Big day of seeing sights yesterday: we were booked on a Golden Circle Tour – one of the big tourist routes in Iceland. As the sun doesn’t come up until 10am pickup was in our terms late – 11:30. And we arrived to find we were the only people on the tour – so for 12 hours there was just us and Harrold, our your Icelandic guide and driver.

So we set off for Pingvellir National Park – site of the first Icelandic Parliament and also an area geologically interesting as two continental tectonic plates meet. It was really cold but sunny, and snow blanketed absolutely everything. And on the way we passed the first of what would be a recurring event all day – cars that had slid on the road and wound up in snow banks. Best advice: don’t self drive in Iceland in winter!

Pingvellir was great – really cold as we did our walk from the visitor centre down to another area of the park and we had to adjust to walking on icey snow including on stairs. But it was beautiful and as we saw all day there were a surprising number of tourists.

After Pingvellir we were off to a ‘greenhouse village’ where we visited a tomato greenhouse for lunch. Sounds ho hum: actually best tomato soup ever; tried tomato beer, and got a bit of an insight into one of the many uses in Iceland of their hot water resource – growing veges. Icelanders are very proud of not having to import tomatoes, strawberries and sundry other veges as they use geothermally heated water for greenhouses.

Then we were off again to the impressive Gullfoss – Golden Waterfall. I don’t think my photos do it justice given the way the light was but it was amazing – bits of it frozen as well as really strong flowing water. Apparently they raft the river below in summer.

From Gullfoss we headed to the Haukadalur geothermal area which as some geysirs, including the sadly depleted original Geysir – which as become the generic name around the world.

From there we visited a dairy farm – again sounds a bit ho hum. This is a family business that has diversified into accommodation, a restaurant, fabulous icecream, and still produces the traditional product skyr (a very bland dry cheese – almost like a dry and crumbly ricotta but developed here as a way of preserving milk.

After dinner we were headed for a hot spa but instead went chasing and finding very faint Northern Lights. The photos actually show more colour than we saw. Conditions were not great but we saw them! Hoping for better conditions later in the trip🤞.

When the Northern Lights activity dimmed we headed back to the spa. It ‘s the furtherest we’ve ever had to walk in wet swimmers to actually get in a pool – and it was 4C. Prefer the japanese onsens we’ve visited but it was nice (eventually) sitting in a hot pool under very bright stars.

On the way back to Reykjavik we did hope for better Northern Lights but there was quite a bit of cloud so while we got a dull gray glow here and there it was a fizzer. Despite this lots of folk were out hoping, and we saw some enormous tour buses full of hopefull spotters. We arrived home about midnight, exhausted. And slept late this morning.