Valentine’s Day, we drove out to Snæfellsjökull National Park on the end of the peninsula.
Lots of frozen waterfalls!
Quick stop for some pastries in Ólafsvík!
Snæfellsjökull is a 700,000-year-old glacier-capped stratovolcano made famous by the novel Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, in which the protagonists find the entrance to a passage leading to the center of the earth on Snæfellsjökull.
We saw a sign for volcano cave tours, and that sounded awesome, so we bought tickets.
We descended down into the lava tubes created by a volcanic eruption in the nearby Purkholar crater. As the surface lava from the eruption came into contact with the cooler air, it turned to rock, while the lava underneath continued to flow away, leaving a lava tube cave behind.
At the deepest we were around 35 meters beneath the surface of the earth.
After the tour we drove over to Malarrif Lighthouse.
The waves crashing against the basalt cliffs was pretty awesome.
The volcanic beach was made up of black stones—ranging in size from marble to golf-ball size—that had been smoothed by tumbling around in the waves.
The sounds of the stones in the waves was deafening!
We started to hike toward the Lóndrangar basalt pillars…
…but decided we were too cold, wet, and tired. Then we saw a zipline, right there in the middle of nowhere!
Finding a playground zip line on our international trips has become a tradition!