The Land of Fire and Ice

  Day 4: Hiking Canyons, Elf Cliffs, and Natural Hot Springs You son of a midge! When I woke up, I walked into the living room area to see Mikah and Ryan sleeping on the L-shaped couch.   If you read my previous post, you learned that there are almost no bugs in Iceland.  However,  the one that does exist gave us fits at our second AirBnB .   In Mikah and Ryan’s room, even with the radiator unplugged, it stayed too hot—unless they opened the window, which let in swarms of biting midges. In their room, their choice was either to sleep in the uncomfortable heat or get eaten alive. They decided the couch was a better third option.  Neither  really  complained - they said that they actually slept just fine on the couch. In the Footsteps of Justin Bieber We kicked off Day 4 with a 5 minute drive from Kirkjubæjarklaustur (a name I still can’t pronounce) to  Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon  — (another  name I can’t pronounce) Even in the early morni...

Rise and Shine! We were all pretty tired from the previous day's activities, but we woke up early on Day 3 for another full day of excursions. Not everyone slept great that night, which I'll get to later in this post when I talk about our AirBnB a bit more. For this trip, I had pre-booked only 4 activities - which, for those who might want to travel to Iceland, is pretty much essential to do, especially in the summer months. So far, we had done Sky Lagoon on Day 1. On this day, we were doing two of paid excursions nearly back to back, a glacier hike and a glacier lagoon boat tour . Our first excursion was a glacier hike in Skaftafell scheduled for 8:30 AM, the first tour of the day.  I was super pumped to do this as glaciers are something I have taught in school for a long time but never had the chance to experience in person. I was really excited to learn more about them.  It was about a 55 minute drive to the Skaftafell from our place and we were supposed to arrive 20 minut...