Enjoying Iceland

What a great view of our car out our tent window and what a way to start our trip!  Oh, wait.  Thankfully our tent held up fantastically and it didn't rain the whole time.  And luckily there was a break in the rain when we set up camp - after a nap in the car.

While we planned on driving along the South-Eastern coast of Iceland during our visit, we weren't sure what day we were going to do it.  The rain helped us make up our minds.  We figured if it was going to rain, we might as well spend the rainy day in the car.  So we packed up our dry gear and wet tent and hit the road.

It was easy to think that we could make good time driving but then we would come across waterfalls, or lava fields, or glacial lakes, or ice-caps and before we knew it we were in the car for eight hours.  Well, maybe not eight hours but how was I to tell, as I still didn't have a watch and it stayed light until almost midnight.

Thankfully, somewhere along the drive the skies gradually parted and the Iceland we were looking for appeared.

From what we had read, Iceland is expensive and if one only has a couple of days to explore, one should stick with the "Golden Circle" and keep with public transportation.  I wouldn't say that this advice was wrong, but if we had exclusively followed it then we wouldn't have gotten the Iceland experience we wanted.

I would also agree wholeheartedly with what I read about needing to spend at least two weeks in Iceland.  Heck, spend a month!  Katie and I both enjoy camping and the outdoors in general, so I might be a bit biased, but we only scratched the surface of what Iceland has to offer.  I will be back.  Oh yes, I will be back.

Anyway, back to our drive.

We stuck to the main highway, highway 1, for our trip.  Now "main highway" means different things to different people.  Most people wouldn't think highways with single lane bridges belong on a "main highway."  Well, there was more than one of these single-lane bridges on this particular highway, and one that was over a quarter mile long, too! 

The landscape was amazing in every sense, and also very difficult to express in words.  At times there were acres upon acres of these purple wildflowers.  We're not sure what they were exactly, but they were stunning.

By now we had driven several hours so when we saw crazy beautiful places we were torn between wanting to finally get to our destination and wanting to take a picture of what we saw.  I think we compromised fairly well.

Our campsite in Hofn was definitely a popular area for travelers, but there's good reason for that:  there's not much else around.  To be fair, though, it was also quite nice.  It had a store, open kitchen area, hot showers, and WiFi (although not for free).

The next morning we awoke to mostly cloudy skies, but that's better than rain!  So we packed everything up and hit the road to re-trace the previous day's route.  We didn't stop as many times for pictures so the majority of the drive was a bit quicker.

Our first major stop for the day was on the "Golden Circle" route at the waterfall Gulfoss.  As you can see, it was impressive.  Not much else to do around it though - a small trail to the falls itself and a restaurant and store.  But because we didn't want to hang out with the crowds, we left after just a while.

Our next stop was Geysir.  Not "geyser Geysir" but Geysir from where the definition of geyser originates.  So that was a nifty piece of history we learned.

From there we made our way back to our first campsite at Thingvellir National Park.

Thingvellir is one of those places that is unlike any other place on earth.  Literally the earth's crust is opening up and leaving crevasses in some places.  Freaking neat! We walked for an hour or so and then headed out for Reykjavik.

Our meanderings in Reykjavik led us downtown and with no real plans we decided to eat at the most popular restaurant in all of Iceland - a hot-dog stand.  We even had to wait in line, in the rain none-the-less.

Now came the time when we headed back to the airport, and where we knew there was some WiFi.  We also had to treat ourselves to an anniversary dinner.  Oh yeah baby, a romantic airport dinner consisting of two Icelandic beers, soup, and a panini.

So that, my friends, was our Iceland experience.  Hopefully not our last Iceland experience.

Now go ahead and click below to check out some other photos we took during our trip:

~ I let Katie do the captioning. :) ~