For our 3rd day, we spent the day in the vicinity of our friend’s cabin, and did a few short hikes around.
In the morning, we went for a hike around the Hreðavatn lake, uphill to get a view of the lake and the surroundings, and then up to a cascade between basalt columns, very pretty.
Not far from there, there’s the Glanni waterfall, which we had seen 9 years ago, and which is still very pretty and impressive too!
By then it was lunch time, we made some pizzas (and saw our first Ooni oven in the wild 😀 ), played a game of SCOUT, and then everyone was feeling kind of in the mood for a nap, so we took some quiet time (I read a bit, I caught up on Mastodon, that sort of things.)
After the nap, we went for another stroll to the nearest lake, picking some flat stones on the way to skip stones there (which did happen, but not for me, because I don’t know how to skip stones 😛 )
We walked back to the cabin, had dinner, played a few more games (Innovation, Decrypto and Skull King – Decrypto was really good!), and then we put a map on the table, explained our itinerary and where we were stopping, and got all the places we could and should see along the road.
Another good day – and the weather was far more pleasant than yesterday, there was some sun and a much clearer view on everything!
We didn’t have a very precise plan for the beginning of the day today; we had plans for the middle/late afternoon, though, but we kind of made plans as we went before then.
Pierre went for a run before breakfast; he came back and pondered whether he wanted to have something more than his shorts in the current weather. We decided we’d go have a look and that it would be one of our morning missions.
But first, breakfast – fairly unremarkable (quite good though, and surprisingly good bread), apart from the tiny shelf of board games that Pierre noticed:
A Fortnite Monopoly and an Axis&Allies box: some choices have been made, but it’s unclear how 😛
After breakfast, we went to Ice Wear to try to find running leggings for Pierre, and we found something! Interestingly, this is the same shop chain where he had bought a beanie hat 9 years ago (and he’s still traveling with this hat 🙂 )
Then it was time to go and explore. We knew there was a lighthouse not very far, so we went to see the lighthouse; however, we didn’t know that the lighthouse wasn’t accessible at high tide, and… low tide was 5 hours before we arrived.
We still got our first selfie, and it’s a lighthouse selfie, as it should be, even if the lighthouse is a bit far away.
We could have gone for a walk from there, but we decided to start from a bit further away as I’m not entirely confident in my right knee these days (so let’s not fuck it up from the start…); we drove a bit further away to go for a small loop around the nearby golf. It was pretty nice, some sea all around, flat terrain, good stuff. And a hilarious sign at the beginning of the loop, saying essentially “you can relax here, you should hurry here because golf balls fly in this and that direction” 🙂
After that walk, we decided to go to the open air museum on the other side of Reykjavik: it’s a museum where they moved old houses and made a few exhibitions around, mostly, “life in Iceland from the 19th century to now” – there was a lot of neat stuff, and the work on the museum and the exhibitions was very well done.We also saw one of the (as far as we understand) two locomotives that ever were in Iceland (there are no trains here), which was an unexpected bonus!
We had plans to go see the nearby park/canyon/river, but eventually decided against it as we were quite tired already and the rain started pouring quite heavily.
But, this is where our mid-afternoon plans were starting too! We’re spending a couple of days at our friends’ summer house an hour away from Reykjavik 🙂 We made plans to meet around the local board game shop, Nexus (very nice shop, by the way – good and diverse selection), we went for a bit of grocery shopping (and we got some travel snacks for ourselves), and we arrived in the early evening at said summer house.
We chatted a bit, had dinner, played a couple of board games (Harmonies and Forest Shuffle, both good in different ways!), and it’s now time for bed, for more adventures in the area tomorrow!
Last year I wrote my Denmark travel log as I was traveling, and it was a pretty good experience – apart from the fact that writing on a phone is miserable. I’m still writing on a phone, but I added a BlueTooth keyboard to the mix – this should help!
Do not necessarily expect pictures in these posts, as I’m mostly using my DSLR and I’ll process stuff when I come home; but maybe the occasional selfie will still happen here 🙂
Anyway, the first day was mostly a travel day – we left home at 11, spent significant time in the airport because our flight was at 2PM and security was a breeze (the security person made appreciative noises at my camera 😁). We had lunch, we boarded the plane, and we landed in Keflavik after what felt like a long (4 hours) but completely uneventful flight.
Last time we were in Iceland was 9 years ago and we remember the feeling that the airport was under strain, especially in the car renting area; this time around it felt far more streamlined. We had the bad surprise to see that our car had been reserved for 2 days rather than 12; we decided to pay for the difference and handle it with our travel agency (which handled it swiftly) – good thing we could actually do this, it wasn’t a trivial amount of money!
After this small kerfuffle, we took the car from Keflavik to Reykjavik, where we had our first hotel. And, it turns out we have friends in Reykjavik, so we met with them for a small stroll in the city center, followed by an excellent dinner at Monkeys – great food and great company, what more can you ask for!
We ended the day with another stroll around the water, with the hope of digesting a bit (food was great, I had a bit too much of it ˆˆ;). It didn’t completely work – I had a fairly hard time falling asleep after that, and the couple of leg cramps that I attributed to plane and dehydration didn’t help either. But, overall, for a travel day, it worked well, and we did take advantage of our first few hours in Iceland!
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