Iceland 1: June 29, 2025 - July 1, 2025

We booked our trip to Iceland through a company named Traveo, who have planned a 28 day trip for us around Iceland.  

Day 1, June 29th: We flew into Reykjavik from Denver, picked up our rental car and made our way to Silica hotel. Our room wasn't ready so we walked over to the main building, ate lunch at Lava and then began our adventure into the Lagoon- a massive pool of hot, light blue water surrounded with mounds of lava rock complete with a steam room, sauna, mask station and a bar. The only casualty was Filip's pink sunglasses (the ones he almost lost at the Museo Botero in Columbia), which fell into the water while applying one of the 3 masks. As we could only see about a foot into the water, the glasses completely disappeared and we eventually gave up the search.  

After a couple of hours we made our way back to the Silica, checked into our room and took a nap (finally!). We mentioned the lost sunglasses to the hotel attendant and when we woke from our nap he had them behind the front desk!  

After grabbing our bags from the car, we sat in the main lobby and had our welcome drinks enjoying the view, followed by dinner at Lava and a dip into Silica's private Lagoon. 

View off the patio in our room

Overlooking Silica's Lagoon

The food at Lava was excellent. Across the 2 meals we had the mushroom soup, Langoustine soup, cod and fillet and would happily eat any of them again (which is good because we will back at the end of the month).

Day 2, June 30th: Monday was a pretty diverse day, we started off doing all the tourist attractions along the Golden Circle Route and ended up driving 2 hours up a desolate mountain road. (It was so desolate that 200 meters before our hotel we grew concerned that we had made mistake.)

We had a bit of a late start, checking out around 10am making our way toward the highlands. Our first stop was Þingvellir National Park. We followed our directions from Traveo to a parking lot and then looked at each other and said "what now?" - which was kind of funny.  We paid our parking fee and started down the path. We were pleasantly surprised to find such a beautiful spot, although disappointed in the crowds.

Large rock formations lined the trail on either side

The next stop on our itinerary was Efstidalur II - a family run farm serving homemade ice cream in front of the cows that supplied the milk to make the ice cream.  It felt pretty authentic as there were only 4 flavors offered - we both tried the cappuccino - it was very good (but not as good as Cherry Garcia or Jenny's salted peanut butter with chocolate flecks).

These cows contributed milk for our yummy cappuccino ice cream

Geysir geothermal area was about 20 minutes from the ice cream shop. We saw one large geyser erupt 3 times (2 within 10 seconds of each other) and lots of bubbling springs.  The geysers were close to the road so littered with people who spilled off the tour buses from the parking lot.

Our final tourist stop was the Gullfoss Waterfall, which similar to the other stops, was really stunning but crowded. 

The canyon that Gullfoss flows into

Gullfoss- 2 waterfalls (20m and 31m) 

Our next stop was our hotel for the night, Highland Base Camp, and our itinerary indicated it was about a 2 hour drive - most of which turned out to be on a gravel, bumpy isolated road.  We arrived right about 6pm, had dinner and tried out the hot-tub on our balcony. 

Day 3, July 1: We were impacted by the jetlag and got a very slow start. We had a 7.4 mile hike, Ásgarour-Hveradalir, planned for the day, but ended up waiting until after lunch to start. The hike started like others we have done before- straight uphill but it was very different. We saw no trees, no grass (a little bit of moss) and very few people for the first 2.5 miles. It was very windy and very cold and we were happy to have on many layers.  We hit the first patch of snow very early in the hike, but it was pretty easy to get over.

Landscape was vast - you could see for miles

Colors of the mountains under the snow were striking

Kite flying at the top

As we got closer to the midpoint of the hike we started noticing lots of people, which surprised us because we had seen so few people and it was already mid-afternoon. But we quickly realized we had hiked to geothermal caldera and there was a parking lot on the other side of the caldera. 

While there was mention of staying away from the steam and some pictures on Alltrails we had not appreciated how amazing and surprising this would be (and another advantage of having someone else plan our itinerary).  There were entire ecosystems within this caldera - including really green grass, flowing streams as well pods of boiling water and steam.

Our hike back to the hotel took us up through the parking lot and along the road - which at first felt a little disappointing but the views were so different from the front side, including a stunning canyon that we followed until we got back to the hotel.

Post hike and post dinner soak (it is probably 8:30pm in this picture- hours before sunset).