Iceland day 9

This day was for exploring glaciers, glacial lagoon and volcanoes. We started off stopping at the visitor center in Kirkjubæjarklaustur (try to say that town name).  Here we learned about volcanoes, and the different types of mosses that grow first on the lava. The mosses grow first allowing other plants to grow. They had a very informative and well put together movie about an eruption in Iceland in 1783.

Here we bought a glass jar with a map in it. It was a treasure hunt. If you found the treasure you got to fill the jar with it as a souvenir to take home. We found it and filled ours with black sand, lava, wool, moss and lichen. It was not much of a challenge but mildly entertaining and will be a fun souvenir.

Our next stop for the day was the glacier. We went to a visitor center where there was a nice hike where you could get pretty close to the glacier. Along the way there was information about the glaciers and how they were receding.

Our last stop was the glacial lagoon. By this point it was raining so hard and was crazy windy again. So we decided to forgo the boat ride onto the lagoon. Instead we just looked on the shore and it was so peaceful and beautiful (well the 1 minute we could stand to be there). Then we were able to cross the street. Over there was the river that the icebergs took to get to the ocean. We saw a few floating down the river, and others laying on the shore. We again braved the downpours and went out so that we could touch the icebergs. The icebergs were all quite unique. Some crackly, some smooth, all bright blue.

Since this was our final destination we decided to turn around and get some miles in on our way back to Reykjavik. We ended up back in Kirkjubæjarklaustur for the night. We decided to grab some dinner out tonight and Leah and I both had some interesting lamb dishes. She had lamb nuggets and I had a lamb burger. Both were good. We found an empty parking lot to spend the night. It had a nice view of a pretty waterfall.