I don’t sleep very well when sitting up, so I was bleary eyed when I exited the plane in Reykjavik Iceland at 6:30am local time. The proceeding days had been anything but restful. My quick trip to speak at a tech conference in Manhattan was capped with long delays (thanks LaGuardia) that got me back home at 4am, just in time for a quick nap before a 10am flight the following morning, right back to Manhattan en route to Iceland.

The Reykjavik airport is a great reflection of the current state of Iceland. A country of 330,000 residents has been seeing nearly 7 million tourist visitors per year. The airport is chaotic and feels disorganized, but they are trying hard.

Day 1 was the only day of the trip that was fairly well planned. We expected to arrive tired and wanted to minimize decision making. We made our way to the rental car (one sentence that took 2 hours) and set off to explore the Golden Circle, Iceland’s #1 touristy drive.

First up on the circle was Pingvellier National Park, which sits on the mid-atlantic bridge between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. The plates pull apart at a rate of roughly 2.5cm/year. While it sounds small, its geologically significant. There are some well-made hiking trails through the area that allow you to explore the fissures formed from these tectonic movements.

Next along the drive is the Haukadalur geothermal area, famous for two geysers called Geysir and Stokkur. Queue the sulfur and flies.

Stokkur erupts every few minutes. If wars were fought with cameras, the crowd around this geyser rival the great empires of history.

The immediate area was roped off, but you were able to have a front-row “seat” for the consistent eruptions, which shot hot water  15-20 meters into the air. There were better eruptions, but my phone and camera batteries both conveniently died right when we arrived, so this is all I have.

Escaping the sulfur and flies – which really were not that terrible – we headed to our third stop, which I was most excited about: the Gullfoss Waterfall.

There are a few short trails around the area, all of which are worthwhile to get different perspectives on the enormous waterfall.

Gullfoss was the northern terminus of our trip, so we headed back south down a different road. Along the way, you pass Kerio, which is a colorful, volcanic crater lake.

Kerio requires an entrance fee of 400isk / person. At this point, it had been about 24 hours since I had slept normally, so I was not thrilled. That said the picture is pretty cool so I will leave the judging to you.

At this point, the golden circle was complete and food and sleep were the priorities. We got our first gas station hot dogs and a coke. Iceland drinks more Coke per capita than any country in the world. Because of the pure water and real sugar, some say its the best Coke as well. I have not been everywhere yet, but I will say its quite good and definitely better than what I find in Coke’s home city of Atlanta.

We headed south towards Skogar, a roughly 2-hour drive which felt like 12 considering the lack of sleep. As we neared Skogar, we saw a huge waterfall called Seljalandsfoss off to the right. What the heck.. we stopped to check it out.

You can actually hike behind Seljalandsfoss and get a cool view of the surrounding area through the falls. Those emerging were completely soaked so we elected to pass. There was a giant and extremely steep hill to the right of the falls though. I decided that running up to was a good idea and jogged my way to the top where I found a cave. From there, a 5 minute scramble got you to the level equal to the top of the falls.

At this point, a second or third wind had kicked in and I wasn’t really tired anymore.

Right across from the town of Skogar was a huge field of purple flowers. We would see this all over Iceland, but the range of bright colors against the dark and cloudy sky and green mountains was pretty amazing.

We checked into our hostel and got settled. We decided to just eat dinner there so that we didn’t have to drive again.

After dinner, we still were not smart enough to sleep, so we drove down the road a few miles and hiked to a geo-thermally heated swimming pool thats in a valley in the middle of nowhere. It was apparently built to teach Icelanders to swim long ago. The pool is literally built into the side of the mountain, which is pretty cool. It only gets cleaned once a year and its saturated with algae (I ended up throwing out the swimsuit afterwards), but it was pretty warm and was a great experience. There were 15 or so others that had the same idea.

We stayed the night at Hostel Skogar, right next to Skogafoss, another huge waterfall that we would explore the next day. Good, functional accommodation… and after nearly 30 hours with sleep, it could have been an airplane seat (but thank God it wasn’t).

Yes, this was all Day One.