Land of Fire and Ice

Sadly our trip is quickly coming to an end, luckily we are ending on a good note......We have arrived to our final destination... the Land of Fire and Ice... the one and only... Iceland.


We arrived in Iceland in the afternoon and were greeted by Ryan's brother Chris whom arrived about 10 hours earlier than us. Unfortunately, we were also greeted by not so desirable weather. I've always heard/read people describe seeing Iceland is like landing on another planet.... we had that similar feeling... when we took one step off the plane and were hit with a wall of rain and strong 55 mph wind that made it impossible to walk straight down the flight stairs. It was quite exhilarating and made me excited for our trip!

We picked up our car rental and were lucky to find we got a free upgrade! We originally reserved a 2WD car since we didn't think we would be needing a 4WD.... but we were given a 4WD and we are SO GLAD THAT HAPPENED! We have accidentally taken roads we probably shouldn't have taken and if we didn't have this 4WD car we would probably still be stuck in a muddy ditch now. lol. Anyways... I'm sure I've mentioned it about 100 times on this blog already... but we have had some serious good vibes/luck on our trip ... everything seems to always work out for the best, it's been amazing. Well... actually....we've had a few hiccups ... like cracking a phone and losing a hub cap on our previous car rental in Ireland.... that cost us about $50, which me might still file a claim to Visa for the card insurance, but if we were to have purchased the insurance from the rental company we would have paid $300 extra... so technically we saved $250 =P. We used that same logic when we were deciding to get the insurance of our Iceland car.... I originally was going to do the insurance to have a very stress free ending to our trip, but the insurance had a $600 deductible.... which in reality one decent scratch on the car could easily cost that much, so we decided to go with our Visa coverage again. Unfortunately, we already have one gravel ding on the car (... which if the Visa coverage works won't cost us a dime in the end (please please be true!).

Here's our Subaru...we got it a bit dirty already =)

Anyways... we headed to Reykjavik where we had our first glimpse at how expensive Iceland is..... we stopped at Taco Bell/KFC combo place thinking we would have a cheap meal for the night..... two meals costs us $30!!! A crunch wrap supreme and a KFC chicken sandwich. We were sticker shocked. This is apparently the norm in Iceland....so we will be only eating food from the grocery store for now on. We spent the night in Reykjavik to allow Chris to catch up on jet lag before we headed out.

The next day we hit the road... the Golden Circle. The weather was okay... there was a constant cloud cover but luckily not much rain. Here are a few pictures....

Chris brought my DSLR from home which these first three photos are from.... WHY ARE THEY SO GRAINY ?!?! I'll admit.... I don't really know how to use the dang thing... but I've tried changing like every setting and still can't seem to figure out how to fix the grainy look. They are being saved in RAW..... maybe that's it?  I was hoping for some epic photos and can't seem to make that happen. Oh well.

It looks like it will be raining all day today.... hopefully we will get a little reprieve to be able to explore a bit. 

Until next time. Adios.