The sun was rising when we got our first good look at Iceland.

The bus ride from the airport at Keflavik to the capital, Reykjavik, goes along a coast that showed the North Atlantic on one side and a rocky, treeless landscape on the other side. Except for an occasional windblown house perched on one of the folds of land, it was just vast vistas galore.

Thrilling, if you like that kind of stuff, but it also made you wonder: With all that open land, why they couldn’t have built the airport closer to the city?

That, as it turned out, was just the appetizer for some of the wild landscape my daughter and I would see in the next couple of days during a visit that would include peering into a volcano, wrinkling our noses at sulfuric geyser steam, riding Icelandic ponies, snowmobiling on a glacier, lolling in geothermic-heated pools and eating a whalemeat dinner.

What attracted us to Iceland was a tour special offered by Icelandair called “Horses and Hotsprings”: a direct flight from Minneapolis-St.Paul to Iceland, ground transportation, hotel room, a horseback riding tour and a visit to the Blue Lagoon, a thermal spa and tourist must-stop.

Like many 11-year-old girls, my daughter is horse crazy, so the tour sounded like it might be a fun way for us to spend a teachers-conference weekend last fall.

Hot pots and super jeeps

Our first day was free to explore Reykjavik. After checking into our hotel, we grabbed our swimsuits and headed to a nearby swimming complex and indulged in a favorite Icelandic activity: splashing around in water heated by all the geothermic activity under this volcanic hot spot.

We picked the city’s biggest pool, an outdoor complex called Laugardalur, with a 50-meter pool, several smaller pools and a bunch of “hot pots,” the Icelandic version of a hot tub.

Writer Richard Chin and his daughter explore on the ice at the Langokull, Iceland's Long Glacier. The glacier trek was part of a tour offered by Icelandic Adventure and included the best-known natural and historic sites just east of the capital, Reykjavik.

After the mandatory shower, my daughter and I joined a bunch of Icelanders in a collective ahh as we submerged ourselves in the hot water, watching the steam rising into the chilly air around us.

Our next day was consumed by a tour we booked separately from the Icelandair package. Offered by a company called Icelandic Adventure, the tour was basically a circuit of the “Golden Circle,” the best-known natural and historic sites just east of Reykjavik. But instead of buses, the tour company puts passengers on “super jeeps”: four-wheel-drive vehicles with monster truck tires and suspension. That means the tour could also include a trip on some of the god-awful interior roads leading to a nearby glacier.

With just my daughter and me and our driver, Jon Ragmar Hardarson, we motored to Thingvellir, a national park and site of a national assembly established in A.D. 930, believed to be the world’s first democratic parliamentary government. We got spritzed at Gullfoss, or Golden Falls, a two-tiered mass of white water. The geysers at Geysir accommodatingly bubbled, steamed and spewed. We peered over the lip of the extinct volcano crater, Kerio, which has a small lake at the bottom. The acoustics of the bowl are so good that performances are staged with musicians on a boat on the lake, Jon said.

Glacier ponies

But the highlight of the trip occurred when Jon turned the vehicle on the road toward the country’s highland interior toward Langjokull or Long Glacier. The road soon petered out to a jeep track, and the surroundings began to resemble a barren moonscape: rocks, boulders and mountains, but not a single tree or even a blade of grass. Nothing manmade except the road itself.

We eventually reached a hut where we were outfitted with snowmobile suits and joined by three Norwegians also there for a spin on the glacier. The final drive to the edge of the ice was done at a crawl, but it was still so jolting that my daughter’s head kept smacking the side window of the super jeep. Luckily, she was already wearing her snowmobile helmet. “Just don’t break the glass,” I told her.

When we got on the sleds, we tore across the icy plain, obeying our guide’s instruction to stay right behind him.

At one point the guide stopped and pointed out a deep, 12-foot-wide hole melted in the ice, big enough to swallow up a snowmobile but small enough to be hidden until it was too late. My daughter tossed in a chunk of ice; it seemed like a couple of seconds passed before we heard a splash.

“We’ll stay right behind your tracks,” one of the Norwegians said.

The next day started with our horseback riding tour. The small, sturdy Icelandic ponies are renowned for a smooth gait called the tolt, but I was impressed with their friendliness and eagerness to please. They marched cheerfully into the biting wind, and they didn’t immediately look for something to eat or some mischief to get into when we paused to rest. They seemed to genuinely enjoy being with people, even us novice riders.

The wind was still whipping when we got to the Blue Lagoon, which added to the surreal experience of an outdoor soak in the spa’s mineral-rich, milky blue, hot water pond surrounded by black volcanic rock and billowing white clouds of steam.

A statue of Leifur Eiriksson stands in front of the Hallgrimur Church spire that dominates the Reykjavik, Iceland, skyline.

Iceland cuisine

We did some other sightseeing before we had to fly back: the national art gallery, a flea market, a really big church. And oh, yes, there was the whale- meat dinner.

Iceland can be pretty expensive when it comes to food and drink. With only about 285,000 people in the country, the small consumer base means that it doesn’t have the economy of scale that larger countries benefit from. Much of what can be bought has to be imported.

In short, this is the land of the $9 bottle of beer.

So we ate the Icelandic versions of pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers for many of our meals. But one night we decided to splurge on a nice dinner. Jon, our driver, recommended a well-regarded Reykjavik seafood bistro, Thrir Frakkar. The restaurant, it turned out, was the only one in town to continue to serve whale meat while the country abided by an international whaling ban. The owner apparently had stockpiles of frozen pre-banned whale.

I couldn’t resist trying out a fin whale pepper steak. But first I had to endure a scolding from my daughter about what a brutish carnivore I was.

What, I asked her, about that hamburger you had at Geysir? Cows are dumb, she said. Whales, she declared, should not be eaten because they are smart.

I considered asking her about the kind of towering intellect that caused whales to strand themselves on beaches, but then our entrees arrived. Whale, it turns out, is a red meat, like beef, but perhaps richer in flavor. Politically incorrect, maybe, but undeniably tasty.