Iceland X: Borgarnes to Reykjavik - Aug 21/26

From our place near Borgarnes, we drove to the Grabok crater and made the brief climb up. Unlike the other craters we had seen, this one was moss-filled.

We made a brief stop at the Deildartunguhver hot spring. It was a commercial hot spring so there wasn't much to see outside. We stayed for a few minutes and pondered getting a hot dog at the stand, but in the end simply carried on.

The two waterfalls of Barafoss and Hraunfossar were next. Hraunfossar is unusual as it's more than 1 km long of cascades. Barafoss, "Children's waterfall", is so named because of some children that supposedly drowned in it. Icelandic names are usually based on a place description, a legend or a tragedy.

Barafoss

Hraunfossar 

Our big activity for the day was the Víðgelmir lava tube. This is caused when a volcano erupts and the gases slowly leave the area, leaving a big cave. This one is the largest in Iceland. We were able to get there a little early and ate the lunch we brought from the grocery store the day before while waiting for the next tour at 1 PM.  A short hike led us to the cave, and we were able to go through about half of the 1.6 km length on a guided tour, mostly on wooden walkways. 

We were done pretty early and had nothing else until we arrived in Reykjavik. Nancy found a waterfall and we decided to go to it on the way since we had time before our check-in. It was down a very foggy and twisty, potholed gravel road... not the best, even though we were hoping for a paved route and took a detour! We realized it led us back to the park we had visited on the very first day and we had already seen this waterfall (I knew it sounded familiar). So we continued on the now paved road to Reykjavik. After finding our Air B&B that was located off to the side of someone's garage (a bachelor-style apartment with our own bathroom, which felt like luxury at this point), we drove to meet Nancy's family as Linda had picked up Nancy's race package for tomorrow's marathon. They also had a (larger) Air B&B not far from us. We debated going out but instead picked up some frozen meals (with vegetables, which hitherto had been in short supply) and made them in our apartment, and just relaxed for the evening. Nancy wanted a good sleep so we knocked off relatively early.