Day 2 (June 21, 2025)

After a solid night of sleep, we woke up fairly early (around 5 am). Sofie stayed up after hearing more about the behind-the-scenes of the APS job she’s been pursuing, I went back to sleep until about 6 or so. After the morning routine, we went downstairs for breakfast, and found ourselves surprised by the hotel breakfast. In particular, we liked the skyr and the bread they had. But our plan that morning was always to make a stop by Braud & Co., a chain of pastry bakeries in Iceland. We ended up at one that shared space with a Joe & the Juice, which wasn’t open for service yet, but did get pastries from Braud & Co., which is famous for their cinnamon rolls. We got a normal cinnamon roll and a vanilla cinnamon roll from them. We heard a lot of hype surrounding Braud & Co., claims of cinnamon rolls that will change your life, but honestly we didn’t find it to be exceptional. Competently made and tasty? Yes. We did enjoy the cinnamon rolls, but we weren’t blown away and felt like we’d have to come back. We also went for a little coffee at one of the many locations of Reykjavik roasters, which was pretty good. All in all, we haven’t found ourselves too impressed by food in Iceland. We are admittedly kind of harsh critics, but there hasn’t been anything that I think has been better than something we could have in the states. Nothing has beaten the food at home so far.

We finally got on our way after Reykjavik Roasters, headed to Thingvellir National Park. This drive was my first experience driving a car in a foreign country, and it wasn’t too bad. The speed limit in a lot of places can get up to 90 km/h, which is apparently just about 55 mph. We spent our time on what seemed like a major highway out of Reykjavik, not dissimilar to a medium-sized highway in the states, except instead of proper exits, it just had a series of traffic circles where you’d either continue on or go around it to get off onto another road. This struck me as odd, as traffic circles don’t exactly feel conducive to speeds around 55 mph, but it worked out surprisingly well and kept traffic moving, which I certainly admire, the beltway goblin I’ve become.

Thingvellir National Park was really nothing short of amazing. The main attraction was a walking path that cuts through these two large rock formations. They essentially form these massive walls around the walking path, which is really cool visually. The park itself lies in (according to Wikipedia) a rift valley that marks the crest of the Mid-Atlantic ridge, and the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Some truly amazing geological phenomena on display at the park, and a really well maintained park. Nice clean bathroom facilities that are well distributed throughout the park, a nice visitor’s center, walking paths that are either paved or wooden, and take you right to the attractions, and beautiful landscapes without a ton of walking. You could really pack in a lot of amazing visuals in a short time. We were there about an hour and a half, walked around 3 miles, and saw some things that truly stunned us.

After we were done at the park, we headed toward Laugurvatn Fontana, a bread bakery that uses geothermal energy. Essentially they bury pots with bread dough in them inside this sand that they referred to as “boiling sand”, which I took to mean the sand itself, like the water in some of the hot springs, was at roughly the boiling point of water. We forgot to book the tour in time, but we were able to poke around a bit of the facility, although there wasn’t much to see. We did get a small plate of the bread baked in the pits, and it was pretty tasty. Kind of a sweet rye bread that I enjoyed. We weren’t there for very long, and headed over to Geysir. This is where we really started to feel like there were a lot of tourists around us. Thingvellir was crowded, but there were a variety of things to see, and they were spread out enough that it never felt too cramped. Not so with Geysir, it was very busy and kind of chaotic. The main attraction was, as you may have guessed, a geyser that shoots up into the air with such energy and force that it can go pretty high. Combine that with the randomness of the blasts, and it’s a fairly fun tourist attraction. Super crowded though.

It wasn’t until our next destination that I realized we may have had a bit of bad luck with our timing. The next spot was Gullfoss, a truly amazing waterfall that can only be described as massive. The amount of space it took up was shocking, and the force with which the water moved honestly felt a bit scary. I got some amazing photos and was pretty enamored with the attraction. We had to share it with a bunch of those tour bus groups, the kind of thing where a bus of people rolls up, dumps about 50 people out all at once, and says “be back in 45 minutes”. It was kind of chaotic.

I am starting to understand that Iceland, while a truly amazing place, is a little bit too popular for its own good. They have done a good job putting infrastructure around their natural attractions that makes it easy to access these attractions, but there are just so many people trying to see these things during the day. It didn’t ruin the experience at all, but it was a bit annoying at times.

After Gullfoss, we were feeling like a little break, so we went and spent some time at Secret Lagoon, which was really nice. It was definitely smaller and less gimmicky than Sky Lagoon, but that was actually to its advantage. There were maybe 100 people there total when we were there, and the pool had more than enough space for those people to be there. It was a nice relaxing time and a good way to reinvigorate for the last few things of the day.

Our final natural attraction of the day was Kerid crater, which was apparently created when a volcano spewed out all of its lava and was left with nothing inside to support its structure, so it collapsed in on itself. This I think was at least 5000 years ago, so now it’s a big crater with a little pond inside of it. Really amazing thing to behold, but it was raining hard and we were pretty tired, so we opted not to walk around all of it, although that was an option.

We went to eat dinner at Olverk Pizza and Brewery, a place I had been eyeing since we started planning this trip. It was a bit disappointing. The pizza wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t amazing by any stretch. We both felt I could do a better job at home. The beer was a real weak point. Sofie noted they work off of a 2 barrel system, which is tiny. Their brewery is at least in part powered with geothermal energy, which is unique, but didn’t really have any effect on the final beer. I tried a flight of 4, an IPA, a pilsner, an English Pale Ale, and a red ale. The red ale was the only one in the bunch that I thought was good, the rest were pretty bad. Overall, the beer tasted watered down and lacking in flavor. The red ale had the most in the way of flavor, but it still just mostly tasted sweet, emphasizing the caramel malts. We lingered for a while there though, as the space was fairly nice.

Finally, we took off to our home for the night, Midgard Base Camp. This was the place we were most excited to stay on our trip, but we booked pretty late in the game, so we had to book a hostel-style room shared with four other people. But I had a hunch that if I asked if there were any private rooms available, maybe they’d have something. So I asked, and sure enough they had 3 available rooms. We bumped up to get ourselves a private room, which offered a little more comfort and peace of mind. We spent some time in their rooftop hot tub, where we chatted with what I presume was a father and son duo from Pittsboro, North Carolina. They had been having a very different trip than us so far, only about six days total, and working with some more intense terrain. They spent most of today on Thorsmork, a popular hiking destination, but also very serious and lengthy hikes. Something I might do if I had more time, but I’ve been enjoying our style of seeing how many little things we can fit into a day, striving for variety. After the hot tub we washed up in the shower and went to bed, where I now sit typing out this journal entry!