Europe

Yes, you read right. Europe! The day following Josh's graduation we drove back to Utah, only to leave for a celebratory trip to Europe a day later. I still can't believe how blessed we were to pull off such an amazing trip.

We spent three weeks total touring four countries. First we stopped off in Iceland for 5 days. (If you ever get the chance, do it.) Iceland Air lets you extend your layover up to seven days at no extra charge so we took full advantage. The people were awesome and so was the country. After landing we rented a beater car and drove to the Blue Lagoon (a geothermal spa) to recoup from our red eye. It was a great way to introduce ourselves to the smell of Iceland. :) Also very relaxing, and supposedly good for our skin, though I'm not sure I noticed any differences after smearing the magical mud all over my face.

Then we drove out to our first home away from home. We stayed in a cute little guest house located on an awesome farm just up the road from some amazing waterfalls that we got to explore in the following days. This was the view.

And these were the sites we saw the next few days.

(The falls down the road from us.)

(The falls further south east)

(The amazing glacier lagoon even farther east. We have even more amazing pictures taken by Katherine Loveless who also took our wedding pictures. I'm pretty confident we will have a giant one of them in our house soon enough. :) These will have to do for the blog though. I'm lazy.)

I love this picture. Look at those EYES I get to gaze into. :)

(This is a second glacier we technically shouldn't have driven to because of our rental car, but we did so anyway. It was quite an exciting road, but well worth it.)

(11:00 PM on the beach. It was definitely hard getting to bed on time with the almost constant sun in Iceland.)

Yes. This actually happened. 

I told Josh one of the things I really wanted to do in Iceland was ride an Icelandic pony and he obliged, though I know he wasn't as thrilled as I was. Then it actually turned out to be one of his favorite things we did! And I loved it too of course. The ponies were SO awesome and actually had some life in them, unlike most horses you rent who are all too ready to be made into glue. They would have run the whole way if we'd let them, and when our guide finally did tell us we could let them run the rest of the way home they took off, my horse whinnying the whole way. It was a blast. :)

Ridem' cowboy.

And they were super cute.

I always have to stop and say hello to the puppies. I can't remember this puppy's name, but it meant "odd one out." Fitting, since he lived with ponies.

PS. The day on ponies was WINDY. (You may have noticed our fabulous outfits. They were totally worth it,  because had we not used them we would have been freezing.) On the way back to our guest house we passed these waterfalls...or should I say waterflies? It was so windy none of the water was actually touching the ground, and it was a lot of water!

One of our stops was to see a "cave." Directions said to walk through this sheep field and follow the path to the "cave." There was no such cave. At least we couldn't find it. I didn't mind though. Truthfully this was one of my favorite parts of the trip because we ended up just running around the field like dorks pretending to be a sheep and a pony. The scenery was amazing with huge cliffs, waterfalls, and streams running through the grassy hills, and we had a blast just being weird together.

After our adventures on the south of the island we moved camp to another guest house a little more north and got to spend two days looking out at this.

Then we did some more touristy things, like driving to Gulfoss, (which is the largest waterfall on Iceland) Geysir, (which is just that, a geyser. You can actually stand close enough that the water lands on you.) and also took part in a free walking tour of downtown Reykjavik. 

Icelanders believe in Elves. Look it up. If you look closely enough at the rock, aka elf house, next to our tour guide you can see a rectangular shape. That's the elf house door.  And the other pic is just a weird statue.

Crazy pagan church that I believe Lutherans now use? As I came to find out, most European churches are very impressive looking, but also kind of creepy inside. They're a wee bit obsessed with skulls and devil images.

And thus ends the Iceland portion of our trip. I think I'll take a break now before you're overloaded with pictures, and post about the rest of our trip later. For now, enjoy!