Thingvellur, Where Europe Meets America

Icy roads slowed our progress to Thingvellir National Park, but we didn’t mind. The terrain was surreal, like a white moonscape. I found Thingvillir absorbingly interesting. North America and Eurasia are only twenty feet apart where the tectonic plates emerge from the Earth’s crust. At a photo stop on a broad, white, snow-covered plateau, we chatted with three young Italian tourists. The one from Bologna was overjoyed to know that we had been to visit his home town. Thingvellur is also the place where the first parliament in the world met. Laws were very few, and were recited at each gathering by the Speaker of the Thing, as their legislature was called. Even now in the churchyard of a shrine in Iceland's version of Arlington National Cemetery. The honored dead from Iceland's military service are buried here.Read more