Having successfully acquired fish, it was now time to get something to put under the fish. Even though we had decided not to actually pay the fee to sit in the hot spring, we nonetheless drove back to the one we had previously considered to acquire another Icelandic traditional food item: fermented shark.
No, just kidding. We wanted to get some geothermal rye bread, baked right in the hot springs. Purchasing a loaf was straightforward, but locating knives proved trickier. We checked at a nearby restaurant, and while they didn’t have any plastic silverware, the proprietor noticed our loaf and was at pains to warn us not to eat more than a slice or two, lest we suffer acute gastric fluidity.
So now we had lots of fish, suddenly suspicious bread, butter, and no way to combine same. There was obviously no alternative – we went to a gas station, which meant driving even further back the way we had come. At said gas station we acquired a loaf of presumably safer paprika bread and a box of plastic knives.
From there it was time to visit one of the most important national parks in Iceland, Þingvellir. Since I’ve now gone four paragraphs without a picture, let’s make up for that right now:
And, how about another panorama? (It’s the law.)
And in case the scale of that big pile of geology isn’t quite coming across:
Þingvellir literally means “Assembly Field”, and it’s where the ancient parliaments of Iceland met. We found a picnic table surrounded by ducks and ate our bread and fish, and it was delicious. The ducks weren’t allowed to have any.
By this point, it was after 9 PM, but there was absolutely no way to determine that from the ambient lighting, which was pretty much the same as it had been all day long.
Did we mention that Iceland is spectacularly pretty? I think we mentioned that. At any rate, after a hike around this corner of the park, we were about out of gas, so we returned to our AirBnB in Reyjavik where, at 11:30, it was STILL just as bright as it had been all day.
Next up – Snuffleupagus, volcanoes, and goats!