Our Trips (2023 - on)

After our Rick Steves tour we flew to Reykjavik Iceland. Iceland is a small country, about the size of the state of Indiana. After viewing several travel shows and reading guidebooks, we decided to sign on with a local tour company, Arctic Adventures, for their 3 day South Coast & Golden Circle tour. This meant we had one day before the tour and a half day after to tour Reykjavik on our own. The Iceland map above depicts the general itinerary of our tour.

Reykjavik is a small city and is home to about two thirds of the country’s population. We quickly learned that the climate can be quite cold, rainy and windy here. Our full day walking around Reykjavik was unpleasant with wind and rain at 45 degrees F.! One day of our tour the guide/driver had to rearrange our itinerary because the road was closed due to wind!

More than one tenth of Iceland’s land surface is covered with glaciers, most of these are along the southern coastal area.The glacier’s melting means that waterfalls are abundant. You will see in the photos examples of many! The melting glaciers have resulted in a few ice caves, one of which we visited. Actually ice tunnels would more accurately describe these because you go through a tunnel of ice inside part of the glacier. Because of this you have to wear crampons for safety.

Iceland is also noted for their volcanos. The landscape in many places is quite barren because it is covered with volcanic rock from years ago eruptions. This geography also means there is considerable geothermal activity. This has been a boon for the country in helping them shift away from dependence on fossil fuels. They have been quite successful at harnessing the underground super heated water for electricity generation as well as heating homes. Most of Reykjavik buildings are heated from this underground hot water.

Click here for some miscellaneous photos.