Day 7: An icy golden circle

 We woke up to snow/sleet falling and alerts on our phone saying that roads may be slippery. We had planned on an early start, but decided to hunker down and drink hot coffee for a couple hours instead. There's a website (road.is) that is mandatory viewing every morning, it shows the condition of each road and lets you know when it's safe to travel. I don't know what you do if they close all the roads around you, but luckily that didn't happen. Once the roads turned from "slippery" to "spots of ice" we headed out toward Reykjadalur Hot Spring thermal river. The roads were wet but not icy, the biggest problem was the insane wind. It was a bit crazy on some of the mountain passes but we made it to the parking lot without incident. It's a 3 mile hike to the river where we were planning to swim. The river gets hotter the further you go so you just walk until you feel like taking a dip. The hike started like this:

The sun was just starting to peak through, but the wind kept getting stronger. As we went higher the hike quickly turned to this:

A lot of people kept going, but with the wind and slippery slopes we decided it wasn't worth taking a dip in this weather. We headed back down with bright red faces from the crazy wind.  

The Golden Circle is a really touristy route that the majority of people visit when going to Iceland. The rest of the country is at least as pretty and has better hikes to do, but I think they just try to funnel all tourists to the Golden Circle to keep them out of the harder to reach places. We changed our plans a bit due to the wind/ice and just found a couple waterfalls that were easily accessible. Bruarfoss was first.

The bright blue waters and distant mountain views were spectacular. About 20km away is Gullfoss. There's a huge restaurant and gift shop there so it was a good place to grab a pizza and souvenirs.

Gullfoss is huge and there's a constant stream of water droplets spraying upwards so every time the sun came out there was a rainbow.

We found a nice corner away from people and just enjoyed our last hour in this beautiful country. 

The landscape in Iceland is like nothing we've ever seen. There are huge flat patches of former lava flow as far as the eyes can see, dramatic cliffs forming out of nowhere, snow capped plateaus, birch forests, a bajillion waterfalls, glaciers dropping chunks of snow into fast-flowing rivers, and something new to look at around ever corner. 

Put Iceland on your bucket list, you won't regret a Ring Road road trip.