You are Iceland. And here's 5 reasons why you are crazy cool.

1. You are crazy cool because you really like to swim.

And if all of my pools were kept at 96 degrees, I'd freaking swim every day too!

We ended our first day in Reykjavik at the local pool. The sports complex was in an area that was so lousy with natural hot springs that women used to walk out to the valley there to do their washing. Now there's a modern swimming complex there. (Along with some other sports facilities, including a soccer stadium. In fact, when we went swimming, there was actually a soccer match going on and we could hear the cheering from the pool.)

There were strict rules about no cameras in the changing and shower area, along with strict rules about showering (with no bathing suit) before entering the pool and then being completely dry before leaving the showering area to return to the changing area, which kinda made it impossible for me to shower and then go get my camera. But here's an artist's rendering I found on a poster outside the changing area.

The pools are geothermally heated outdoor pools, of course. There was an indoor lap pool, but since this was a typical summer day - about 55 degrees and cloudy - naturally the indoor pool was closed. As soon as you go outside there is a good sized relaxing area with water at about 100 degrees, where everyone was gathered. Behind that, there was a large pool for splashing around and "cooling off" with water about 96 degrees and a huge a water slide for the kids. That pool felt like really warm bath water that you could comfortably sit in indefinitely. There was also a small, shallow kiddie pool that wasn't too too hot and then three hot pots for grown-ups (small round jacuzzi looking pools but no bubbles) that were 100 degrees (38 C), 104 degrees (40 C) and 107 degrees (42 C) respectively. Naturally there were only like two very large and very hearty looking Icelanders in the hottest pool. The coolest of the hot pots was completely full, so, because we were too cold standing in our wet bathing suits in the 50 degree weather to do the celcius/fahrenheit calculation, we hopped right into the 40 degree hot pot. When you enter water that warm from the cold, it feels like the water is literally burning your skin off. Once you settle in though, it's merely horribly hot. We pathetic continental dwellers only lasted about 4 minutes and then we had to get out and cool off again in the main pool. After an hour and half of sitting around in the various pools, we were so relaxed, we felt like we were made of jello, all loosey goosey and go with the flow. It was niiiiiice. I could certainly get used to ending every day like that.

2. You are crazy cool because you know what this means:

"I don't speak Icelandic" tourist t-shirt

The next day was a rainy day. It was also a Sunday. Both of which put the kybosh on walking around town and doing some souvenir shopping. So we went to the mall. The mall was pretty much like any mall, until we went to the food court and there it was, all over the place...

...the Icelandic language. It looks wacky. It sounds wacky. And I love it! I don't understand it, but I love it. What makes it look really crazy, even though most of the letters are the same, is the fact the Icelanders don't allow any English or latin-based words to creep into their language. No "radio" or "telephone" for them; it's útvarp and sími. I'd thought we'd be okay at Domino's but the word Domino's and the word pepperoni were the only ones I recognized. Using the pictures, we managed to piece our order together. I pointed to the giant poster over the counter and ordered - in English, because they all speak perfect English - 2 sneiðar með pepperoni og 0,4 l gos á 550 kr.: 2 slices with pepperoni and 0,4 l soft drink for 550 kroner.

The language is one of the things that makes Iceland so intriguing. Life here looks pretty similar to life as we know it - the food is a little heavy on the fish, but you can get pizza and other foods easily; Reykjavik looks like many other pretty European towns; and the mall is filled with stores with familiar brand names like any other mall - but everything is labeled with this crazy speak. We had the same feeling of what Freud called the uncanny when we first got in the car to tour the countryside: driving is on the right side of the road with all the familiar international road signs, but once you see the landscape, you immediately realize you are not in Kansas anymore.

3. You are crazy cool because under that pale, handsome, and trendy looking exterior, you are still Vikings.

There's no denying that the Icelanders are a good looking people. I've heard that Iceland is very proud of its three Miss World winners, but, honestly, pretty much any Icelandic woman walking around is going to win the title over me! And the men aren't too bad to look at either (at least the younger men!). Modern Icelanders are also an intelligent and peaceful people. Iceland has a 100% literacy rate (and they're reading Icelandic!) and, as we discovered in the National Museum, the only wars they've been involved in were the so-called cod wars with Britain, which involved some maneuvering between Coast Guard and fishing trawlers over how far beyond the coast other lands are allowed to fish. The National Museum had on display the only Icelandic weapon, a sort of hook thing that they could pull along behind a ship to cut the lines off the fishing nets of foreign ships. And these are the direct descendants of Vikings!

We wanted to learn about the real Viking history so after our experience at the mall, we drove to the Saga Museum, which was purported, by my otherwise excellent travel guide, to be a fun stop for kids to learn about the Icelandic sagas. Exciting saga stories, wax figures, what's not to love?

Yikes! Besides this grizzly scene, there was a beheading, a woman burning at the stake, and a family dying of the plague. All in life-like wax figures. Eeek. Both of us felt a little weirded out afterwards and were agreed that we wouldn't be bringing our kids here. But then again, we're not Icelanders. There were Icelandic kids cheerily playing with fake swords in the gift shop as we left. Must have something to do with the ancestry. A few days later, we discovered another saga museum for the faint-hearted like us, the Saga Center, which lies about an hour outside of town.

