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Home again back on the road and like we said in our last entry from Chile back in early May, we are now in a very different part of the world. We’ve made our way up to the North Atlantic and what should be a beautiful and interesting experience in the country of Iceland.

We left Tampa last Wednesday and flew up to Boston on Delta. Boston was the most effective gateway to Iceland for our plans. From the airport, we took the Logan Express bus to Framingham where our hotel was located. It was an easy process and the hotel was very close to the Natick Mall, so we had good food options for our overnight stay. We ended up having dinner and lunch on Thursday at The Cheesecake Factory. The highlight of the mall was the Bosse pickleball venue. I wasn’t dressed for pickleball, but what a beautiful indoor facility along with restaurants and bars. Great operation.

On Thursday, after checking out of the hotel (we stayed at a Red Roof Plus and it was totally fine), we walked back to the mall for lunch and then took the Logan Express back to the airport. Along the way, the bus blew a tire and a replacement bus was sent out. It was a 45-minute delay but no problems for anybody in terms of catching flights. We arrived at the airport a little before 4pm and checked in for our Play Airlines flight – this is a budget airline based in Iceland. We grabbed dinner at the airport before boarding the plane at 6:30. The flight left on time at 7:15 and the flight took around four-and-a-half hours. With the time change, that put us into Iceland around 4am. Sandy got about an hour-and-a-half of sleep and I got around three hours.

We know Iceland is going to be expensive and I’m sure that will be reflected in our journal quite often while we are here and it started as soon as we were through passport control. We needed a quick snack and found a croissant and a donut. Nothing special about them and the cost was $6 each. For a donut and a croissant. Here we go. 😊 We walked over to the Sixt car rental office in light drizzle and had to wait for the office to open at 6. No problem picking up the car and we headed out at 6:20. We had 12 hours to fill before check-in at our first lodging. For the day, we stopped at one of the bigger grocery stores in Reykjavik (Hagkauk) and then headed north to circle the Snaeffelsnes Peninsula.

Our first destination on the peninsula was Ytri-Tunga, also known as the seal beach. There is a colony of grey seals and harbour seals at this beach and we enjoyed watching them swim and sunbathe on the rocks.

The next stop was Budir – a tiny hamlet on the water with one of those classic little churches painted black. We have learned that these churches typically don’t have regularly scheduled services nor their own priests. At times, a traveling priest will come to a church and perform a service, but otherwise, many people attend services online.

Continuing on, we found lunch in the village of Arnarstapi. It was fairly crowded with tour buses – I suppose crowded is a relative term when it comes to a remote outpost such as this. We each had a ham and cheese sandwich along with a few fries for $15 each. And to be clear, the ham and cheese sandwiches were made up of one thin slice of ham and one thin slice of cheese each. 😊

As we reached the western tip of the peninsula and started our way around to the northern side, we stopped for a 15-minute power nap at one of the beaches. That gave us the energy to carry on and make our way to Kirkjufell – one of Iceland’s more prominent mountains and a beautiful waterfall.

This was the second place where we had to pay to park and for this one, the cost seemed higher than what we thought it should be. We decided to not pay and we learned our lesson quick. The parking rate was around $7 regardless of the time spent there – we were maybe there for 15 minutes – and it is paid through a QR code. A couple of days later, I received an email from our rental car company telling me how to pay the $7 along with a $50 penalty. Thankfully, we had paid the fee at the other stops so we did not have to pay additional penalties. Lessons learned – don’t try to skip paying the parking fees even in the most remote of locations or how long you plan to be at the location. I know we aren’t the only ones to get hit this way.

After Kirkjufell, it was a short drive to the town of Stykkisholmur where we did a short walk up to the mountain overlooking the town and then enjoyed fish and chips from the food truck right at the harbor.

From Stykkisholmur, we drove around 90 minutes to our AirBnB, which was a small camper on a beautiful sheep farm hosted by Maria and Siggursteinn. We were exhausted, so we unpacked and went to bed with our eye masks – sunset was at 12:27am and we hadn’t taken the time to figure out how to darken all of the windows and skylights.

