The GCW Tour, the Frozen Cruise: Iceland Is Amazing -- Icelandic Bus Drivers Not So Much

Our first day in Iceland we took an excursion to see the "golden circle." The route took us about an hour out of Reykjavik to one of Iceland's national parks where the viking parliament met a thousand or so years ago and where you can see pretty clear geological evidence about how Iceland was formed, with the North American and European plates doing their tectonic thing and the country basically coming apart at the seam.  

From there we went to one of Iceland's geyser fields to watch the ground steam and geysers erupt. 

The next stop was the Gullfoss Waterfall, which was pretty impressive. It's a large double falls, set in some really amazing countryside, so well worth the time to visit. 

Well, sort of.

The scheduled stop was just forty-five minutes, but unfortunately that got extended to about two-and-a-half hours. The parking lot was too crowded for the bus to wait, so the driver had to circle around and return. When he did, he cut the turn too sharp and managed to drop the rear wheels in the ditch, high-centering the rear of the bus on the pavement. Despite a lot of well-intentioned efforts, the bus was still sitting there two-plus hours later when a replacement bus came to fetch us.

But we did learn that Icelanders are quite proud of their geothermal power plants. Even though we were more than two hours late, with a lot of grumpy parents in the group, the tour still made its last stop at the Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant. Most of the tourist areas were closed, but there were still three kids there to give us an orientation to the plant's operations. Very cool stuff. 

And from there we went back to the boat, where, no doubt, Guest Services was given an earful. 

And just for the record, in case the pictures don't make it clear, Iceland really is a beautiful place. It's no wonder that last year the country of just 350,000 people saw 1.2 million visitors, and this year is expecting two million more.