By Li

A good start to the morning, we were up and about and down for breakfast by 9am, breakfast was simple but there was a few Icelandic specialties, such as sour cream and brown sugar. It’s very filling and the sugar gives a good source of energy. There was a selection of pickled herring and other cold meats. The kids seem to love the sour cream and sugar.

After breakfast, we hit the road to the Thingvellir and we stopped off at the Kerid crater first, it was a drizzly day and very windy. At one point, William was nearly blown over near the crater lake. The crater was fairly big and impressive. Strange how the perception was on how deep the lake is, we assumed it was very deep but it was like a bowl and it’s approximately 7-14m deep.

Next stop was the National Park but we passed a hydropower plant (Ljósafossstöð power station) and decided to stop in. It was free and we enjoyed looking around and had a lot of interactive displays and explaining energy and generating electricity,etc. It was the oldest and 1 of 3 hydropower plants on the River Sog.

After our little detour, we finally made it to the Thingvellir National Park visitor centre. It is a historic site where the Icelandic parliament was created from 10th to the 18th century. The park also sits in a Rift Valley caused by separation of 2 tectonic plates. The rift was a fairly decent size and went on for ages.

We also stopped off to see the local waterfall Öxarárfoss. It was pretty and not as big as some waterfalls we have seen but the kids loved walking on the rocks below.

We decided the weather wasn’t playing ball so we opted to head back to the guesthouse to thaw out and relax, via of course another viewpoint!

And then William flooded the bathroom…