Given how good our weather had been on Saturday and the first half of Sunday, I was really hopeful it would be good again when we woke up but today but it was awful. So we went and had breakfast and it was insanely busy. It felt like almost everyone in the entire guesthouse was in there and we barely got a table. We ate the standard Icelandic hotel/guesthouse breakfast and then packed up and prepared for what looked like it would be our worst day, weather wise.
First, we headed back to Arnarstapi, where we ate dinner the night before. We went back because, though we didn’t notice the night before, there are cliffs and those holes which you can look down into that have waves in them.
The cliffs were impressive. We walked around a bit and the weather threatened to get better.
And we found a weird arch that hopefully made up for us not going to see Hvitserkur.
Now there are also scenic cliffs in the next village over to the east, Hellnar. But there are also more cliffs – there are a lot of cliffs here – just down the road. So we opted to skip Hellnar and go straight to Lóndrangar, which some people said was the highlight of these cliffs.
They were right.
The scale doesn’t really come across in this picture but these are much bigger cliffs. Also, the weather completely changed and it was nice now. Jenn had to wait a bit to take this picture because there was this French couple that wouldn’t stop taking pictures of this view.
We got back into our car and headed for Djúpalónssandur, a black sand beach that is just slightly farther from Reykjavik than the far more famous Reynisfjara which I dubbed the most overrated place on our trip.
The beach is littered with the remains of a shipwreck from over 70 years ago.
And, like many lava fields in Iceland, there are coloured rocks.
We headed back up to our car and made our way to the next sight on the end of the peninsula. One of the many lava caves in Iceland is here. Unlike most other sights, they require guides. So this is one of the things we didn’t do. If we had more time I suspect we might have, but we honestly ran out of time almost every single day. I do wish we’d had time but we also never thought to do it until we were near the caves/tubes so it was unlikely we’d have been able to go immediately.
Anyway, there are at least two craters you can climb at the end of the peninsula. We decided to skip the first one, Hólahólar, for some reason. It might have had something to do with its height or its size. Instead, we went to Saxhóll, which has steps up it (an absolutely rarity in Iceland).
All morning I was hoping that Snæfellsjökull, the ice-capped volcano on Snæfellsnes, would appear through the clouds. It very briefly did. We didn’t quite get it while it was out but almost.
Another thing we didn’t do that I wish we had time for is going on a glacier. You can do that on Snæfellsjökull, for example, but it would have eaten up a good chunk of our day. So it’s another thing to do if we ever come back.
So that’s at least two things we need to do if we come back.
Anyway, once we got back down from the top of the crater, we got back in the car and drove around the rest of the end of the peninsula. We saw Svöðufoss from the road but we learned that it would be a bit of a hike to the falls so we decided to pass. We stopped in Rif on the north side to use the toilets and it was in this visitor’s centre where we could walk on the roof and get a view of volcano (which was in the clouds) which was kind of cool.
Then we drove to Ólafsvík. Some of these towns were actually kind of pretty, which I didn’t always think of the coastal towns in Iceland. In Ólafsvík there was a church that Jenn really liked the look of, right below Bæjarfoss.
So we kept driving east on the north side of the peninsula to what some people claim is the most photographed mountain in all of Iceland.
The waterfall isn’t so spectacular as Icelandic waterfalls go. But the reason people like to take pictures is it’s the only waterfall with a mountain off to the side.
As we drove farther east the weather got worse and worse. It feels like Snæfellsjökull just really affects the weather to the east of it because the the weather was totally different from the west side of it to the east.
Jenn wanted to go to Stykkishólmur, a village that some people really like on a peninsula that sticks off the side of the main peninsula. So we headed there through the rain. It was kind of a nice drive – reminiscent of the opinions – but we couldn’t see much. We ended up eating lunch at a café and once again had pretty decent premade sandwiches. The café had this neat afterhours box where you can buy their bread once they are closed. That’s probably more common than I realize but I thought it was coo. Anyway, the weather was bad so we didn’t want around.
So then we began the relatively long drive back to Reykjavik and the weather just got worse. Eventually we drove through a tunnel under a fjord which was kind of a neat experience. As we got closer to Reykjavik there started to be traffic. And then, as we got into great Reykjavik we got in a traffic jam. Seriously. I really didn’t think it was possible but even Regina has traffic jams. I made a mistake and got off one exit early and so it took quite a while to get to our hotel that in Kópavogur, the second largest city in Iceland and basically just southern Reykjavik.
Once we checked in we decided to go for a swim. So we went to Salalaug, one of Reykjavik’s many public pools. It cost about $11 so 1/6th of the tourist baths. We sat in the second hottest tub for a while and then went in the steam room. I couldn’t handle it so I went in the plunge pool and then back in the second hottest pool. These pools are outside and it’s only a warm pool that is inside but nobody goes in the regular pool when it’s cold. (It was drizzling.) These pools are very nice – much nicer than ours – and they have also solved changerooms. Icelandic changerooms are clean. Everyone must take off their shoes. And there are wet and dry areas in the changeroom. You are not allowed to go to your locker if you are wet. It’s brilliant and I don’t understand why the rest of the world doesn’t do it.
After the pool we went back to the hotel. Then we walked to the mall and had Polish food in a food hall in a converted gas station. (Most gas pumps in Iceland are fully automated so they have to do something with the old gas stations.) Then we went into the mall and went to a sports bar for a drink.