Christmas In Iceland 2023 - Part Three, 26-29 Dec (Urriðafoss, Skálholt, Krýsuvík, Fagradalsfjall)

This video is the third and last of our holiday in Iceland in December 2023. It covers the four days from the 26th December (Boxing Day) until the 29th December.

We stayed at the Hotel Örk in Hveragerði in Iceland over the Christmas period. It had snowed heavily over night on Christmas Day so there was a lot of snow laying on the morning of Boxing Day, 26th December. Due to the snow, we decided to have another walk around the local area, which is always a nice walk anyway, but particularly lovely with all the fresh snow. It really was excellent and definitely one of our best Boxing Day walks ever! :) After our walk I decided to go for a swim in the hotel swimming pool. The pool is geothermally heated so was lovely and warm and made a great contrast to the freezing air temperatures outside.

The weather improved slightly on the 27th Dec, so we went for a drive to a waterfalls that actually wasn't too far, but that we had never visited before. It was the Urridafoss Waterfall which was lovely. We love going to little places like this, that your average tourist bus doesn't visit, so it's great to just be able to take in the gorgeous views by ourselves.

From there, we then stopped off at Skálholt Cathedral (Skálholtsdómkirkja). This is a fantastic building and the reconstruction of a building next to it is also great to see (Þorláksbúð). I flew the drone around the building to get some aerial shots and photos. It all looked lovely with the snow laying on the ground.

After we had finished there, we drove back towards Hveragerði, but stopped off at a little church (Kotstrandarkirkja) that used to be on the main 1 road, but is now a little bit off the track to get to. It was actually the very first place that we saw the Northen Lights on our first trip to Iceland a few years ago. The light was rapidly fading, but was still glorious, so I decided to fly the drone around to get some Sunset shots.

On the 28th Dec, we drove down to the Krýsuvík area and had a lovely walk around the Seltún Geothermal Area. This isn't a big area, but still worth stopping to take a look if you are passing. From there, and just up the road, we stopping in a little area to take in the views across the Kleifarvatn lake. The light was brilliant and the water was really still, so this really did look fantastic and I took a few photos and once again flew the drone to get some aerial footage and photos.

When we got back to the hotel, we had a late afternoon dip i the hotel hot tub, which was a lovely way of relaxing after our various walks of the day.

On the 29th we drove down and stopped at the Fagradalsfjall parking area. This parking area was made for the first of the current series of volcanic eruptions back in 2021. There have been various eruptions in the area since then, and it's a still a great place to go for a walk and viewing the still cooling lava. It was also very close to the eruption that happened just a week or so before we visited. Once we hiked up the hill, we actually had a great view across not only the old lava, but also the new lava that was literally only days old!

After a lovely hike, we then made our way down to our last hotel stay at Garður where we would stay our last night before flying home the next day.

All in all, we had the most amazing time over the Christmas period with our stay in Iceland. It was generally much busier than we expected in the more well known tourist hotspots. In fact, Gulfoss was the busiest we had ever seen it on Christmas Day!

We will definitely be back in Iceland again. In fact, our next trip is already booked for March 2024, but it would be great to spend another Christmas there at some point in the future, as we did love having a proper White Christmas :)

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Thanks for watching!

Steve & Amanda
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