After lunch, we decided to take a hike I had read about which was close to Hoffellsjokull - the closest ice fall to our hotel. It's not a commonly visited ice fall as it's not right off the main road - there's a short drive on a gravel/rocky road. Once we got to the parking lot, there was one other car there and the family was coming off of the rise to view the glacier lagoon told us that it was really windy up there. We had no idea how windy it was until we got up there ourselves... it was like standing in a hurricane! We couldn't stop laughing at the ridiculousness of where we found ourselves.
After shooting this we actually were able to get a photo or two of the glacial lagoon. It's very different from the main one that is super popular as the icebergs have more debris in them, which makes for interesting markings.
Shortly after taking this photo, I stupidly put my back to the wind for a moment and the wind literally knocked me off my feet onto my butt. Ow.
We never actually made the hike - which goes up the right side next to the ice fall - it was just way too windy to risk it. We were also planning on going to a thermal tub place right there but decided against it since it was just so windy and the idea of drying off in 50F and super windy wasn't appealing! So we went back to the hotel to relax a bit since we have been running around seeing so much.
We decided to have dinner at the hotel. Here's the view from our table:
The menu:
Smoked mackerel - this was really good. I was a little nervous as sometimes mackerel can be a bit fishy, but this one was not fishy at all, but had great flavor and was still moist and really smoky.
Langoustine soup. They used a good stock but I thought the one we had at lunch had a stronger flavor - this one had a bit too much cream for me. But it was really tasty.
Arctic char with a hollandaise mousse and charred onion (and potato puree which was a LOT of butter).
Lamb - if I didn't read the menu, I'd no idea it was a rhubarb sauce, but it was very good regardless.
This is the birch dessert. I was really disappointed by this - there was no discernable birch flavor and the meringue tasted like it was made 3 days ago and sat around in a steam bath. I was so looking forward to this as I have some nice memories being in summer day camp sucking on birch tree branches while we were supposed to be playing some kind of sports.
