Iceland Part 2 - On the Road

There is one main highway that circles the island, Route 1, or "Ring Road".  If you do anything at all in Iceland, you should do this.  Normally people do the whole circuit, starting and ending in Reykjavik, but supposedly in the winter it gets kind of rough up north, so we figured we'd just see the southern half and take our time doing it.  We stayed two nights in Reykjavik, and then set out along the southern coast, going counter-clockwise along the Ring Road towards Hofn, a little harbor town towards the southeast of the island, which is about 300 miles away, a 6 hour drive, stopping for the night in towns here and there.

Not that the drive feels particularly long.  There is plenty to see, and you'll never get bored of it.

There are farms all along the road, and you'll see sheep and horses and cows all over, watching you as you drive past.  I find farm animals endlessly interesting, but that might just be my city side showing.  Anyway, with all these sheep, there is a lot of Icelandic wool scarves and hats and sweaters all over the place, but I found it kind of scratchy, and didn't get any of it.  You could probably scour pots with it.

The green farms give way to miles of desolate rubble.  If there's anything I took lots of photos of in Iceland, it was probably rocks.  A lot of the Ring Road is flanked by black gravel and boulders.  It actually reminded me a lot of what we saw in Hawaii -- a reminder that we were on islands born from still-active volcanoes.  

There are occasional heavy bulldozers on the sides of the road, organizing the rocks by the road.  I wonder what that job must be like.

Some of the bigger boulders jut out kind of awkwardly; evidence of having been flung from a volcano into their final resting spots, rather than eroded or broken off from larger formations like we're used to seeing.

Our first stop would be in Vik, a small spot with a population of 291, where we stayed the night at Hotel Katla.  They have a nice outdoor hot tub that we spent a bunch of time floating around in, staring at the sky looking for Northern Lights.  We never got to see them, though.

However, what we did see was Reynisfjara.

It's a black sand beach to the south of Vik with a bunch of gnarly rock formations.  Legend has it, the spires in the water are trolls that got caught in the morning sun and turned to stone.  Be careful here.  The wind and surf are downright violent.  This is where my camera got blown lens-first into the sand.

By the way, the little red blip that shows up in occasional pictures is Sharon.  Because we had these places pretty much to ourselves, we split off from each other.  Sharon would scout around ahead, and I would slow down to take pictures.  Our orange and red coats were garishly easy to spot against the backdrops that Iceland had to offer, so we were never worried about losing each other, which was good, because there was so much to photograph, and I was kind of worried about Sharon having to wait around for me and getting bored.

Next up, waterfalls!