A Month in Dublin: Iceland Day 2-The Interior

Today, Meg and I left the city to see some of Iceland's amazing landscape. Our first stop was a trip to a horse farm for some horseback riding on Icelandic horses. The horses are unique to Iceland and are well known for their unique gaits that all (?) other horses don't possess. We also found out at the farm that Iceland works so hard to ensure this breed is as pure as possible, no other horses are permitted on the island and any Icelandic horse that leaves the island (for show, competition, etc.) is not allowed to come back to the island--they mean business.

After we got our horses, we would soon find out how quickly Icelandic weather changes. It was pretty nice starting the trip and no more than 15 minutes in, it was sleeting. This wasn't midwestern sleet either, it was more like pea-sized hail being blown sideways at 30 mph. Safe to say it didn't feel very good on the face, even the horses were really bothered by it. Luckily it only lasted about 10 minutes and became sunny...only to do the same thing again 20 minutes later. Overall though, the horse ride was great. The scenery was incredible, the horses were very nice to ride (Meg's was a slow-poke though) and even got to ford a couple creeks on the horses, which was pretty cool.

After some lunch, one of the guided bus tours picked us up for the tour of the "Golden Circle." The first stop was at Þingvellir National Park. This was the site of Iceland, and the world's, first parliament over 1000 years ago. The park is pretty incredible as it's at the junction of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates and has all these rifts and splits everywhere. From there, we were off to Gullfoss.

Neither Meg nor I had seen a large waterfall before and we would not be disappointed. Gullfoss was pretty incredible. The waterfall is actually a set of two waterfalls with an amazing backdrop. We hiked down as close to the waterfall as we could and got drenched, but it was totally worth it. We managed to get some incredible views and had an amazing little rainbow pop up for us while we were there. It was also interesting to find out that there's a monument at the waterfall to the lady who saved the waterfall from being turned into a power plant...it had been bought by foreigners.

Our trip ended at Geysir, the namesake for all around the world. Geyser itself isn't that active anymore, but the area is loaded with other geysirs. The most active one was Strokkur, which we got to see erupt 3 or 4 times in 30 minutes, very cool to see. It was amazing how hot the water was in some of the smaller ones, it made us look forward to our upcoming day at the Blue Lagoon. Enjoy the pics.