In Iceland, there are multiple tours with multiple companies to satisfy the desires of the exploding tourist population. We are taking two— the first, today is from Nice Travel, touring what is called "The Golden Circle". It stops at four important geological sites, all within a 60 mile radius of Reykjavik.

The countryside appears quickly outside the city limits passing beautiful landscapes, small groups of sheep (most are sent up into the mountains in the summer), mountains and extinct volcanoes like this one. ( There are about 130 in the country but only 30 active ones!) We did not find the elusive Artic Fox, but loved seeing the one in the museum yesterday.

Our first stop was Thingvellir Park. We haven’t quite figured out the letters in the Icelandic alphabet yet, this park is spelled with some kind of funny "p" -þ for the Th. A Unesco site, it is situated at the meeting point of the North American and EurasianTectonic plates. They move 2 centimeters further apart and the gap fills with magma. every year. Our guide Kiki quipped " in a few thousand years we will be able to walk to China!" The lake, named Tingvallavtn is Iceland"s largest lake and contains water so clear you can always drink from it.

The second stop was the Gullfoss ( Golden Waterfall). It is near the Long Glacier, (which has a name 3 times as long in Icelandic), 2nd largest in the nation. Beautiful, large rushing water made it a natural highlight.

Geysir, our third stop just down the road has multiple geysers, pronounced "gee-sirs" and the origin of the word comes from the largest one here, named " geysir". We were not lucky enough to see it erupt, but the second largest one, " Strokkyr" erupted several times while we were there.

After a quick but big bowl of lamb soup, and managing not to buy anything in the very large tourist shop, we drove a bit to the last stop, the Kerid Volcano.

Another of the inactive ones, this one collects rainwater and glacier run off in the bottom of the caldera which forms a beautiful lake. It was made even more famous a few years ago when producers built a platform in the middle of the lake and invited Bjork to sing an outdoor concert there using the natural acoustics of the volcano’s sides. ( Sorry, no pic of that).

Returned home tired, having again gotten in more than our 10,000 steps, and after a rest ( mostly to work on this), went to the food hall nearby for some Neapolitan pizza and an Italian beer.

Tomorrow we do the South Coast tour and start even earlier.