20260621 Sunday, June 21, 2026 Iceland Golden Circle Tour
The breakfast at the Iceland Parliament Hotel was a bit chaotic, and at $42 USD per person, it was a little under standard for your typical Viking extension hotel. There was a reasonable selection of standard breakfast items, but the hot line just had scrambled eggs, baked beans, and sad-looking pork sausage halves. Instead, there is an entree menu, and diners get to choose one item from that menu. Those included things like eggs benedict and omelets. Ben ordered the eggs royal, which is eggs benedict with smoked salmon instead of ham, and Janet ordered a ham and cheese omelet with a side of bacon.
It was a filling breakfast, but not as good as the ship’s and not as good as many other Viking extension hotel breakfasts.
Our Golden Circle Guide, Sigga, had walked into the lobby before Ben and Janet came down and did not recognize our group. She then went around the back lobby entrance, where Doug spotted her, and Ben waved her in.
Sigga drove a relatively nice black Ford Transit van configured for 9 passengers. It had comfortable seating, and we were impressed that she had a PA system installed so she could speak through a headset, and the vehicle’s audio system played her narration throughout the van. As the day and tour played out, the weather was exceptional with sunny skies and only a light breeze. This meant that the van heated up in the sun while we were touring, and it turned out that her air conditioning was not working, so we ended up having to drive with windows down in the afternoon to keep the interior cool enough for everyone. This was the first tour of this summer season, so she was not aware of this issue until today.
Sigga has an interesting background. She was a flight attendant for several international air carriers in Europe and Africa before pursuing a journalism career, which culminated in her being a news anchor for an Icelandic TV station. Then she gave birth to twins— a boy and a girl— and found the hours and demands of being a news anchor incompatible with single motherhood. That led to a stint in media production before a friend asked her if she could help him out by showing some visitors around Iceland. She found she really enjoyed guiding, and has been doing that for several years now.
The tour began with heading out of Reykjavik into the suburbs, pointing out landmarks and talking about housing, population dynamics, and growth in Iceland. Growth has been driven largely by immigration, driven in part by the EU’s open borders policy. There are significant Polish and Lithuanian populations, and even an Albanian mafioso contingent. On the whole, it was worked to the benefit of all as the Polish and Lithuanian immigrants do jobs that Icelanders don’t care for, filling a critical labor need, and the Albanian mobsters pretty much stick to killing each other and leaving everyone else alone.
We drove out past the stables where we had ridden horses yesterday. The valley has quite a lot of horse infrastructure, and while Sigga didn’t personally ride, a lot of Icelanders do.
Our first official stop was Kerið crater. This is a picturesque crater that once was thought to have been formed by an explosive eruption, but the lack of evidence of any associated ashfall has led to a more recent theory of it having been caused by the collapse of the underlying magma chamber towards the end of its eruption, which spilled lava all over the surrounding landscape.
There is a rim trail that takes about 20 minutes to walk around, and a trail down into the crater to a lake at the bottom. Ben, Doug, and Sandy all ventured to the bottom after everyone circled the top. There were tiny stickleback fish in the lake, and the water was quite cold. It reflects the surrounding water table.
The Haukadalur Geothermal area was our next stop. This is home to Strokkur, the “Old Faithful” of Iceland. It erupts about every 10 minutes, shooting superheated water 200ft in to the air. The original great Geysir of the same geothermal area quit erupting about 30 years ago. There are several smaller bubbling geysers and cauldrons dotting the area. We were able to witness a couple of eruptions of Strokkur while we were there, but it is hard to capture it on film unless you have endless patience.
Gullfoss or Golden Falls was the next stop on our tour. This unforgettable waterfall looks like it’s falling off two perpendicular knife edges until disappearing into the earth.
Once you find the right angle, it then becomes apparent that it disappears into a deep canyon at a 45º angle to the upstream portion of the river. There is tremendous power evident in the water which fills the air with sound and mist.
We were dropped off at the top of the falls and then wandered down to the base of the falls where we were picked up again.
We were dropped off at the top of the falls and then wandered down to the base of the falls where we were picked up again.
Sigga filled us in on some of the folklore surrounding the falls and the true story of how Sigríður Tómasdóttir saved the falls from being dammed for hydropower by foreign investors in the early 1900s by making repeated 120km treks to Reykjavik to protest the action. She is frequently called Iceland’s first environmental activist. Fortunately, the foreign investors were unable to successfully raise the capital necessary to bring the project to fruition, and it was eventually bought by the Icelandic government and made into a conservation site in 1979.
