The Golden Circle

Date: 26-27/06/2017
From/To: Arnarstapi – Selfoss
Distance: 227 Km
Total Distance: 4922Km
Weather: Cold, Drizzling, Sunny, Windy
Road: Paved

In the morning we had a walk along the coast line.

Gerlind did find the rock with a hole that we were looking for a couple of day, but couldn’t find it. It turned out that the rock was to the left from our accommodation, not to the right. So here is a picture of what I was looking for.

We packed up and left direction Selfoss. On our way was a mineral spring on a side of a farm, so we had a short stop there and took something in a bottle. I tasted quite nice, but Peter and Gerlind found later out that might be contaminated with pesticides or fertilisers, so we tost it the next day.

After nice drive we arrived at the new destination, the Borealis Hotel. The setup was nice, it hat even a hot tub, well more pictures to the tub later.

The next day we decided to do the touristy thing, driving the ‘Golden Circle’. On our way to the circle, we found that blue church, it stuck out like a saw thumb, so we had to have a look at it. The interior looked very nice, and it had even a bell tower. Most of Islands churches have a bell tower detached from the church.


The first stop in the golden circle was the “Gullfoss” waterfall. We were happy that we had our raingear when we approached the waterfall. Not only to be protected from the weather, you can see us as well from the distance (the neon yellow points on the right side is us, on the left hand side you have to look a bit harder:-).


In fact it worked so well that Peter and Gerlind borrowed the rain gear.

This is the beginning of a Mexican wave (swirl J)

And it was easy to zoom in when they were at the waterfall (No Zoom, with zoom)


Du to the rain and stormy weather, Sigrid was enquiring using a different type of vehicle, unfortunatelly it came only with four wheels, so we gave it a miss.

The next step in the golden circle were the geysers. The ‘Strokkur’ erupts every 5..10 minutes. Gerlind managed to take a sequence of pictures of it



Here you can see a turquoiuse hot spring and the Strokkur’ erupting at the back. The colours of some geyser looked incredible.


On our way back we stopped at a petrol station, here they not only had tyres, they had as well horse shoes in different sizes, right next to the yoghurt.J.

We stopped at the ‘Skalholt’, which was the bishop’s office and one of the most important places in Iceland from 1056 until 1785.


When Peter and I looked around, we found the passage under the church. It ended on a wooden door which was unfortunately locked. Well, that was the end of our treasure hunt.

On the side of the church was a church build in a traditional way, with wood, stones and grass roof/sides. It was pretty windy and cold outside, but in the church it was quite coszy.

After this strenuous day, we needed some relaxation, so we hopped into the hot tub at night.

Today we did only one half of the golden circle, tomorrow we will have a look at the second half.

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