Car rental

We arrived at keflavik airport and were greeted by a cheerful young man delivering our car to us.  There are no rental booths like at other airports.  They just bring you the car.  Going over our agreement he says

1.  You are not covered for gravel.  Damage from gravel.  We say...ok.
2. You are not covered for damage to the undercarriage.  um. ..ok
3.  You are not covered for wind.  WIND?  Yes, like if the wind blows a door off.  Ha ha, we laugh.  Ok. 

As he hands over the keys I ask...is there anything else we should know.  Yes, he says, there may be sheep.  He said this with a smile.

There were sheep!  Everywhere.  Not contained in fenced in areas.  Sheep on the road, sheep on the mountains, sheep everywhere!

As for the wind...it almost happened.  It's hard to tell how windy it is because there aren't any trees. 

Wild life

On safari in Iceland we had some sightings of the wildlife.

Signs

It seems that Icelandic people have a good sense of humour.  We saw all kinds of signs warning us of things we should not do.  Such as, do not use the side of the highway as a toilet.  Here are a few of the signs we saw.

And this one is in the airport building:

Heat wave

It was ridiculously hot here all week.  We were sweltering and overdressed.  Sunburn was a big problem. I have never had such a burn. 

http://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2016/06/23/temperature_records_for_june_in_iceland/

Bathrooms

Three women travelling together spend an inordinate amount of time searching for bathrooms.  In general, bathrooms were very clean in iceland.  They often charge 100 to 200 kr which translates to 1 or 2 dollars so if we paid to get into a museum and used the bathroom for free we felt like we had gotten our money's worth.

Now...the free outdoor bathrooms, on the other hand, were the most disgusting we had ever seen.  First prize goes to the port o lets at Diettofoss waterfalls.  Second prize goes to the toilets at the caves. 
I wouldn't want to be there in august after another million  visitors traipse through.

Volcano

Just went to the center of the earth.

Crater

Climbed a staircase to see a crater. Steph is that speck way down at the bottom. 

Caves

We went into a cave created by lava tubes.  It was a climb down a spiral staircase into darkness.

Sauðárkrókur to Grundarfjörður

Our plan was to see seals at a seal breeding colony, visit the farm where the murders in the book Burial Rites took place and then to drive down to the Snæfellnes peninsula.  We missed the turn off for the seal colony but instead went to Hvammstangi, the seal centre of Iceland.  We stopped in a small coffee shop where we were told the seal breeding colony is on the other side of the peninsula.  We knew that.  Then we asked about the farm.  The man serving the coffee was the GREAT GRANDSON of the man who dug up the bodies of Agnes and the other executed person and dragged them by horse to the farm at Illugastaðir to rebury them at a church!  We felt like we had met Agnes and so skipped the extra hour of driving up to the farm.

This was a long driving day so we decided to take a short cut.  We veered off the Ring Road and ventured on side roads.  We then drove 120km on gravel roads in the middle of nowhere to get to Stykkish, a small town on the Snæfellnes peninsula where the ferry leaves for the West Fjords.  Here is a picture of us at the windy lookout:

Husavik to Sauðárkrókur

Another sweltering day in Iceland.  20c and sunny.  We stopped at godafoss, the waterfall of the gods.  Then on to the big city of the North, Akeyuri, where we had lunch and a walk.  Back on the road we drove over a mountain range, through farmland and ended up here in some unpronounceable town.  Just before getting here we stopped at a turf house that was lived in until 1947.

Husavik day 2 continued

So, the 6 km hike only took us until noon so we had to continue our adventures with a little drive up north to a small museum. It was a lovely old house from 1930 on a family farm.  We had a chance to talk to a local and learned quite a lot from her.  The children are bused to school until age 16 and then they go to boarding school for high school. 

She highly recommended whale watching so...

Husavik day 2

Today was a no travel day.  We started with a 6 km walk up the mountain behind our apartment.  The mountainside is covered In lupin.

Husavik

We checked into a beautiful 3 bedroom apartment in Husavik.  These ducks came to visit outside our door. 

Mud pots

Saw bubbling mud pots today.

Höfn to Egilsstaðir

After a good nights' sleep at the Fosshotel just outside of Hofn, we headed towards the East Fjords, not quite sure how far into the Fjords we would get.  Of course, Paula, being the activity coordinator, forgot to mention her plan to stop in Djupivogur and take a boat out to Papey Island.  Luckily, we arrived just in time for the boat trip which turned out to be a highlight of our time in Iceland!  This was a 4 hour tour out to an Island that was inhabited until 1948, with a maximum of 16 residents at any time.  It is now a puffin sanctuary and our tour guide was very gave us the history of the family who lived there.  The family was from Gimli, Manitoba and they lived there quite isolated from the rest of the world.  We walked around the island for 2 hours finding puffins, eider, guillemots, arctic tern, razobills and I'm sure other birds whose names I can't remember.

These are puffin holes:

It was 5pm by the time we finished this tour so we decided we had to skip the East Fjords and take the shortcut: road 939.  The local at the gift shop assured us it's much faster to take this road rather than the ring road.  Route 939 is a very narrow gravel road that winds through a mountain range.

Coming in the opposite direction we passed hundreds of cyclists competing in the WOW Cyclothon, a 24 hour cycle race around the island.

http://www.wowcyclothon.is/en/

Vik to Hoffn

Icebergs.   Canyon. Puffins. Glaciers. Seal.

Breakfast picnic

We were served breakfast in bed.

Day 3: surprises

Paula going into the secret waterfall. 

Day 3 : Elf evidence

Steph stumbled on an elf suburb. 

Day 2 the golden circle

Well, it's really a triangle.

Day 1, hegchavatalyngatn

We arrived. Drove past lauganvytavetrwn,  bridgamengartnwyllkn, and had breakfast at cafe paris, where paula's egg sandwich turned out to be a grilled cheese sandwich with a runny wobbly egg on top.

Vik to Hofn (expanded)

Upon leaving our B&B in Vik, the owner showed us a map and said we should take road 206 to go to a beautiful canyon.  I pointed out that we did not have an all wheel drive car but she reassured us that the road was for any car.  So we dutifully turned down road 206 which quickly turned into a gravel road and then turned into a 1 lane rocky road down a winding steep mountainside. We weren't covered for gravel or the undercarriage!   At the bottom there were around 20 cars, 2 bathrooms and a path up a hill leading to spectacular views of this canyon.

Continuing east, our next stop was the glacier lagoon where we took a boat ride to get up close to the ice.  The colours were brilliant!

One interesting tid bit we learned was that this was the lagoon used for a Bond movie where they needed to drive on ice.  But the lagoon was not frozen.  So a wall was put in, blocking the passage to the ocean, thus preventing the warmer salt water from entering the lagoon and voila, the lagoon froze and the movie was filmed on the ice.