Iceland Day 5

*Adele voice*
Hello from the other siiiiiiiiidddeeeeeeee
(I may have wanted to do that this entire time)
Hot springs and waterfalls and geysers and glaciers, oh my! Today we went on the “Golden Circle” tour. And…oh my gosh it was incredible — a truly perfect way to spend our last day here in beautiful Iceland. The temperature was perfect, and the sun even graced us with its presence! Our tour guide was excellent, and the small group we were in was full of fun people! I struggled only to pick five pictures to share. However, I have genuinely fallen a little in love with this beautiful, quirky, unexpected place, so I am sure I will be back again as soon as I am able! Here is my trip journal for today, although there are not many entries:

2 June
0840
So our Golden Circle guide couldn’t find any room to park in the bus lane to pick us up. So what did he do? He drove his sweet bippy up onto the grass. I found a bus driver after my own heart. (To clarify, it was a small bus that could only seat about 15 passengers. It’s not like he went tearing across the lawn. Although some of the vehicles that go up on the glaciers as part of their tours have monster truck tires, so I guess it’s good he wasn’t driving that kind of bus. We saw one bus made from an old Russian missile carrier. Anywho, I loved our main tour guide! His name was Sivar, although he said we could call him Simon since his name had some rolled r sounds and a weird accent in it. Icelandic names/words are impossible. Anyways, Simon was super knowledgeable, funny, and easy to listen to. He had an answer to all of the questions I could think to ask and then some! Even when I asked him if they had successfully cultured any of the thermophiles from the hot springs he knew the answer.)
0950
We are currently on a tour of a geothermal power plant. Super nifty. (The plant was relatively new, built in 2006 or 2007. Its output was somewhere around 600 megawatts and supplies a lot of the hot water to Reykjavik. Hot water is so plentiful that the streets in the City Center are cleared of snow by the excess heat from the underground water pipes in the winter. They also replace all of the remaining water into the reservoir at the plant to prevent the tank from going dry. Talk about renewable energy!)

1125
There’s a man on this trip I call “mustache man” and he has been late back to the bus twice. If he is late again, I may grab him and drag him along with me. (Mustache man was late at every single stop. Every. Single. Stop. By at least 15 minutes. It was so bad that at the last stop our tour guide had to go and find the guy and bring him back to the bus. Simon literally threw the keys to the van to my Madre to give to the other guide so he could find the guy. Take it from me, folks: don’t be like mustache man. DON’T BE THAT GUY. Just don’t.)
1320
So our tour group has two gentlemen from Austria, a lady from Latvia, a gentleman from Germany, an American couple, a couple from Bristol, and mustache man. (I didn’t bother to ask mustache man where he was from because I probably would have replied to his answer with “Oh, really? Is everyone late there or is it just you?” I heard from my Madre who heard from Simon that he was from Switzerland. Seriously? They make like the best watches ever there, and he couldn’t bother to be on time? UGH. The Austrians were nice, although they didn’t talk much. I think I scared them. The German guy was super chill, all of the Germans I have met on this trip seem great! The Latvian lady thought I was funny after I muttered “hipster asshole” about mustache man once. The couple from Bristol was also hilarious. It’s funny how you make connections with people you are sharing a bus with for eight hours!)

That was the last thing I wrote in my journal. The tour itself comprised of the geothermal plant, two waterfalls, a 6,500-year-old volcanic crater, some hot springs, a geyser, and Iceland’s oldest national park, situated in the rift valley between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. The rift valley is also where the first Viking parliament used to meet way back when. Everything was super gorgeous, even with all of the tourists everywhere. I would recommend visiting Iceland! When I come again, I think I will rent a car and go all the way around the island to stay instead of staying in one place during the entirety of my trip.
All in all a great adventure! I hope these little updates were as fun for you all to read as they were for me to write! I am sad it is all over. However, I will be back in lovely Colorado around 19:00 tomorrow evening, and it will be very nice to sleep in my bed again!