Today’s all-day outing to Iceland’s Golden Circle included three major stops:

The Gullfoss, one of Iceland’s most famous waterfalls. I have photos of it when I was here in 2016 and the big difference is that today the perimeter was covered with snow.

The Geysir, which is a geyser has been active for 10,000 years.

The  Þingvellir National Park, which has some of the most spectacular scenery in Iceland. By this time of day, the skies were clear blue, and contrasting the white snow, the black lava, and the green moss was truly picturesque.

The park also contains the outdoor site of the Parliament where we took a group picture.

Before the visit to Þingvellir National Park, we had lunch at a tomato farm called Friðheimar where we enjoyed lunch among the thousands of tomato plants, as the restaurant is located inside the greenhouse. The menu was all tomato-based, so we had tomato soup and homemade bread. The menu had optional tomato-based dishes such as tomato desserts and tomato schnapps. The gift shop offered food souvenirs such as tomato jam, cucumber salsa, and tomato drinks.

The owners also raise Icelandic horses which are smaller than regular horses. The ones we saw in the yard were grooming each other. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!”

We also stopped at a dairy farm for homemade ice cream.

After dinner we made another attempt at seeing the Northern Lights, but I mostly came away with taking a photo of the people staring into the sky. There was nearly a full moon tonight, and in contrast to the last hunt, there was a lot of wind, causing us to feel colder than the 2° C. listed on the thermometer. At long last, we saw a little sliver of green, but the aurora were mostly hiding from us tonight. We’ll have one more opportunity to hunt for the Northern Lights before we go home.