Mental Detours: Iceland

Wednesday we had breakfast in the hotel, and headed out to Iceland's south coast. When we got to the car I realized I forgot to prepay for morning parking (it's free overnight until 9 am) and found a parking ticket on my windshield. I went back to the hotel desk to find out how what to do about the ticket. I was told I could pay it at a nearby bank and that the fine would be less if I paid it the same day. So I found my way to the bank and paid my parking fine. Consequently we got a late start on our sightseeing.

Once we got on our way we went to see the Keldur turf houses which are some of the oldest houses in Iceland. When we arrived we were greeted by a bunch of cows. They mooed at us and I mooed back. We reached the turf houses and were given a brief talk about them then were allowed to walk around and look inside the old buildings. There was also a small chapel with a cemetery. We noticed many of these small chapels around Iceland's countryside. The graves in the cemetery were interesting in that they were all covered by a small mound.

After the turf houses we decided we would drive to our farthest point of interest and stop at the others as we worked our way back. So we drove first to the black sand beach at Vik. This beach was a little tricky to find, but worth it. It's a wide beach of fine black sand, bordered on one end by basalt sea stacks. It was a scenic spot for pictures.

We left the beach and drove next to the Dyrholaey arch and bird sanctuary. The area is supposed to be a good place to see puffins, but we were not fortunate enough to see any. We did see the amazing arch and plenty of other birds. A short distance away from the parking area is a high bluff with a gravel road up to the lighthouse. We saw cars going up and down so we decided to try it. The road was better suited to SUVs and not our Toyota Corolla, but we made it to the top and were rewarded with a fantastic view of the surrounding area, the Dyrholaey arch, and yet another black beach that stretched on for miles.

Our next destination was Skogafoss falls. The drive was amazingly scenic. We stopped at the Solheimajokull glacier and walked up the path to get a closer look. The glaciers are very old, and look dirty from all the volcanic ash they have collected over the years. You can book tours that let you climb the glacier. We saw some people returning from such a tour.

We proceeded on to the Skogafoss waterfall. Skogafoss is huge and you can get as close to it as you dare. I dared to go about 50 feet from the crashing water and got pretty wet just from the spray. After leaving Skogafoss we drove to the Seljalandsfoss waterfall. On the way we stopped near the base of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that erupted in 2010 and stopped European air traffic for 6 days. We took pictures but the top of the volcano was not visible due to cloud cover.

We continued on to the Seljalandsfoss waterfall. At Seljalandsfoss you can also get very close, and if you want you can actually walk behind the falls. We saw a number of people do that, but the path behind the falls looked wet and slippery. Lacking good footwear we thought it best to stay on the front side. Although Skogafoss and Seljalandsfoss are named waterfalls that are popular tourist stops, we also saw many other beautiful waterfalls just driving down the road.

Our weather had been nice all day but it was raining by the time we got to Seljalandsfoss. We were getting hungry and worried that we'd get back to Reykjavik too late to eat so we stopped at a local restaurant along the way home. I had a cheeseburger that wasn't too bad. Janet's chicken nuggets however were pretty bad. Even I didn't like them. At least the fries were edible.