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Dagur þrjú

 Day Three

If I could describe day three in one word it would be wet. The weather was horrendous all day. It got to be so bad that we are currently sitting in our hotel at 6:00 pm. The day started with some really intense wind, the weather app said the winds were up to 40 mph! We stayed at the day two hotel until checkout at 11:00 am, hoping the weather would calm down. It didn’t. I think Dr. Barineau got a video of Jacob and me struggling to put out luggage in the car with the wind fighting back, I’ll have to ask him for it. Today we did what Dr. Barineau describes as “car geology”.

We saw everything through rainy car windows. Even through all the “doom and gloom” Iceland is still magnificently beautiful. We had planned to see some really cool things, a ferry ride to a black beach and doing a glacier hike, but the weather just wasn’t going to allow it. I obviously can’t speak on whether or not the planned experience would have been better than what we did today, however, I can say that the things I saw today were still fantastic! We got to see solifluction, the Eyjafjallajökull jökullhlaup, glacial erratics, lateral moraines, more rootless cones, the largest effusive eruption on earth in the last 1200 years, pahoehoe and aa lava flows and got to see a place where a valley is being made to learn about valley formation.

We didn’t get too many cultural experiences today. But we did stop at the Black Beach Restaurant where I tried turnip soup, it tasted like hot baby food, not bad but not great. Let me tell you about these fries though, don’t let anyone bully you for portion sizes in America. I wanted a little side of fries and they basically brought me a bucket! Dr. Barineau and Jacob had to help me eat them.

We did get out of the car once today though. There was one of the historic sod houses on the side of the road. It was like the TARDIS, I didn’t think a person could fit in them, but they were massive on the inside! This hotel is super nice though, this is my first private bathroom on this trip. Overall, while day three didn’t go to plan, it was still fantastic!

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