Evelyn turned 10 today! She chose “bad” singing for her song, so consider yourself warned.
We explored a few small lakes around Reykjavik before driving to Íshestar Horse Stables fulfill her ultimate birthday dream: riding an Icelandic horse.
Aren’t the skies incredible? The sun “rose” about 11:30 am every day and set by 3:30 pm. Those brief hours were sort of a perpetual sunrise/sunset.
This is one happy birthday girl.
Rebekah and I opted to walk alongside while the other 8 rode horses. At first, it was to watch the younger kids and make sure they were safe. Afterward we saw how steady they were, we made good use of our mobility to take a ton of pictures and videos. Prepare to be inundated.
We were told that Evelyn’s horse, Sugar, auditioned to star in Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, he didn’t make the cut.
I was able to get up close and personal to their other Icelandic horses in the paddock. They were quite photogenic and playful.
After lunch, we started our drive on the Golden Circle to see what we could with the light. We explored Kerið Crater first.
Then we hopped back in our cars and raced to Geysir to be able to see it before we lost the light. Geysir, Iceland, is the original geyser and gave it’s name to all other geysers in the world! Geysir itself erupts only rarely, but we were able to see many fumaroles and visit the Strokkur geyser, which erupts every few minutes.
That night, we drove north of Reykjavik in search of the Northern Lights. We kept our eyes on our aurora tracking apps and got more and more excited the further north we drove and the darker and later it got.
Mike looked out the window and saw a vaguely greenish low-lying cloud that he though might be the Lights, but I wasn’t sure. By the time we had found a quiet, remote stretch of road to park, it looked like he was right! The surprising thing was that it wasn’t that impressive when seen with the naked eye. It wasn’t until Rebekah took several photos with her camera that we were really able to see the characteristically vivid colors and ribbons of light. It has been on my Bucket List to see the Northern Lights, but if it weren’t for my sister and her amazing camera, I would have been pretty disappointed by what we saw.
We also had some fun with the long exposure shots!
As far as birthdays go, this one was pretty epic and will be hard to top.
