We woke up on our own, a bit before 07:00.  It had been windy overnight and Crystal hadn’t slept well.  A fire alarm (or something like that) went off just after 07:00, but thankfully it stopped almost immediately, and was apparently a false alarm.  At breakfast, Crystal mentioned how she normally dislikes salmon, but when it is raw or just cured, she’s a big fan.  She made two breakfast sandwiches with it this morning.

Our first stop today was at Papa John’s, sort of.  We headed off the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, heading southeast on Road 54 until it dead-ended at the Ring Road in Borganes.  After a couple minutes on the Ring Road (which we hadn’t been on in days), we pulled off to park at Geirabakarí Kaffihús, which was decorated to look like a Papa John's in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  Crystal thought about going in to get some coffee, but she’d had some at breakfast, and didn’t think she needed any more caffeine.

We headed inland, off the Ring Road, and after about 30 minutes we arrived at Deildartunguhver, the largest hot springs in Europe.  There were signs everywhere indicating that we should be careful, as the water was 100 degrees.  We wondered what percentage of people in the US would be aware that 212 degrees is the boiling temperature.  The colors of the rocks at the springs were a bunch of shades of red, and somehow there were living plants in various shades of green.  We didn’t stay long, but it was pretty interesting, and not much of a detour of the route we were taking.

It was only about 30 minutes to the next stop, two waterfalls, Hraunfossar and Barnafoss.  Hraunfossar was one that really interested us, because unlike almost all the other waterfalls, it doesn’t fall from a river or stream.  Instead, it appears to just come straight out of the foliage.  There is porous rock on top of solid rock, and water travels through the porous rock and on top of the solid rock, and then just trickles over the side of the solid rock at the river’s edge.  Barnafoss is more like most of the other falls we saw, with a lot of water and a lot of power, and is located on the turquoise river where the water from Hraunfossar eventually flows.

Similar to Kirkjufell a couple days prior, the constant stream of bus guests have led to large swaths being roped off, and viewpoints no longer being accessible, to the detriment of the rest of us.  Eventually Justin found one spot, not roped off, where he carefully descended in order to get a panoramic shot of Hraunfossar.  We were right near the meeting spot for our tour, and we were quite early, so we killed time in the café at Hraunfossar, trying to figure out what to do this afternoon and evening.  We debated whether to drive to thermal baths on our own today on the way towards Reykjavík, or come tomorrow.  We nixed seeing the Glymur waterfall today, as it required a hike that we hadn’t allocated time for.  We also tried to figure out whether and when to do a volcano hike.

It was a 10 minute drive east to the offices of Into The Glacier.  We killed a little time after checking in to grab some beverages, as neither of us would be driving for a few hours.  In the restaurant there we saw the Swiss family from our Thórsmörk tour, but they weren’t on our tour today.  We got on a big bus, but with a raised suspension and bigger tires.  We sat at the very back, and the people in front of us were part of a group tour.  We took this bus for maybe 45 minutes through some remote terrain that reminded us of The Highlands.  We arrived at the Klaki base camp, where we used the WC, put waterproof overboots on top of our shoes, and then we got into a different vehicle.

This vehicle was smaller, holding maybe 20-30 people, and was clearly designed to travel on snow and ice.  We went up a bit of dirt (where the glacier had receded the past 10 years), then onto the Langjökull glacier itself.  After 20 minutes or so, we got to the entrance to the ice cave.  At first we had to shuffle a bit to not slip on the ice, but then we entered a room where we put crampons over our overboots (which were over our shoes).  Then we walked through a couple tunnels and a filled-in crevasse.  The crevasse was filled in with all the snow and ice that the people who built the ice cave had dug out.  How they knew it was sufficiently packed down is beyond us, but it didn’t give way today.

Being inside the ice cave was fascinating, but we were glad it didn’t last any longer, as we were getting a bit cold and wet.  There were several spots where water was dripping through the ceiling of the cave, and it wasn’t light enough in the cave for us to spot all these drip locations, so every so often we’d have zero degree water just fall all over our head or jacket (or hand holding a camera).  We traveled back to where our car was parked in the reverse order - first the snow bus, then the “regular” bus, with us changing out of the overboots at the Klaki base camp.

We had to wait for a bit before the regular bus went back, as we were waiting for one other tour to wrap up and get on our bus.  We used the time to read about the hike for the Glymur waterfall.  It didn’t look too bad, just too much for today.  Justin decided he wanted to see the volcano this evening, and maybe go to the waterfall tomorrow, especially since it was right next to the thermal spa we were planning to visit.  Crystal decided she’d take it easy tonight, and just hang out in Reykjavik.  So once we got back to the parking lot in Húsafell, we went straight towards our hotel in Reykjavik, The Swan House.  We had some traffic on the way into town - we weren’t sure if the fact it was a Sunday evening had anything to do with that, or if this was just normal.  We also drove through an underwater tunnel, which was unexpected.  

We got to the hotel around 19:00.  After we dropped our stuff, Crystal went out to enjoy the main pedestrian street with the view of the big church, Hallgrimskirkja.  She got dinner, and had a nice fish soup.  After dinner she walked into a couple different mini marts to get some wine to take back to the room, but they had beer only.  Back in the room she did some crossword puzzles and did some language studies.  She also bought tickets for the geothermal baths for tomorrow, and it took a bit of time to square everything away and triple check that everything was correct.

Justin headed southwest, and made a quick stop at KFC on the way out of town.  His drive was about an hour.  There was a big parking lot, and he paid for the parking using the Parka app.  Thankfully it worked okay, as Crystal had paid for all of the other parking spots (and pumped all the gas, too).  The walk from the parking lot to the volcano was about an hour.  It was dry, but very windy.  Justin moved around a couple of times until he found a good view in a place that was shielded from the wind. 

There were dozens of other people around, but none of them seemed to have figured out that the wind from the north might be blocked by standing on the south side of one of the many hills; whatever, he was warmer and didn't have anyone around him.  He spent only about 45 minutes actually watching things; if he’d waited another 45 minutes it would’ve been sunset and the view arguably would’ve been better, but he didn’t want to wait that long.  So he did the hour walk back to the car, where a guy from Tenerife recognized Justin’s CD Tenerife hat.  

He then drove back to the hotel, and arrived right around midnight.  He checked out the photos, and was bummed to see they were almost all “out of focus.” It turns out they weren’t actually out of focus, but instead they were blurry because of heat haze, which is a frequent occurrence when very hot air is around colder air - basically the air itself is blurry, and the camera can’t do anything about that.  But the pictures were definitely clear enough to show there was a big volcano in southwest Iceland today.