Last Day in the Renault---Golden Falls

7. Friday. Our last full day in Iceland is dominated in the morning by the crossing of the expanse of the coast plains of the giant wide glacial rivers that  pour out from up the canyons on the ice cap, relieving the water into the sea, at times in a volcanic cataclysm. The road is up on a causeway, the existence of which one year to the next is at the mercy of the magma and rocks, and other volcanic side-effects. When the water comes pouring down, it is merciless.

Along the sea are also bizarre standing "islands" that emerge up out of the coastal plain, stranded by the retreat of the glaciers in earlier times.

We leave enough time in the afternoon to explore the tourist areas around Reykjavik, since we'd come almost all the way around the island by now, and we coming back into the somewhat populated area, that could be taken for rural Wisconsin at times. Of course we visited Þingvellir where the first Icelandic parliaments met, in open air, a thousand years ago. It is located right at the meeting point of the crustal plates. Footpaths take one up from the river through the fissures between them. Rounding out the trio also hit Geysir and Gullfoss, the magnificent "Golden falls" that Red thought was the best falls of all. They were also submerged in a dam, due to corruption of the legal process, but were saved by a young woman who threatened to jump in the water unless they were preserved.

Gullfoss, looking here like a slice of pie. Yummy.

There was also a stop at a farm for ice cream made on the premises, by cows that one could see through a window from the place where ice cream was sold. One gets the sense that Iceland is still in a farm-estate-centered state of society, like Norman England. The signs along the road often point not to actual towns but to historic farm-estates, some with chapels, as if the nucleus of what would have become a town had it been on the continent. Iceland blows your mind that way.

We stayed the night at our third of the Icelandair hotel chains, this time at Fluðir, a small town not far from Gullfoss. It is the center of the country's greenhouse growing industry, and the hotel restaurant had a menu of locally grown produce. Outside in the courtyard were hot tubs. Iceland is quite nice.

The wi-fi at all of the hotels we stayed in was tremendous. Not a smidgen of complaint. Also Red noticed that her T-Mobile iPhone actually got higher bar levels throughout most of Iceland than she usually got in Portland.

We even tried to extend our stay, but changing the air ticket would have cost quite a bit more. So instead on Saturday morning we decamped,  drove back into the outskirsts of Reykjavik---the strange re-emergence of small urbanity amidst so much sparseness, and merged onto the tiny faux Interstate for the last fifty kilometers to the airport. After gassing up the Renault once last time, and dropping it off, we lugged our rolling bags down the sidewalk into the terminal, and went through security, showing only our tickets and not our i.d. cards (btw in Iceland on domestic flights you can actually carry unloaded firearms---it would hard to imagine not allowing this).

I felt wistful to be leaving. But we were looking forward to the next stage of the trip. Besides we had got the last bit of great Indian summer weather probably, and it was a splendid time to leave. So we stood in line in the Icelandair terminal and boarded the afternoon flight for...