Day 3. July 30. Reykjavik.

Overview.  Days spent walking in a town, rather than driving around must be present in any itinerary, because too many back-to-back long driving trips are exhausting. So, our third day is a "stay in town" day, in anticipation of a three day marathon around West and North of Iceland. Morning was the Settlement Museum, afternoon - walking around downtown, late afternoon - thrift stores (yes, thrift stores), and in the evening, the three out of four of us went to the top of  Hallgrimskirkja before heading home.  This report is significantly shorter than the previous one.

Weather. Collaborated somewhat. Morning was very dull and grey, with leaden skies that reflected and diffused all the light and made it hard to take nice photos. Afternoon added some rain to it while we were driving. But evening was beautiful   with the skies clearing just enough to create beautiful spotlights just in time for  the golden hour.  The temperatures stayed around 15 Celcius most of the day, although in the afternoon the car was showing (quite without any support) about 25 Celcius. Like yesterday reported high of 33 degrees Celcius, I do not believe those numbers. 

The Settlement Museum.  We took our time getting out of the house, and parked downtown around 10:40am. Took a leisurely stroll from the parking garage to Old Town (Centre City), walked past the Allthing building (old building, the size of a good mansion or a small palace with a modern annex), and found the Settlement Museum at the end of the street. We were five minutes late for a tour, but the museum is organized in a way that allowed us to catch up with the tour, so we spent about 40 minutes following the guide around the space. 

Allthing: the parliament house.

The Settlement Museum

The museum itself is organized around a longhouse dig smack in the middle of Reykjavik. The house was part of a farm that stretched between the sea and a small lake, that used to be a lagoon. The longhouse is fascinating. The guide was discussing things I already knew from reading about the history of Iceland, but the younger kid did not know too much about the Settlement, so it should have been educational for him. The museum has a nice 3d reconstruction of how the house would have looked like, layer by layer. Watching this, and walking around the longhouse and looking at the artifacts dug out -- not too many -- the longhouse was abandoned after about 80 years of use, was great. 

Due to how lighting is organized inside the museum, it is difficult to get a nice shot of the entire longhouse. This and the next picture are probably the best ones I could get.

Portion of the  longhouse.

Some of the excavated goods: an axe, a key, an arrowhead, and some fishhooks.

More excavated goods, including some glass buttons.

Reykjavik. After the museum, everyone else went for coffee, while I went to a small building next door (Reykjavik's oldest surviving building, I think) and saw a small exhibition of photographs from 1918.

The 1918 photo exhibit hall rumored to be the oldest standing building in Reykjavik (note, there is a modern annex behind it as well).

Pictures of pictures #1: Reykjavik in 1918.

Pictures of pictures #2. Reykjavik in 1918.

Pictures of pictures #3: Reykjavik in 1918.

  I then rejoined the family at a coffee shop off Ingolfur Square. We then walked past the closed flea market (open on Saturday - that's our morning destination for that day), and through the streets of Old Town returned back to Laugavegur and walked it all the way to the other end, where, among other things, live vinyl shops, coffee shops, Shawarma King (where we had our lunch), a store called Kvartyra #49  (clothing boutique run by a Russian expat and her Icelandic husband, selling some Russian fashion), we discovered something called The Icelandic Museum of Phallology, which is, yes, all about penises. The older kid read that it is a "legit" museum, and they have an entire whale penis in their collection.  

Retro Reykjavik

Kvartyra No 49 selling Sputnik 1985 sweaters.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum.

Thrift stores. There are a couple of actual thrift stores (rather than second-hand clothing shops) at the end of Laugavegur. We have learned that some of the best souvenirs about the places we visit can be had for pennies on the dollar in the thrift stores, so they are now part of a usual city crawl. In the Red Cross store on Laugavegur I found a nice ceramic tile depicting the Thingvallir church.   Inspired, we looked up the addresses of a couple more places outside the downtown course, and at around 4pm (time flies like crazy), set out of downtown to find them. The first store, ABC, was impressive - large, with excellent selection of stuff. I got a framed picture of a fishing trawler, and the older kid quite literally mined some pins of Iceland from a large and otherwise boring box with bijouterie. The second store was part of a mini-mall, and not that interesting.

Music store. The older kid looked up a music instrument store  Tonastothin, close to downtown, and the younger kid hearing that got interested. So, we got there about 25 minutes before closing. The place has a really good selection of Gretch guitars, but no Fenders of Gibsons (they have some good-looking Epiphones though).  The younger one looked at their selection of trumpets, and then approached one of the sales people about a mouthpiece. Turned out, the person approached was a trumpet player himself. He pulled out the mouthpieces, and for a few minutes the younger one was trying them out, eventually settling on a 3C piece from England, that we got a massive price break on. The kid also looked at trumpets - there are some nice inexpensive ones there.

The Tower. Final stop along the way today was the tower of  Hallgrimskirkja. I only found out in the morning that one could go up there.  The older kid stayed on the ground, the remaining three of us went up, I got a chance to snap a few hundred pictures of sweeping panoramas. Olga and the younger kid left earlier and went to discover local ice cream (score - they have something called Extreme Farmer's Cream, which is what it sound like - it's Icelandic analogue of Coldstone's Sweet Cream, and Britain's Clotted Cream ice creams). 

Views of Reykjavik  and beyond.

 In the meantime, I took my time with the pictures, and then took a few outside of the cathedral, just as the golden hour sun started shining its spotlights on the tower. The pictures of the cathedral, and of the statue in front of it have gotten much better.

Leif Eriksson properly lit.

Spotlight shines on Helgrimskirkja.

Golden hour did not disappoint.

And that's just it. Walked to the car, drove home, where I collapsed until the wee hours of morning.

Driving. Some trivial amounts of back and forth - probably about 40 km around town.

Walking.  Google fit claims 14,094 steps - another good day of walking.

Day 4 plan.  We are driving to Akureyri all day. The plan currently calls for exploring the waterfalls and caves around Reynholt, and a stop at Reykholt.  We can then hit some coastal areas out west on our way back.