Iceland day 4

We woke up this morning after a very cold night and headed back out on the ring road. As we were driving we spotted this waterfall off the side of the road and pulled over to check it out. 

Then we continued our drive, which was full of beautiful views like this:

We stopped in Egilsstadir and got a donut before leaving the ring road briefly to go to Borgarfjordur Eystri, which is a town right on the edge of a fjord known for having lots of puffins. 

We passed some horses on our way. 

And some more lovely views:

When we arrived we found the puffins!

They live in little holes covering the cliff. They fly super fast and dive into the water to catch fish. Lots of times they come back to the cliff with fish dangling from their mouths. Mark used the giant lens on his camera to take some awesome pictures, so if you want to see them, you'll just have to wait till he gets to a computer. 

Puffin selfie!

We had a picnic lunch by the puffin cliff. 

In the small town they had this contraption for drying fish. We went to check it out because Iceland is famous for its dried fish.  

It turns out they were all fish heads. Yikes!

Our guidebook had said to make sure you saw the "hairiest house" in Iceland in that town, so we did. I am now wondering if they have to mow their roof. 

As we were driving back I noticed this frozen pond that looked like a patchwork quilt with all the different blues. 

From there we continued our drive across northern Iceland moving west. I'm a big fan of bridges and this one popped up in the middle of nowhere, but looked like a city bridge. 

The scenery changed pretty drastically from the lush fjords of eastern Iceland and became much more volcanic. 

Eventually we arrived at Hverarond, a big group of bubbling hot springs. We aren't talking hot springs as in the hot pots that mark so enjoys swimming in. We are talking bubbling sulphuric mud. Like what you might picture warthogs or hippos sitting in as a hot tub in an animated movie. 

They were pretty cool to see, but smelled TERRIBLE! I was struggling a little with my gag reflex when we were downwind of them. 

Close by was a small lake with tons of steam flying off it. There were warning signs all around it saying not to swim in it because there were those steamin hotspots beneath it. But look at that blue color of the water!

Our next stop was the Myvatn geothermal pool. It is similar to the blue lagoon you may have heard of, but less famous. It is filled with water heated by the earth ad was pretty relaxing. I appreciated the lack of green sludge at this one. Haha. 

After swimming, we went to Daddi's pizza and had a delicious dinner. 

Then we set up camp by lake Myvatn and went to bed.