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Billy turned out to be a good bedmate and I slept soundly that night. At one point in the middle of the night, though, I awoke and found him sleeping across the bed, his legs dangling horizontally off one side, and I roused him enough to get him sleeping vertically again. I later gathered that Kaye and Gwen didn’t get along so well—Gwen is a notoriously “active” sleeper, often rotating her body around 180 degrees over the course of the night, which is the main reason that I usually wind up sleeping with her, and Kaye with Billy (the other reason being that Gwen is a major “daddy’s girl”).
I woke at 6:30 and looked out the window—we’d bunkered down here due to reports of a severe winter storm that would start at 7, but at that point it looked clear. I went back to bed and snoozed a bit more before everyone else was up at 8, and by that point there was horizontally driven snow and high winds.
We headed back to the dining room—now full of guests waiting out the bad weather—for a breakfast buffet. Unlike the crushingly disappointing buffet in Reykjavik, this one had an extensive variety of foods—bacon, sausages, and eggs; waffles, chocolate croissants, and sourdough bread; cheese and ham and salami; yogurt and cereals and muesli and oatmeal. We sat down with food-laden plates and looked out the large picture window, which today showed a dramatically different scene from last night—still the beautiful Ölfusá river, but now with a backdrop of stormy grey skies and wind-driven snow.
After breakfast, we let the kids veg out in the hotel room and Kaye and I headed to the spa (where kids were not allowed). We were the only people enjoying the spa, and we had a nice time lounging in the hot tub together. We took a break and read our books in a dimly lit lounge area; then we hung out in the sauna together. We spent about an hour and fifteen minutes there; we’d instructed the kids that they could use Kaye’s IPad to text my cell phone if they needed us, but we had blessed radio silence the entire time we were in the spa. As we made our way back to the room, we walked through the lobby, which was filled with tour bus passengers looking stressed out and clinging to their oversized luggage as the winter storm continued to rage outside. Kaye and I strolled past them, relaxed and happy in our white robes and slippers, and I could feel some of the people in the lobby gaze at us in envy.
We got back to the room and had a makeshift “picnic” lunch on the hotel floor with more of our camper provisions, including the sandwiches they’d made us at Glacier World. By now, they were quite stale but still edible— for me at least; Billy took one bite of his and immediately spit it out. We also enjoyed crackers, salami, cheese, and cookies while all sat on the floor and watched the Steve Martin version of “Cheaper by the Dozen” on the IPad.
After the movie, it was around 1 in the afternoon. The kids had been in the hotel room all day, mostly watching screens, and by now were stir crazy and bickering, leading Kaye to ask Gwen (rhetorically, at least I hope) “are you trying to drive me insane?” The storm had let up by then, so we decided to take them on a walk by the river.
We walked around toward the back of the hotel, passing by a church with its Icelandic flag at half-mast, which Kaye attributed to a funeral taking place there. Undeterred by this morbid detail, the kids climbed up a massive mountain of plowed snow and had a good time sliding and tumbling down it—at times toward the main road, leading Kaye to scold them and repeatedly tell them to knock it off. Meanwhile, I watched an eddy in the Ölfusá river, chunks of ice swirling around before floating back down the river toward where it emptied into the North Atlantic Ocean.
It was a warm but somewhat drizzly day by now and Kaye and I found ourselves questioning whether we’d made the right decision sidelining ourselves for the entire day. So we decided to take a day trip to the Kerio crater, where we’d planned on going the next day as part of the so-called “Golden Circle” of Iceland.
We loaded into the car and drove about 15 minutes out to the Kerio crater. On our way we saw coniferous forests and mossy landscapes—again a far cry from the barren, rocky landscapes we’d seen for much of our trip. A sign at the site of the crater noted it was formed about 6,500 years ago—again, a rather young geologic formation—and that it’s approximately 800 feet long, 500 feet wide, and 165 feet deep. It was filled with ice and the sign noted that the water depth inside the crater varied from 20 to 40 feet, and that the water inside the crater doesn’t drain but, rather, varies with the water table. I originally thought it was a crater from a meteorite, but it turned out to have formed when magma that used to lie under the crater flowed out for an eruption elsewhere, causing the ground to collapse into the ensuing hollow.
From above, the crater looked like a human eye: elliptical in shape, its blue ice obscured at the edges by a layer of white snow and ice. The center was a bright blue circle, resembling a combined iris and pupil.
After taking it in from above, we hiked down to the edge of the crater, then walked all around the top. The kids were bickering the whole time and we were constantly shooing them away from the edge of the 160-foot drop (the kids seemed to disregard us no matter how many “serious talks” we had with them about listening to us for their own safety), but it was a nice excursion to shake loose of the cabin fever that we’d all developed just hanging around the hotel all day.
We drove back to Selfoss, Kaye hitting a wine shop on the edge of town while I took the kids to a bakery for snacks. Then we went to a souvenir shop in Selfoss, where Kaye and Gwen got thick, warm Icelandic wool sweaters, and then walked over to the “New Selfoss” shopping district, which had renovated a bunch of the original buildings that formed Selfoss to a rather charmless food court and assortment of shops. All in all, I decided, Selfoss was a lot prettier to look at than to hang out in—there wasn’t that much to do, and it was s truly miserable pedestrian experience, with a narrow, recessed sidewalk that led from the souvenir shop to the shopping district that was full of slushy water that got the kids’ shoes soaked once again.
After shopping, we hung out at the hotel for a little bit, then had a nice dinner at Tryggvaskáli, a restaurant that was built into the first home in Selfoss. The ambience was really nice—the restaurant was full of historical portraits and photographs, but unfortunately neither Kaye nor got a proper chance to appreciate them because the kids were all hyped up after a relatively “boring” and static day. The two once again were acting out and bickering at dinner—at one point, Billy was banging his utensils on the table, which earned him an angry rebuke from Gwen, who then engaged in exactly the same behavior Billy had engaged in.
Things improved a bit when Billy quizzed us all on Marvel trivia. The food was good, though; in particular two bowls of lobster soup we ordered for the table, which the kids loved. After dinner, Kaye and Billy headed back to the hotel and Gwen and I grabbed some ice cream. Everyone went to bed relatively early, exhausted after a long day of doing not much.
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