Onion River Exploration Project: Day 2 From Reykjavik to Reykholt

Barnafoss "Childrens Falls" Photo by Eileen

Day 5 (8/4/13)

Today is the start of our actual tour. At 9:00 we are getting picked up at the hotel and starting our adventure. We have already met two couples that are going to be on the tour with us and had breakfast with them. Dan and Karen are from Madison, WI and Dawn and Hilda from Oklahoma. We are starting with a quick tour of Reykjavik and then heading north along the west coast of Iceland. Our first stop is at the church that Eileen and I had toured yesterday but we came in from a different direction and get further information on it. Then it was off to the Hofdi House, the location of the summit meeting between Regan and Gorbachev which eventually led to the end of the cold war. Designed and built in Norway as a kit it was then shipped to Iceland and assembled on location. It has been the home of many famous Icelandic people through the generations and was the residence of the British consul during World War II. It is now owned by the City of Reykjavik. We finished our tour of Reykjavik with a trip to the hot water containment facility " Perlan". Like most of Iceland Reykjavik’s hot water comes directly from the ground. At the facility they collect the water from hot springs and store it for hot water and to heat their buildings in the city. It has been remodeled to contain shops a restaurant and a museum not to mention another observation deck and view of the city. After that it was back on the bus and up the coast and under a fjord to the Settlement Center at Borgames. It was very busy when we got there and kind of hectic. By the time we finally got in our patience was a little frazzled and the iPods were giving us problems so we eventually just rushed through and spent our time outside building our first cairns in Iceland. In the afternoon we continued north until we got to Deildartunguhver hot springs, the largest hot springs in Europe. The valley that Deildartunguhver is in has other hot springs and you can see plumes of steam from hot springs all over Iceland. We got back on the bus and headed to the first of many waterfalls that we would visit. Hraunfossar “lava falls” is unlike any other falls I have ever seen. The crystal clear spring water emerges as from nowhere under the lava fields. It then falls down into the white glacial river and eventually mixes and flows on. A short walk upstream brings us to barnafoss “children falls” where according to legend two boys were killed while crossing a land bridge that used to exist there and was later destroyed by an earthquake. Finally we are off to Reykholt “the smoky hill” where we are to stay for the night. After getting settled in at the hotel we walked to the home of the 13^th century scholar/writer Snorri Sturluson who collected and wrote down the Icelandic Sagas. We then toured the old church and new church with a lecture from the minister on the history of Snorri and the Sagas.