of the lava field. Kaylea speculated that the stones were the top of of the mountain that had been blown off by a prehistoric eruption. Well, she was wrong.  The stones were apparently formed in center of a mountain by tubes of lava pushin