This is Gunnar, one of the main character's of the best known Icelandic saga: the Story of the burning of Njál (plot spoiler: Njál gets burned alive). Gunnar is one of the main characters of the first part of the saga. He was "a tall man in growth, and a strong man - best skilled in arms of all men....and so it has been said that no man was his match. He was handsome of feature, and fair skinned. His nose was straight, and a little turned up at the end. He was blue-eyed and bright-eyed, and ruddy-cheeked. His hair thick, and of good hue, and hanging down in comely curls." Ooooh, a description worthy of a romance novel. In the exhibit, it literally said, "He looked every inch the warrior." Oh my! Swoon.

We had an audio guide, which wasn't anything but someone reading the large and long info walls aloud. But when we got to the actual story (about 2/3 of the little exhibit), it became this awesome audiobook. The reader was excellent and he made the story exciting and kept it from becoming a giant list of crazy Icelandic names and graphically violent slayings.

So back to Gunnar. Unfortunately, he met Hallgerda, who was so beautiful that he instantly asked to marry her. Too bad he hadn't really taken the time to learn that she had been married twice before, but had had her previous husbands killed by her foster father because they'd slapped her. Poor Gunnar is a good guy, but is constantly getting dragged into battles with others and, because he's every inch the warrior, he ends up killing a lot of people. The lovely but lethal Hallgerda, on the other hand, starts a feud with the wife of Gunnar's best friend, Njál. Lots of people get killed, Gunnar gets mad and, you guessed it, he slaps her. Bad idea. Gunnar is eventually exiled for the various killings on his hands, but he refuses to leave the "fair slopes" of Iceland and while he is fighting off the inevitable horde that has come for justice, this happens...

Naturally, she reminds him of the slap he gave her and says she doesn't care how long he holds out against his attackers. Because he is Gunnar, and every inch the warrior, he manages to hold out a long time without her help, but, in the end, he is finally killed. The saga doesn't even end there. Other folks enter the story and slay each other; murder, revenge, and various sailing journeys ensue. Vikings will be Vikings, after all.

4. You are crazy cool because you use like 80% renewable energy.

That's 40% more than any other country in the world! In Iceland, only the fishing industry and transportation use traditional fossil fuels.

When do you ever travel to a foreign country and think, the first thing we should do is visit a power plant? Only in Iceland!

that's not smoke - it's steam

The most common bus tours from Reykjavik to tour the countryside actually make stops at one of the two power plants just outside of the city. After our weekend in Reykjavik, we were ready to see the natural sites, so we programmed Garmin for Hellisheiði geothermal power plant. (By the way, I seriously recommend having a Garmin if you're going to drive around in Iceland. The car rental places often have them to rent. It's not that there are so many roads, but half the roads don't really look like real roads so it's very reassuring to have Garmin tell you that you are going the right way. However, as we arrived at Hellisheiði, our Garmin thought that we were nowhere!)

you can go through the interactive tour at their website here

At the power plant, they have a lovely visitor's center with several multimedia, interactive presentations explaining how they drill holes to access hot water resources in the ground. When a hole is made, the pressure and heat causes steam to shoot out of the borehole. They capture the steam and direct it right through turbines, which generate electricity. No burning of anything. No smoke and smog. Just steam. Um, well, steam that smells like a million rotting eggs. You see, the water in the earth is full of all sorts of minerals including sulfur, which smells like rotten eggs. So the area around a power plant is green and lush but reeks of sulfur. Now, the water in your shower and bathroom comes from cool ground water, which is used to cool off the hot turbines. That warms the water and voila, bonus free hot water! And by the time it gets to you, it only smells like a large order of boiled eggs. Hooray. It's a small but stinky price to pay for cheap, clean energy.

The reason why the Icelanders can produce all this cheap energy is because they live over hot spots created by the movement of two of the earth's tectonic plates beneath Iceland. The North American and the Eurasian plates are pulling apart from each other right through the middle of the island.

And anywhere this happens, the movie tells us, these cute little volcanoes form along with magma intrusions into the crust down below. That heats up the water under the earth's surface and all you have to do is build a power plant on a big lava field, drill some holes in the right spots, hold your nose, and run some pipes out to the happy, smiling customers. Well, they understand the details.

5. You are crazy cool because you're always full of surprises.

After visiting the power plant, we ventured out into the Icelandic wilderness. We passed through the rocky lava fields and then the horizon suddenly opened up onto a beautiful, green valley, full of agriculture.

view from the lava fields of the Hellisheiði area down to the plains around the town of Hveragerði

It was very windy up here taking this picture. I had to wear my super touristy Iceland hat. There aren't really trees here, so there's always quite a bit of wind. Just as we were getting used to the lovely, green valley, the landscape quickly changed again and we entered a bushy sort of area, with little houses built low to the ground, as if they were hiding from the wind beneath the bushes. We stopped on a little side road rest area to take this picture.

Then we turned around and noticed a bench behind us facing the other direction.

What could be over there? Oh, this old thing? That's a 6,000 year old volcano crater. Just something we have lying around.

this thing is huge, over 250 feet deep - if you look close, you can see a couple who climbed down to the bottom by the water

Kerið crater is the remnant of one of twelve volcanoes that produced the big lava fields in the area. Most of the remains are low-lying and covered with vegetation now, but this one was just sitting around waiting to be discovered.

And that's what Iceland is like. On the way to see one thing, you find something else just as spectacular. Our first day out in the countryside had us getting out of the car constantly, discovering things, taking pictures, then hopping back and saying, "now, that was something!"

And that's why Iceland is crazy cool.

Stay tuned all this week for more posts about our trip to Iceland!