Next came a pleasant surprise. Sigga took us to a tomato farm called Friðheimer which produces the majority of tomatoes consumed in Iceland. This greenhouse facility is heated and lit by geothermal energy. It now has a very upscale restaurant and wine bar that has become very popular. We got to tour the greenhouses and see how the tomato plants are trellised on a support structure that maximizes productivity.
We were treated to an intimate private dining room in the wine bar greenhouse and had some very fancy and delicious tomato soup and salads with fresh-baked bread. It was a unique and enjoyable dining experience.
The next stop was Iceland’s first public swimming pool. A fishing shipwreck that occurred just off the shore of some islands just off the shore of Iceland caused the entire crew to drown. This led to a law requiring all Icelanders to learn to swim.
What is very nice is that the availability of geothermal energy and abundance of natural hot springs made it relatively easy to construct swimming pools with geothermal heating.
This facility is called the Secret Lagoon, and it is reminiscent of hot springs pools around the world. There is a main pool that feels like it is nearly 90ºF in temperature, which would make for a pleasant swim even in the dead of winter. There are surrounding hot tubs at various temperatures and even a cold plunge pool fed by the adjacent river.
Our next stop was a visit to a dairy operation called Efstidalur. Due to the harsh winters, cows must be kept indoors for much of the winter, or they would simply freeze to death. During the summers, they are allowed to roam the pastures, but even in the US, many dairy operations have their dairy herds spend most of their lives indoors or at least under cover. There are viewing windows that allow visitors to see the cows without disturbing them because the windows are one-way glass.
We bought ice cream and frozen skyr, Icelandic yogurt, for dessert there.
The last official stop on our Golden Circle tour was Thingvellir National Park, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull away from each other along the mid-Atlantic ridge. This is the only place where you can straddle between North America and Eurasia on land.
This is also the location of the ancient Viking Parliament. The rift creates a natural amphitheater, while the nearby river and waterfalls provided convenient facilities for carrying out executions because the Viking Parliament also served to mediate disputes and deal out justice. There were overhanging rock cliffs convenient for hanging executions, and a perfectly shaped stone at the base of the nearby waterfalls for beheading. And if drowning was preferred (it generally was the method used for women being executed), there was a nearby deep pool of icy cold water below the waterfalls into which the accused could be stuffed into a sack and drowned underwater.
On those cheery notes, we headed back into Reykjavik, but not before making one last stop. We went into a Hagkaup on the outskirts of Reykjavik.
This is like an Icelandic Walmart or Fred Meyer’s store with a variety of goods and groceries. This is where we were able to stock up on Súpu Jurtir Icelandic soup herbs. These are used in conjunction with lamb on the bone like shoulder or chops to create the base of Icelandic meat soups.
After returning to the hotel, we checked with the Viking concierge and learned that we will need to be in the lobby with our luggage by 8:45 a.m. for our airport transfer. Our flight departs at 12:45pm and it can take an hour to get to the airport if traffic is a problem.
We walked with our group back into Reykjavik’s shopping street and this time walked into 101 Reykjavik Street Food, the restaurant next to the Reykjavik Fish Restaurant we had eaten in before. There was some contention as to which restaurant had the better fish and chips, but Ben and Janet really wanted to have Icelandic lamb soup before leaving Iceland, and 101 did have that on the menu. Everyone else ordered fish and chips.
The general consensus was that the French fries were better at the 101, and the fish was a close call. The Fish Restaurant used a beer batter while 101 used panko breading. As for the soup, the menu item is actually traditional Icelandic Meat Soup, and there were definitely two different kinds of meat or cuts in the soup. One was clearly lamb, but the other might have been another cut from a lamb or perhaps even horsemeat. It was delicious and filling, and served with a hearty roll, but not as good as what we remembered of the lamb soup we had at Geysir 10 years ago.
We were pretty much the first people to wander into the restaurant at 6 p.m., but by the time we finished, there was a long line out the door, so the place is definitely popular. We were wise to get there early.
After returning to the hotel, we got our suitcases reconfigured for airline check-in and also got our boarding passes electronically, so we’ll be prepared for tomorrow’s departure.
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