Up early, Robbie, Alexa and I headed to the car parked nearby, piled in and headed for the airport, which was surprisingly easy. Dropped them off without incident, said our goodbyes and I headed back to the hotel, where Mike had already paid our hosts and was ready to go. Laden with leftover food, bags of souvenirs, and suitcases, vowing to "get it all sorted out later", we returned to the car and set out. I had booked us at a hostel for that night at Fljotsdalur, near Hvolsvollur, because it looked charming. It was only about 2 hours from Reykjavik so I figured we would do a bit of backtracking, but for the most part our schedule was an open book. So off we went!
Our first stop was at Hveragerði, Iceland's "Greenhouse town" and home of the Iceland Horticulture School. There really wasn't that much to see, just a bunch of greenhouses, one of which "Eden" had a big tourist center and a Home Depot-like selection of potted plants and a teensy section of gardening equipment and supplies. It was quite anomalous, seeing all this lush tropical greenery in such a barren spot. We traveled out to the Horticulture school and looked around a bit; it was very interesting to see the pipes they used as a conduit to bring the heat from the ground up into the greenhouses. I think we were supposed to see this town the other day as part of our Golden Circle tour but as I've already expounded upon, that didn't happen, other than "down there is a town with a lot of greenhouses where they grow all the vegetables." Pretty much everything that's not imported from overseas is grown here.
Oh one neat thing I didn't mention from our earlier day trip, I think it was the caving one, was the fact that every now and then you would stumble upon this massive group of wooden posts, looking kind of like clothes drying racks only bigger and sturdier. They were fish drying racks! Dried fish is a major export from Iceland; some is sent to Spain and Italy, but our guide told us that a lot is sent to African countries like Kenya. We actually bought a package of "fish jerky," dried fish that's a common snack food, but somehow never got around to trying it. In fact it may be sitting around mixed in with our other souvenirs right now. I'm sure my nose will stumble upon it sometime. :)
Anyway, on we drove, past rolling meadows, horses, and rocks. I pointed out Iceland's largest volcano off in the distance to our left, and Mike asked if there was anything to see. I checked the guide book and found reference to a "Mt. Hekla Museum" that had all sorts of exhibits on previous eruptions and the local people's relationship to the volcano, so we decided to head over there. We missed the first turn but looking at the map it looked like another road a bit further on would also take us there so we just took that road.
A note about the roads: Without a 4 wheel drive, you are prohibited from driving on so-called "F-roads," which are pretty clearly marked on signs and maps as F239, F324 etc. These roads are pretty much kind-of-worn-in tracks, often going through rivers, etc so its understandable that you can't drive on them. I was surprised, however, at the quality of some of the roads that you WERE allowed to drive on. I guess i was thinking they'd all be paved - boy was I wrong :) I made a little video of us driving down this lovely road i selected for us to drive down towards Mt. Hekla, which as gravel and so bumpy I could feel my teeth knocking together. I was a bit nervous and felt very bad for the suspension/shocks/whatever of this poor rental car.
Anyway, what looked like it would be about a 30 minute drive on the map turned into about an hour and a half of puttering down this dirt road, with me being terrified that we were going to fly off into a ditch and Mike being annoyed that I wouldn't let him drive faster. There were a lot of rocks, but occasionally also lush soft grass and pretty rivers. We stopped for lunch by a little brook - i couldn't believe how soft the grass was! Could have laid there all day.
Continued driving until we had pretty much gotten as close to the volcano as you can without hiking, and took a road to get us back to the road we were originally going to take to get there so we could find the museum.
We burst out laughing because THIS road was paved, nice, and smooth! We never were able to find the museum, but we made it back to the main road in like 20 minutes.
Our next stop was the Seijlandsfoss waterfall. It was beautiful, very powerful and a very wet slick path led to a cave area behind the waterfall which was very cool.
We hiked along for a while past a couple other pretty falls, including one that was pretty much completely hidden from the front because it was walled in on 3 sides. There was a little wooden gate that we went through and were able to go straight up to it, isolated from everything else, unable to see the road or anything. With the roar of the waterfall, the smell of fresh greenery....it was so relaxing and peaceful. We spent a long time just sitting and enjoying things, our own little garden of Eden.
I took a zillion pictures - everything was just so green and pretty! Unfortunately, eventually the clouds started to roll in and things got pretty overcast, drizzly and gray. We decided it was time to start going to look for the hostel so we could get an early start the next morning.
Even though the Fljotsdalur hostel was just a mile or two north of us, we had to drive back south quite a ways to get to the road. The road from Hvolsvollur took us through some lovely countryside, several waterfalls, farms, etc Too bad it was so drizzly. We drove alll the way to the end of the road, where we found a sign for Fljotsdalur pointing up a gravel drive with a sign that said "4WD ONLY!". Sigh. So we had to park at the main road and trudge up the gravel drive in the rain :)
We got to the hostel, a tiny, old turf house with a door that was only about 5 feet high. We heard voices, a group of 3-4 middle aged British people joking and cooking dinner in the kitchen. They had us take our shoes off and showed us to a small room with 2 sets of bunk beds. Another couple arrived at some point, a married pair of geologists on a long weekend holiday. We had a nice time chatting. The person who runs the hostel has been running small group adventure tours for the last several decades - they dont have a website so i can't link the information.
Anyway, I asked about a shower (the bathroom I'd seen had only a toilet and sink) and was informed that there was a shower outside in the garden. LOL! Well, I didn't feel like being adventurous in the rain, and I was tired so I just laid down to download my pictures, only to realize that I had left my computer charge cable in the apartment in Reykjavik. Oops. At least I was able to download the pictures and clean up the memory card.
The walls were thin so we could hear people snoring in the next room, and I think we both snored as well because I had a pretty icky respiratory infection brewing...but luckily we had the room to ourself.
We curled up in our little bunk beds and were out like a light after a busy day.
Pictures to be added later.
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