Trouble Brews

Day 5

The day began like any other, then quickly took a turn for the worse when plans for breakfast and coffee were delayed…  Truthfully, if this is the least of our worries, we are doing great :)  Anyway, we packed up the car and the tent and drove on out of Skaftafell, continuing the journey east.  It began raining (as usual) on the drive out, and soon a rainbow appeared in the sky.  At about this moment the most picturesque scene imaginable appeared, the full arc of a vibrant rainbow perfectly spanning a glacier… picture it… imagine it… because no I did not stop for a picture. 

The first stop was Jokulsarlon, a glacial lagoon at the foot of the Breidamerkurjokull glacier, an offshoot from the Vatnajokull glacier.  This is actually where they filmed Die Another Day.  They froze the lagoon (don’t ask me how, or why they didn’t just wait until winter or visit Greenland instead) and blew up six Aston Martins, or so my guidebook tells me.  Anyway, we didn’t blow anything up.  Just walked around, took some pictures, spotted a harbor seal, and found a measly cup of coffee.

Jokulsarlon

They have ice.  I eat ice.

ice ice baby

We had hoped to make breakfast at this stop, but the wind whipping through would have made cooking anything rather difficult…  So instead we split a cliff bar and continued on the drive with a still semi-grumpy Emily.

On the drive towards Hofn

An interesting statue.
The plaque next to it was written in Icelandic
so I have no idea what it says

About 2 hours later we arrived in Hofn (pronounced like an unexpected hiccup – say ‘hup’ while inhaling) <-- font=""> no joke.  And found a place for lunch!  We had lobster pizza, and no I did not take a picture of that either, but I can attest that it was delicious!

Hofn means "harbor" in Icelandic.
There were hundreds of Arctic Turns!

A cool statue

The best sign of all time.

Hofn was the farthest East that we made it, from there we turned the car around and back tracked along Ring Road (Highway 1) to one of the southernmost towns, Vik, where we camped for the night.  Along the way back we stopped at a farm to get ice cream, saw more glaciers, and checked out the ocean side of Jokulsarlon.

A church near our ice cream stop

Aidan took a turn behind the wheel

Glaciers glaciers everywhere!

Standing by the ocean, looking up the river into Jokulsarlon

The ice found it's way to the ocean

Emily found her way to the ice :)

Ice on the beach

Jokulsarlon

Continuing westward, we passed the interesting spectacle below.  Apparently it was once thought good luck to place a stone here, I don’t remember why.  But now there is a whole pile and I took a picture of it.

We pulled into the campsite at Vik pretty late in the evening.  The rain stopped for about 6 minutes, long enough to quickly put up the tent and get the stove lit to start the pasta we would be having for dinner.  About as soon as the water started boiling the stove started having issues, and I assumed we were running low on fuel.  Unfortunately we didn’t have a back up canister because we were traveling near places we would be able to purchase more, assuming we needed it at a reasonable hour.  Worried, I took the pasta off the stove, hoping it would still cook while the water cooled, and put on the sauce and meatballs to heat up with what remaining fuel we had.  If you haven’t figured this out already, words in Icelandic are about impossible to decipher, and so neither Aidan nor I knew that we had bought teriyaki meatballs to add to the tomato sauce…  Dinner was… edible.  Barely.

The end.