Leirár- og Melahreppur

Today we were up with the sunrise to get ready for our excursion for the day. We booked a tour called Into the Glacier and drove to a nearby town called Husafell to meet the group and get into our crazy big super jeep (it holds about 50 people and has enormous tires). We even met a woman from Texas who was from SA and lives in Spring Branch. We drove for about 1 hour and 15 minutes around the surface of the glacier Langjokull. There are 13 glaciers in Iceland (including offshoots 269 named glaciers). One glacier has already died in 2015. Langjokull is the second largest glacier in Europe. The drive up the surface of the glacier was breathtaking and we stopped halfway (it was a bathroom break but there was snow covering the building so only the boys could take advantage of the break:)

The tour takes you to a man-made tunnel into the glacier. The tunnel is 900m long and at the deepest you are 50m under the ice. It was crazy to experience being inside the glacier and they even had different little rooms in various states of compression from the weight of the glacier as it changes. They asked for a volunteer to sing and Gid bravely sang a verse of Imagine Dragons’ I bet my life. This was followed by Happy Birthday for me, which was very sweet. The tour lasted about 4 hours.

After the tour we went back to the house and had lunch. The kids played outside and we tried out the hot tub (which was so hot it was even too much for me) but I let the kids play with snow and that helped. Gideon is a snow bird for sure. We have to force him to come in every time. We just hung out playing games and watching movies, enjoying our last night. It was a good day.Read more