Epic European Cycle : 2015-05-03 : Golden Circle Tour

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Activity
Type Name Description Service Provider Cost Kms To Date Total Notes Actions
Tour Golden Circle Reykjavik Excursions $0.00
Accommodation
Type Name Service Provider Confirmation Location Cost Notes Actions
Hostel Reykjavik City Hostel Reykjavik, Iceland $0.00 2 nights. $99.40/night


Trip Log

Notes Actions
Brent and I are thinking of ways to be frugal during our travels. The hostel we're staying in has long-term storage. We might be able to find one in Frankfurt that would be cheaper (maybe free?) than putting our bikes into a storage facility for a month. We'll see.

Food is hideously expensive in Iceland. It has made me a lot more aware of every single morsel we've paid for, and I make sure we consume those morsels. We've re-discovered the "Free Food" bins at the hostel, as a potential source of food, rather than as a depository for our leftovers. We scored a couple of nice apples and some chocolate to take along on our tour today. WOO HOO!

At Barbara's encouragement, I think we'll also be dabbling in a little couch surfing during this trip. We're supposed to spend the nights of May 6 and 7 with Pierre in Paris, and Aleyah in Ljubljana towards the end of August.
We did the "Golden Circle Tour" with Reykjavik Excursions today. It was really great. The countryside around here is crazy! Lots of lava beds, glaciers... the weirdness never ends. We saw Gullfoss (waterfall), the active "Strokkur" geyser at Geysir (the namesake of all geysers), and Þingvellir national park where the European plate and the North American plate are pulling away from one another. There are cliffs on the east side where it's the European plate, and on the west side where it's the North American plate, and the space in between. We walked the trail to North America.
As part of the Golden Circle Tour today we visited the Friðheimar greenhouse, which grows amazing organic tomatoes. They import bumblebees from the Netherlands for pollination. We got a good close look at a box of bees and some of them are crazy big! The proprietor, who gave the overview of their operation had a fairly thick accent and a great sense of humor. Funny highlights:
- He said "We don't use any pesticides on our tomatoes"; I heard "We don't use any pasta sauce on our tomatoes"
- He said "The queen produces many babies which come out of her eggs"; I heard "The queen produces many babies which come out of her ass"
- When talking about the bees, he mentioned that they import boxes of 60 bees, including 59 female worker bees and one queen. He says, "The bees work very hard every day to pollinate the tomatoes. When the queen produces babies, though, some of them are man bees, and they don't like to work, so we have to import more bees."


Photos

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