So this "sunlight all the time" thing got real old, real fast. After dinner last night we tried to go to bed, but were kept up by the sunlight streaming through the cracks between our black-out curtains. Aaron didn't fall asleep until around 1:30 and it was still dusky.
We haven't really taken the time to explain what we've been up to. Long story short, it's a road trip. There's a company called Guide to Iceland that has lots of different tours, and we picked a 9 day self-drive tour around the ring road. They rent a car for you, book all of your hotels, book a bunch of activities, and give you a roughly 40 page itinerary and a bunch of vouchers. It usually takes us a lot of time researching and planning our vacations, but we also don’t like our vacations to be too structured. This let us skip the planning phase, and get straight to the adventure. It also left us with a pretty good amount of flexibility. Given how many of our blog posts begin with some form of “we woke up late today”, we kind of need the flexibility.
Well today was a pretty long leg of our road trip, and there was no pre-scheduled activities, so Kaylea mapped out the next few days and worked on the blog, while Aaron drove. At some point, he got distracted a missed a turn and we ended up on a gravel road where we quickly realized the mistake and turned around. Little did we know, it would not be our last time on a gravel road today. Not by a long shot.
There were no scheduled activities, but the itinerary had a few pages of things we could check out, so we decided to head to some interesting waterfalls. We’ve been chasing a lot of waterfalls on this trip. Kaylea really had to pee, and the places to pee are few and far between. Luckily we found a hot spring resort and restaurant. The WC (water closet) was for customers only but Kaylea managed to talk her way in by pretending we might eat at the restaurant. We might have eaten at the restaurant if they had more than 4 options, but the food truck outside seemed better suited for our needs. We got two hot-dogs "with everything on it". Ketchup, mustard, Icelandic mayo, and grilled and chopped onions. The Icelandic mayo looked like caramel syrup and tasted like whatever sauce they put on In and Out burgers. Pretty awesome hot-dogs.
After a bit more driving, we made it to the Hraunfossar waterfalls! These waterfalls didn’t fall over the top of a cliff they came out from under the cliff. Again, this is Iceland, so lava tubes. Snow melt was coming down from mountains, through lava tubes and volcanic rock, out the edge of this cliff. It looked amazing.
While checking out the waterfall, we hiked to a small look out point and saw naked guy bathing in one of the pools. It was pretty ballsy. We also met a pretty dog named Gria. You need to roll the ‘r’ when you say Gria. We walked a little farther and found another waterfall with a big arch in the middle. There was a sign that described a folktale about two boys who disappeared while trying to cross the arch during church. Their mother then had the town tear the arch down.
As you can clearly see from the pictures, there's an arch in the middle of the waterfall. It was either a misunderstanding of the folklore on our part, or a ghost arch. We're going to go with ghost arch.
There were a few more sight seeing things in our guide, but they were going to add an extra hour on to our drive. So, we decided to skip some cool rock formations and a fishing town, and head to our next accommodation. Not long after we left the waterfalls, we came to a fork in the road. If we went left, we would get back to the highway and have a nice, scenic, uneventful drive. If we went right, we would be would be working our way down dirt roads, rusty bridges, and doing some vehicular rock climbing. Of course, since we were following google maps, we didn't know any of this. Since the drive over the mountain was technically a few kilometres shorter, and google didn't know we were driving a Kia Rio, google decided to take us right. Our first sign of trouble : "where'd the lanes go?"
There’s something else we forgot to mention. On the day we arrived, the guy that gave us the keys to our rental car just casually mentioned that the Kia Rio probably can’t handle the mountains. Aaron just shrugged that suggestion off and drove directly into the mountains to see a volcano. So, on the first day here, there was a little bit of a gravel road to get to a parking lot. Besides a few loud bangs on the bottom of the car, getting to the parking lot was no problem. Getting out of the parking lot was a different story. Google maps directed us up a 45 degree gravel incline that the Kia Rio just couldn’t do. Thankfully there was nobody behind us, and the road was just wide enough to make a 7 point turn. It was then that we learned the limitations of our rental car... and google maps.
Back to our story! We passed a sign that said "Malbik Endar", and immediately hit gravel road. We've driven on dirt roads before, but this was pretty big gravel, and not well packed down. It was a bit like driving on ice. "When does the Malbik Begindar again!?" Google said our next turn was in 15k, and it seemed to dump out on another road, hopefully it was paved.
It wasn't. It was more dirt road. There were sheep and goats on the road. There were giant hills that we weren't 100% sure the car could do. We kept following google for about 30 minutes. This was white knuckle, butt-cheek clenching driving on the gravel. Luckily we had gravel protection. Rocks were constantly banging the bottom of the car. Eventually google had us turn onto a mountain road that was obviously impossible for our little Kia Rio. We sat there for a minute or so trying to find a way out. Eventually, we doubled back and spent another 15 minutes kicking up dirt and praying we don't get a flat tire. Finally, we hit paved road.
It took us another 25 minutes before we caught up to where google would have dumped us out to a main road. Google had been trying to take us over the mountains. ATV's were driving that road. It looked like it might have been fun, but it also looked like we might have died if we had tried it with the Rio.
We were back to the scenic drive with more snow capped mountains, valleys, rivers, and small lakes. Aaron enjoyed the drive while Kaylea blogged and serenaded Aaron. We hit up a fast food joint called Nesti, which Aaron pronounced Nasty. It was actually pretty good. It was sit down restaurant quality compared to US fast food. They had a quesadilla. It was BBQ chicken, but we were too chicken to try. A lot of Icelandic "Mexican" food seems to be BBQ flavored.
Our Hotel for the night was pretty nice. It was the largest room we had stayed in so far. The bathroom smelled like mildew and fresh paint, but the room was large, so we stayed. We walked to a micro bar for some drinks, but the music they were playing was super depressing. After one drink we decided to go somewhere else, but the next place we went to had just closed. The place after that let us in the door, but said that they're not allowed to let people in past 10pm, even though there were plenty of people in the bar. Back at our hotel bar, they said we could order drinks for the next few minutes, but we had to be out of the bar by 11pm. More Covid rules. Everything in this town shut down at 11, and restaurants couldn't let people in past 10pm. All this, and of course, it was still daylight outside. We got some shwarma right as the place closed, and decided to call it a night... or day... or whatever.
Comments
Post a Comment