Jeeohthermuhl

The morning started out rough. The roomie and I were fresh off our Rúntur which meant we caught less than an hour of sleep after getting back to the hotel after 7 am and going to breakfast at 8 am. I went down to breakfast in sweats with my hair still wet looking all kinds of shambles. I loaded up on carbs, juice, and kaffi, and changed in time to meet my group in the lobby at 9:15.

A bus picked up about 20 0f us from our choir for the Golden Circle tour. I made a beeline for the long seat in the back of the bus and passed out. We must have been on the road for a half an hour when we pulled into the parking lot of Hellisheiði geothermal power plant.


I signed the guest book as we entered. We were funneled to a large staircase in the middle of the lobby that served as make-shift seating for tourists. A powerpoint on the plant and how Iceland uses geothermal energy was given in English. Not having any room to sit (and to keep from falling asleep), I walked around the second floor.


There was a cool exhibit towards the back that demonstrated the force of a volcanic eruption with sound. The floor shook as the sound waves did their thing and it was loud (not ideal post-Rúntur, haha). After the powerpoint presentation ended, more people took interest in the sound exhibit I discovered, so I went outside on the terrace. There were large, metal machines and pipes winding there way into the active volcano ridge. When you drive through Iceland, you can see the pipes alongside the road. They're responsible for heating all of Reykjavík! Also, a tid bit I picked up from my oh-so-educational power plant excursion, the pipes are on wheels so they flex in strong weather conditions!


After taking pictures, I went back inside and looked through a large window that showed the internal power plant machinery. There were metal machines everywhere and it too was very loud. It reminded me of the inside of the Little Debbie factory in Stuarts Draft, VA (Organizational Communications class field trip in college. SO LEGIT. After we toured the facility, they gave us boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes that fed me and my roomies for weeks), though not quite as large-scale, and of the turbines at the Hoover Dam, though not quite as big. Be sure to pick up a tiny booklet at the information desk on your way out. It has interesting graphs, charts, and maps of Iceland's geothermal energy usage since 1940 as well as recent energy consumption and plotted locations of geothermal fields around the country.