The Western Coast of Iceland

On our 3rd day in Iceland, we did a whopping 11 hour tour to the western coast and the Snaefellsness Peninsula (Rich calls it the Snuffleupagus peninsula, you know, the big furry elephant looking character on Sesame Street). It sounds remarkably alike. Surprisingly enough, it was windy and raining for this tour! Shocking, right?! One of our guides did jokingly say that all the Iceland brochure pictures were taken during the 10 days of sunshine during the year. He didn’t seem to be joking that much… Allows for moody photos because the sky is always cloudy I guess. Clouds make for good sunset photos. I was really fortunate to get in some lovely and very bright rainbow photos on this day as well. There is always a silver lining. Rich having wet socks every evening after tramping around in the wet all day wasn’t one of them…but I did figure out that the waterproof trail running shoes I bought did the trick.

This tour included lunch at a working farmhouse where we had lamb lasagna. Yep. Never thought those two words would go together. It was pretty good though. The farm had a lot of horses on it so we got to stand in the driving rain and take photos of some sodden, but beautiful Icelandic horses. We went to another couple of black sand beaches (as I think most are considering the volcanic makeup of the island). One had seals playing off shore and another waving (literally) from the beach. There were also some whale bones from a beached whale. We stopped near the coast to see a very old black church which was originally founded in 1703 but rebuilt in 1848. There was also a very interesting-looking troll made from stones. Yet another beach had four large stones. At the turn of the century, you could determine the worth of you being a sailor by which one you could lift. We toured some national parks and the countryside was breathtaking with the clouds and the sun warring each other to see who would control how the view looked. We left early the next morning….as in we had to be outside a nearby hotel with our luggage at 0345 to meet the bus to the airport. We enjoyed our time in Iceland and honestly wished we could have come a bit earlier in the summer and spent more time there. However, we were some of the last of the straggling tourists for the season, and the lack of crowd was good. So for now I say “so long” to Iceland which is translated into Icelandic which is “bless.” Kind of appropriate, I think!