The land of fire and ice.

 Thingvellir National Park was the highlight of this, our last day of vacation in Iceland. The park is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of two reasons: it is important for Iceland's history as the island essentially became its own nation here, and also because of the geology. Most visitors come here for the second reason, and tourists were pouring in today on a beautiful warm Thursday.  Folks come to see how Thingvellir lies on the junction of two tectonic plates, the North American one and the Euroasian one. You can walk right down between what geologists say is where the land cracked apart something like a billion years ago.     Signs in the park say these edges are more clearly visible here than anywhere else in the world. So it is a unique place. This white accordion type house was the prime ministers summer home for many years, right here in Thingvellir where the tectonic plates were shifting and moving. The image of those houses is popular here. Tonight I was in a souven

 Yesterday, we were astounded by Glacier Lagoon and Diamond Beach and by all the glaciers we were passing. We kept stopping and each stop took a long long time. Here are some photos from yesterday (the 6th).

  The east side of the island, the ice side, offers so much that I’m too tired to talk about it tonight. We only got to our hotel by 10 pm tonight. My phone says I walked 31,000 steps and my hiking boots have a lot of black sand in them so it was a full day, a good day. I named my hike on Strava and a doubter thought I had just made up the name of the park. But this photo does not lie.

 We'd heard Iceland is not that great for bikers. But today, we met this amazing couple from Holland who were spending 10 weeks cycling WITH their three-year old daughter, Asha. They are staying off the busy Ring Road and just doing back roads and not doing the whole island. But they've camped every night so far except one which is impressive. They'd just pedaled up a huge serpentine hill, 2-3 miles long, really steep with switchbacks and a 10 percent grade. We pulled over to talk to them while they were catching their breaths at the top of the hill and getting Asha something to drink. They were chill and relaxed but the whole trip so far (they are on week 7) has not been easy because they endured weeks of daily rain.  I told them we are bikers too and they were probably thinking, but not like us and they were right. He is a cook and she is a data engineer and Asha goes to four-year-old school in October.

A few things came together last night, atmosphere-wise, and we were thrilled to see the Northern Lights last night right outside our hotel room. The lights changed all the time. Sometimes colors vibrated in shades of green, and always there was movement: dots and check marks and arcs and ghostly streaks across the whole sky. We had to keep turning around to see everything. I was clumsy with the camera but got a few good shots once I figured a few things out about how to hold my phone.

I'd imagined what an Icelandic port city would be like from some books I read before and was happy that we got to see the small harbor city of Husavik. It was about what I expected, maybe 20 percent fancier, because of these freshly painted boats and the glacier mountain backdrop.  The route (see blue line below) today was up and over with a stop for hiking at the cliff place called Asbyrgi. It was so sunny and warm and non-windy that we could have worn shorts but we didn't even bring any.  I'm reading a book about Iceland called The Greenhouse , by Audur Ava Olafsdottir.  In it, I've learned all these plant names, many sound so wholesome. One name is Lady's Mantle, and I did see some today on a nature trail. Also, there is meadowsweet, burnet rose, pink dwarf weed and sheep sorrell for me to keep looking for. The lady's mantle and the cliffs and the fall colors shown below were in a park called Asbyrgi, see photos below.   We picked and ate these berries which