ICELAND: Vik to Hofn

April 13, 2016

Good Evening!
Day 2 here in Iceland has been a grand success.  We started off our day with by waking up from 12 glorious hours of sleep. We REALLY needed it and I don’t think our day would have gone as well if we hadn’t tried to catch back up on all the sleep that we missed!

We decided that we would take turns driving each day, so today was Michelle’s day to drive while I navigated and took pictures from the passenger seat. We both love driving stick shifts.

We headed down Road 1 (the “Ring Road”) towards several places that I had planned out. We accidentally passed the first place and the second place was kind of lame, so onward we drove.  We missed our turn again for the third place on the list, which was Vatnajokull National Park, but we ended up finding a really cool glacier/glacier pool that we hiked up close to.

After that we drove to Vatnajokull National Park to see a waterfall, but we ended up taking a much longer hike which was about 7 or 8 km long. It was so beautiful, and really nice to get away from all of the rest of the tourists. (Surprisingly, there are proportionally the same amount of Asian tourists in Iceland as there was in California. Didn’t expect that.) We only saw two others take our same path. See the photos below, and know that there were many more we wish we could fit in this post since it was such an amazing view. We hiked for five hours and got back on the road again after a reward dinner of Ramen and some hot chocolate.

Next stop was Jokusarlon Glacier Lagoon. This place was really beautiful and basically a big lake where pieces of glacier break off and float around. We also found out there were seals here and Michelle had a good time talking to them from the shore. They loved watching her dance, as did I.

When we left the Lagoon we headed in the direction of the town of Hofn, which would be where we parked for the night. But before settling down for the night, we stopped at a little hostel that had outdoor “hot pots” that could be used for a small fee. These are basically natural hot tubs with water constantly being pumped from somewhere in the ground. It was wonderful to sit in hot water after a long day of hiking and try to soak ourselves clean. It helped rid of us of a bit of the smells we had been accumulating for two days.

After finally finding a place to park for the night, we settled down for sleep. That is until a massive wind storm came through and started rocking our van back and forth for a few hours in the middle of the night. This made Michelle nervous that our car would roll off the cliff we were parked on, but we survived. And in the morning, we realized the camping spot we “happened upon” was actually a sick view of the mountains next to the ocean! The Lord blessed us well with that.

Off to our next dayventure!

Taylor & Michelle