The sun rose at 2:27am on Saturday so it probably never really got dark while we were sleeping. We got up around 10:30 feeling much better, had oatmeal and bananas for breakfast and made peanut butter sandwiches to take with us for the day. We left the farm at 12:15 and headed about an hour south to the town of Borgarnes. At Borgarnes, we grabbed a picture of the purple lupines that blanket much of Iceland at this time of year. It is beautiful but it is also non-native and invasive so it comes with some controversy. Additionally, the fields seem to be a decent place for Arctic tern bird nests. These birds are incredible. They migrate from the Arctic to the Antarctic every year – that is roughly 50,000 miles of flying every year. They are also very protective of their nests in the fields – they gave plenty of warning caws at Sandy while she was taking her picture of the fields. They are known to peck humans and they were dive-bombing Sandy.

Borgarnes has an attraction called the Settlement Centre, which we really enjoyed. The museum has two floors – the first one provides a 30-minute audio guide that walks one through the history of settlers arriving in Iceland from Europe a little more than 1,000 years ago. It is really well done. The basement has a 30-minute audio guide that walks one through Egil’s Saga. Prior to getting to Iceland, I read about the Icelandic sagas. There are around 40 stories that tell the settling of Iceland and I happened to choose one called Ngal’s Saga, which takes place in the southern part of the country. Egil’s Saga takes place in this geographic area and the museum has done a great job of telling the story through handcrafted exhibits. Before leaving, we stopped by the restaurant to sample whey, which was used to ferment goods through Iceland’s history. It wasn’t terrible – kind of like a vinegary kombucha.

After the museum, we stopped at a fitness store and purchased a set of free weights. We both like to use weights and decided that it would be most effective during our time traveling here to pick up our own weights instead of pay the high fees for fitness centers and we also know we won’t be near fitness centers for part of the time as we make our way around the country. We’ll see if we can sell them on Facebook marketplace before we leave. We grabbed a few groceries at the Bonus supermarket and then headed back to the farm.

Back to the farm around 5, we had what I am sure will be one of our primary highlights for our whole time in Iceland. Maria and Siggursteinn invited us in for coffee and tea along with their son, Dennis and his wife, Bjorka. We laughed and learned with them for a couple of hours and then their daughter and her daughters came to get us so we could go feed the four lambs that they are currently bottle feeding. Unfortunately, we were both feeding them bottles at the same time, so we didn’t get pictures of either of us doing the feeding. We learned a lot about the farming process – day-to-day and the different stages throughout the year. They have about 300 sheep on their farm. We heated canned minestrone soup for dinner and went to sleep with the sun still shining at midnight.

Sunday was a big day of driving. We headed north and west into the part of Iceland that is called the Westfjords. Shortly after starting, we filled up our gas tank and – you guessed it, let’s mention the price. We got our gas for $9.50 per gallon. We subsequently read that this is not the most expensive gas in the world – Hong Kong takes that title, so I guess we need to be happy with the $9.50. Our first destination in the Westfjords was the Latrabjarg cliffs. The drive there took around four hours and followed nine different fjords (deep and thin water inlets that generally developed from retreating glaciers thousands of years ago and are framed by steep mountains on both sides). Beautiful drive. The goal at the cliffs was to see puffins. This is the westernmost point in Iceland and is a nesting home to hundreds of thousands of birds of varying species. Approximately 44,000 of the birds are puffins. On our walk at the cliffs, we managed to find five puffins – the other 43,995 must have been fishing out in the Atlantic.

We left Latrabjarg at 4pm and our next stop was the Dynjandi waterfall. We spent about an hour here as they have a nicely marked trail that climbs up to the bottom of the main falls, passing several smaller falls along the way. This was incredibly beautiful, almost perfectly proportioned resembling a wedding cake or a bridal veil.

We arrived into our hometown for the next three nights, which is called Isafjordur. Our lodging is at the Managising Guesthouse. Our first impressions are that we are going to like this town. It has a population of a little under 3,000. It is the largest settlement in the Westfjords region. It is a cruise ship port – the Norwegian Star made a stop while we were there. Upon arrival, we went to the restaurant just around the corner called Husid. We ordered a pizza and a pan-fried fish entrée and shared both of them. They were delicious. I also enjoyed a Viking lager. After dinner, we went back to the guesthouse and unpacked. I checked to see what time sunset would be and was entertained to learn that the next sunset was ten days away, on July 2^nd. We are forty miles south of the Arctic Circle, so that surprised me. Off to bed with our eye masks because one of the windows did not have a shade.

