Day 8: Seydisfjordur to Heidarbaer

PS from last night. I went to a one hour concert in the local church over the road as part of their summer concert series. It was a group called Dea Sonans who describe their music as Latin & Melodic Chamber Jazz.  The church was a lovely venue and having felt cold all day it was great to feel warm and cosy.  

The group were great, one on piano, another on violin or trombone, another singing or flute or tenor saxophone, and another on double bass or singing.  They sang everything in Icelandic and I didn’t understand or recognise a thing, but it was such an enjoyable hour.  

Today we went from the East coast to the North coast.  We are now at point 27 on the map.  

First stop was a two hour drive to Dettifoss. Thisis the most powerful waterfall in Europe, which is astonishing as there are no safety barriers anywhere near it.  When we arrived there were around 20 people flying overhead with individual motorised paraglides.  The valley downstream is pretty impressive.

And this is the waterfall itself

I tried to keep the safety warningsto the kids to a minimum, but you can see what effect it had:

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

I know I keep going on about the roads, but today was the worst.  I had to drive at 20kph along this, if I had gone any faster my teeth would havefallen out

Then we headed off to Lake Myvatn.  It is a beautiful nature reserve with lots of different sections dotted around the enormous Lake.  There was a crater to climb up and this was the view inside (not as picturesque as the one with electric blue water).  

And this was the view from the rim of the crater out over the lake

The whole area is meant to be great for bird watching, and we wished we had Andy and Karen there to tell us what we were looking at! [Andy welooked for the male King Eider but as it didn’t specifically waddle up and introduce itself to me, I am not sure that I saw it - bird watching fail!]

We did see lava pillars though, these are formed when channels of steam rise up through the lava layer, the lava cools around the channel and then remains solid after the lava has drained away.

  

and some more

We drove to our campsite via route 87 otherwiseknown in the guidebooks as the Rollercoaster Highway.  It lived up to its name but its hard to get a photo to show the full uppy-downy-ness

We are now at the campsite and hallelujah it hasa swimming pool, hot tub and sauna.  The swimming pool and hot tub are all heated directly from the geothermal plant over the road.  We went for a dip as soon as we parked up- glorious sunshine too.  

We are half way through our adventure, I feel really relaxed and have only sent one work email the whole time (give me a medal!).