I still woke up fairly early, and so did the other girls. Because we had extra time before our afternoon tour, we wanted to go have a really good breakfast. There was a pancake place near our hostel that Erica wanted to try, but we were apparently awake too early because it wasn't open yet. So Lexi, Erica and I went for a walk down the main shopping/tourist street. I got a teacup and puffin keychains to bring home, Erica got a pretty necklace from a metalsmith place, and Lexi tried to talk to the lady that had cancelled her cooking class, but she wasn't there.

We walked back to the pancake shop that was finally open. They only had crepes and waffles, so I chose a nutella waffle, of course, and a coffee. Sitting and having a really good breakfast made the gloomy day a bit brighter. After breakfast we walked back to KEX to get ready for our tour. I packed myself a jam sandwich for lunch later from the groceries I'd gotten the night before. A bus picked us up right in front of our hostel and took us to the Harpa center where we waited for our main bus.

Our bus driver, Jon, was hilarious. He had some good stories to tell and was really knowledgeable about Iceland. Unfortunately, it was pretty grey and rainy for the entire day. Our first quick stop was at a powerplant that pumped the geothermally-heated water to Reykjavik. We only walked to a spot where you could look down on the plant. You couldn't see much because it was pretty foggy and the wind was blowing hard. You could see some of the white puffs of steam coming from the plant, but that was about it.

From there we drove down to Thingvellir, the place I most wanted to go on this tour. Bit of background here: Iceland is in the middle of nowhere, really, and the only reasons it's out in the middle of the ocean is because it's all volcanic-based. They have active volcanoes (some that have erupted in the past couple years) and all the landscape is covered in black volcanic rock. The reason they have so many volcanoes is not because they're sitting on a volcano site like Hawaii is, but because they're right on the edge of tectonic plates. These plates are not pushing together, but rather, they're pulling apart. Thingvellir park is an easily accessible place where you can see the giant rifts in the earth where the plates are pulling apart. Before I started researching Iceland, I had no idea such places existed.

When we arrived at the top spot at Thingvellir, it was raining pretty hard. I hadn't really thought about how much it might rain when I was packing at home and hadn't brought any kind of rain gear, so I was really happy that I had bought an umbrella back in Riga. We huddled in the gift shop at the top for a couple minutes, and the rain died down a bit, so we headed out down the path. The path winds down between a giant rift and as you walk down, the walls get higher and higher. It was really neat to think about the geology of the place as you walked down in the crevice.

Erica and Melanie were wet and so they headed off to the bus pretty quickly, but Lexi and I spent time looking around for a bit. Down at the end of the path was a big waterfall that fed down into the submerged rifts further down. Off to the right side was a commemorative spot for where the foundation of Iceland's parliament happened. From there we walked down to the flat land with the submerged rifts that you can go snorkeling or scuba diving in if you want. We passed a cute family of geese too.

The water in the far submerged rifts is astoundingly clear. This is apparently because of all the volcanic rock the water has traveled through that makes it filtered to the clear colour. So, ever with a grey sky, the water was very blue and you could see all the way to the bottom. I could have explored the area a bit more, but it was time to get on the bus to the next stop.