There IS such a thing as bad weather!

For those of you expecting a fantastic Iceland landscape picture today I apologise. This picture shows the colourful roofs of the houses in Reykjavik taken from the tower of the cathedral. The reason for this non-landscape picture will become clear shortly.

Yesterday I mentioned the adverse weather that we expected. We are staying in a self-contained lodge separate from our hotel and during the night we were woken by wind noise and hammering rain the likes of which we have never heard before. We were seriously concerned that the roof would blow off. The glass windows were actually bulging in visibly with the wind gusts.

It turned out that the wind speed had been a steady 30m/s with gusts of 50m/s (110mph). This is greater than Beaufort scale 12 i.e. hurricane strength! Since there are no trees to speak of in Iceland they take this sort of wind in their stride and there was very little damage evident.

This morning it was clear that our plans to visit The Golden Circle would have to be put on hold and the hotel actually advised us not to go out in the car. However, we ignored them and had a day visiting an interesting museum about Icelandic Sagas and the city of Reykjavik.

Photo opportunities were therefore somewhat limited so I am posting this picture as the best of the bunch. Reykjavik cathedral was lovely but Technophobe blipped that.

The Golden Circle trip has been rescheduled to tomorrow