Monday and Tuesday were quiet days in terms of plans – no scheduled sightseeing – just enjoying Isafjordur. We have been enjoying bananas and oatmeal for our breakfasts. We got out for four-mile runs and walks on each day for our workouts. This is a beautiful town set on a spit of land in a fjord and surrounded by mountains. It is colder here than a little further south – highs close to 50 with feels like temperatures around 40. As far as our TV watching, we wrapped up all seasons of the Cheers episodes while we were in Isafjordur and now we have started watching every episode of Frasier. We’ve also been watching the most recent season of Amazing Race – maybe not surprising that it is my favorite show. Monday evening, we stopped in the coffee shop and shared a pot of Happy Tea (various herbs) and Tuesday evening, we shared a flight of four beers at the brewery. Dinner on Monday night saw us pop into the grocery store and make up an easy meal we could do in our guesthouse – we picked up burgers and pan fried them, steamed a head of broccoli, and spread some goat cheese on some crackers. Tuesday night, we went to the shawarma fast food joint in the “mall” where the grocery store is located. Also, while in Isafjordur, we visited the Culture House, which used to be the hospital. Now it is the town’s library, archives, and houses art exhibits.

Wednesday was moving day. We migrated from Isafjordur to a small village at the eastern end of the Westfjords region called Drangsnes. The drive was around three hours without stops, but we did make a couple of stops. First, just outside of Isafjordur, we stopped at the Arctic Fox Centre. This is a small museum with lots of great information about Iceland’s only native mammal – the Arctic fox. We learned a lot about their history here and the lives they lead. The museum has put together a superb collection of information to tell the story. They also have two rescue foxes on site that we got to see.

Then about halfway into our drive, we stopped at a place called Heydalur in one of the pretty fjord valleys to have our peanut butter sandwiches. Today’s route took us around six different fjords on the way to Drangsnes, which included spotting a couple of seals. I don’t want to forget my thoughts about traffic in this part of Iceland – there is none. If it takes around 30-40 minutes to drive around a particular fjord, it is common to make the entire journey and see no other cars or maybe one or two. It’s pretty awesome.

We arrived to our new home around 4pm. We are staying at the Malarhorn Guesthouse. There aren’t any food options in this tiny village of around 65 people other than the buffet offered here at the guesthouse. $104 for the two of us (we didn’t order any drinks), but the food is excellent. It’s funny to type these prices when I think about what we were spending last year in Mongolia and Nepal. Anyway, I got my money’s worth at the buffet, walking out really full. The buffet included cream of mushroom soup, homemade rye bread, two different fresh salads, vegetarian chili, lamb goulash, baked cod (caught by the guesthouse owner), rice, zucchini pasta, and spiced cake with homemade whipped cream. The setting here is also beautiful of course – Gromsey Island is right off the coast and is home to puffins, although we haven’t seen any here yet.

That brings us to today – our last day in the Westfjords as tomorrow we head south. We started with the guesthouse’s excellent breakfast buffet (which is provided with our room). It includes hard-boiled eggs, cereal (corn flakes and cheerios), various fruits, waffles, homemade rye bread along with cheese and meats to make sandwiches, several other breads, cakes, coffee, tea, and juice. Nice start to the day. Then we headed out around 11 toward Nordurfjord, which is a little over 60 miles north and takes a couple of hours to get there. The vast majority of the road is unpaved, bumpy, and full of pot holes.. We saw hundreds of baby ducks and lots of baby lambs and sheep. We had sunshine for the first and last 25 miles of our round trip. That was too bad because the landscape is spectacular, but with the clouds and drizzle, it wasn’t easy to see all of the splendor. For us, we said we are glad we did the drive, but we wouldn’t recommend it to others unless the weather was better. Sandy is now out for a walk around the little village while I am enjoying tea in the restaurant. We’ll enjoy the buffet again tonight and then have a relatively early night so we can get on the road tomorrow.

We traveled the majority of the roads shown on this Westfjords map and the arrows indicate some of the places mentioned in this journal entry.