It was great to see the sun!

We finally saw the sun on our fourth day in the country, and we woke up to gorgeously clear, blue skies. This was nice, as we had planned to hike up “Steam Valley” (Reykjadalur) that’s just outside the town we’d been staying in - Hveragerdi. During these posts, I will try to share the Icelandic names of places with you, but most of them are quite long and are definitely tongue twisters. I’m not going to try and find an Icelandic keyboard, but rather just type the close approximation in English.

At this point, we hadn’t seen a lot of sheep yet, so I found it charming that they were grazing right beside the path.

We hiked steadily uphill…

… and were rewarded by a waterfall about halfway along.

Hiking deeper into the valley, we started seeing more signs of geothermal activity -

Finally, after battling fierce headwinds the whole 2.5 mile way in (and climbing nearly 1000 ft), we made it to the “hot river”.

We had actually taken our suits and towels with us, intending to soak after the hike. However, the VERY brisk cold wind, crowded conditions and shallow water of the river talked us out of it. We turned around and enjoyed the much faster hike back down, with the wind at our backs. We also enjoyed a chance encounter with a ewe and her two pretty big lambs -

Especially on the lambs, the curly coat looked so soft.

The better lupine picture I promised earlier:

They are everywhere, and line the roads quite deeply. One of the guides we had for a trek said it was imported from Alaska to plant in sandy soil to help prevent erosion, but then it has taken over and become quite invasive. I don’t know about you, but this is much prettier than kudzu!

So we’re now heading east, and being treated with glorious landscapes - Mt. Hekla above - and an unnamed glacier below:

I’m leaving the glacier unnamed, as you’ll be seeing many more of them on our travels along the south coast, and the names have at least 10 -15 letters in each one. Mt. Hekla is an extinct volcano, and is said to have been J.R.R. Tolkien’s inspiration for Mt. Doom.

I’ll close this short post with the reason I’m having trouble falling asleep. This was taken at 11 pm!