The day began early as I needed to return my hire car back at the airport.

My little Kia has done a great job over the past week or so, and I’d definitely use Blue Car Rental again. I’d recommend a 4WD here, even if you’re not planning on F-roads, as it just makes life easier (some of the stuff I visited involved a couple of km down pretty rough tracks and although you could do it in a normal car, it would be a bit iffy).

I headed to the airport, dropped off the car, and then waited for Georgie’s flight to land. Once she arrived, we got the bus into town and checked into the hotel.

For today, we’d missed the big trips out so we wandered around Reykjavik a bit.

First stop was to walk up the hill to the church,

You can pay a small fee, and take an elevator to the top, which gives nice views over the town, including the small airport which serves domestic flights

From here we headed down to the waterfront. There’s some colourful buildings and graffiti about.

Down on the waterfront, there’s a sculpture of a boat.

This is the Sólfar – the Sun Voyager, created by Jón Gunnar Árnason and placed here in 1990. We continued along the waterfront to Harpa  – a concert hall venue, with it’s interesting glass architecture. A quick coffee stop before heading back to the hotel.

In the evening, we took an excursion; Taste the Saga, advertised as a brewery tour. We’ve done tours around breweries and wineries before, and they usually involve looking at barrels or stills followed by a small tasting. This was slightly different – a completely crackers “actress” (with a wide repertoire of accents) explained some of the history of drinking in Iceland (with a brief diversion where we had to explain Eurovision to some Americans) while we got through various full-size drinks. Good fun.

22mm, f/6.3, 1/25 sec, ISO800
24mm, f/6.3, 1/25 sec, ISO1250
26mm, f/6.3, 1/25 sec, ISO1250
16mm, f/6.3, 1/25 sec, ISO2000
16mm, f/6.3, 1/25 sec, ISO1250

---

Continue Reading...