Iceland day 5

The first place we went this morning was a cave with a geothermal pool inside of it. Apparently this cave was featured on game of thrones. 

You aren't allowed to swim in it because the water gets too hot, but it was pretty to look at! 

Next we walked around the Myvatn lake to see some lava formations. 

This was great in theory but terrible in reality because there were so many bugs. 

Seriously. I have never seen so many bugs and I lived through a year of the cicadas. 

We were happy to leave the Myvatn area because of the bugs and headed toward Godafoss waterfall. 

This waterfall was gorgeous!

We hike down to the bottom of it for a different view. 

Up next was the city of Akureyri. I am guessing this is one of the next biggest cities after Reykjavik. 

The city was beautiful because it is right on the water. I didn't get a picture, but the stop lights were shaped like hearts. So this is a pretty loving city I guess. Here is the local church: 

How mark and I will look by the end of this trip: 

I thought it was funny that this ad used Elvis. Also, we stopped here for fish and chips. 

And the food was amazing. 

We continued west for a bit and then turned off the ring road to head north along the fjord. Iceland seems to have pockets of certain things, for example there was a section where we saw sheep everywhere. But in this northern part we started seeing horses everywhere. 

We turned off the main road to find Hvitserkur. Mark had shown me a picture of it before on the Internet and I thought it looked like a rhinoceros. Also based on the picture I had seen I didn't think it would be anything too impressive, but I was blown away by it in person. Especially once we hiked down to the beach right in front of it. 

It reminded me a lot if delicate arch in Moab, but in black, so you know I loved it. There were hardly any people there ad the sky was overcast, which made it even better for picture taking I think. 

I took this picture from the car. This horse was just standing there outside of the fence staring at us. 

Another horse we saw a little farther down. Icelandic horses are known for having super long hair in the front. 

Last year Mark read a book called Burial Rites. It is a historical fiction about the last person to be executed in Iceland back in the early 1800's. He says it was one of his favorite books of the year. Anyways, he wanted to find where her head was buried (yes, just her head -- she was beheaded obviously). It's buried in the cemetery of this little tiny town (Tjorn) in northern Iceland. This is the church:

And here is Mark with her grave:

Not too far from the town we past this castle-looking restaurant that I had read about online called Geitafell. People had raved about its fish soup, so we decided to stop. 

Mark inside the quaint restaurant:

The fish soup. It really was delicious!

We left the restaurant and started our search for a campsite. Along the way we saw a sign pointing to the shore with an image of a seal, so we stopped to search for some. We saw some on the little island in the distance, but couldn't get a good picture because they were so far. 

Not too far from there we found a campsite to stop at before continuing our journey into the westfjords.