March 14th, Part Two: Some Very Popular Scenery

It took a couple minutes to find parking in the small lot on the side of the road, but we eventually found a spot, parked the car, and started walking.

Hello, Kirkjufell!  :)

This is one of the most photographed spots in Iceland, so it really wasn't a surprise to see this many uber-serious photographers strewn across the paths.

And it's no wonder...the scenery was amazing in every direction.

One path led up to a fence and a field of horses. This one was scratching his face on the post.

We spent a little while wandering around, enjoying the views.

You could see the town of Grundarfjordur in the distance.

After a little while, a snow shower moved in. Visibility started dropping, so we started walking back to the car.

It was neat to watch the snow swallow up the mountain; this was only a couple minutes after I took the picture above this one.

You could see the snow showers moving across the distant mountains, too. I could have stayed here taking pictures all day.

We took one last good look at the views, then made our way back onto the road in search of dinner. A little bit of driving later...

...we found Bjargar-stein, a neat little restaurant in Grundarfjordur. The view from our table was fantastic.

We were the only ones there when we first arrived, but a few other people filtered in while we ate.

The people that weren't at the restaurant were missing out...the food was fantastic (and local!).

We eventually finished dinner (and dessert), then started heading back to Reykjavik. The drive started out fine, but after a while we hit some snow squalls and it got a little ridiculous. Mark pulled over on the side of the road at one point to take a break because it got so crazy. We eventually made our way back to Reykjavik, and celebrated not wrecking the rental car with some whisky samples.

I had been uploading pictures to my computer when I thought to take a look out the window.

Good thing I did...there were Northern Lights! I scooped up all my camera gear and went outside to try to get a better shot.

They were a little hard to see behind the clouds, but there were a couple minutes of some really neat flickery waves. It was pretty windy, though, so as soon as they started to fade, we went back up to the room and headed to bed. The alarm was going to go off fairly early the next morning!