Our trip today was along the east fjords of Iceland between Höfn and Egilsstaðir.
It took a long while to go to sleep last night. The winds were rocking the trailer – a lot. They finally settled down (I think it was after 2am). The Iceland weather indicated that the speeds were 17 m per second, I think they were stronger than that and it was still constant.
Before I tell you about our trip today, I wanted to update you on buying fuel. At the self-serve stations, even the Canadian debit cards do not work. If there is a shop/cafe you can go in and buy a card with credit on it for filling up. Some of them will also allow you to leave your ID with them and then they will open the pump for you and once you have paid will give you your ID back. Your problem will be with the kiosks where there is no attached store as you will already need to have a card.
The wind this morning had calmed down a great deal from last night, and the speeds were down under 15 km per second so we felt comfortable enough that we should be allowed to drive. The wind when we first started was still quite brisk. At one point you could see the ocean being blown all the way up the mountain. The scary part was the rocks blowing across the road. You may remember one of the pictures yesterday was the rocks left by the glacier. Well, those rocks were being blown across the road and were hitting the trailer. We saw some about the size of a small fist in the middle of the road.
Did I mention all the cattle guards? Almost all of the one-lane bridges and a lot of the other bridges have cattle guards at least on one side. And then every now and then there are also some random ones on the highway. So driving along Þjóðvegur, which is the national road in Iceland (Hwy 1) you are slowing down for one lane bridges and random cattle guards. Very few roundabouts today though.
We passed through a couple of tunnels today. The first one was 1.5 km long and I thought that it was long. Until we went through the second one, which was almost 6 km long. And neither of these are the longest tunnel in Iceland.
Our trip today was in the east fjords of Iceland. We noted that there are fish farms in the fjord.
Our activity today was going to be to walk to the Folaldafoss waterfall in Berufjarðará river. However, we were still in the rain at that point and decided to take pictures from the stop instead. The decision was also probably influenced by the horrible gravel road that we took to get there – my bones definitely got shook up.
Our lunch stop was beautiful. We parked in one of the picnic areas near the second tunnel (Fáskrúðsfjarðargöng) and had lunch enjoying the scenery.
At Breiðdalsvík we had to make a choice – take the left road, Highway 95, or the right road staying on Highway 1. Information online indicated that 95 was not maintained in the winter. Since we were not sure when winter is considered over here in Iceland (everything seems to say “summer” and “rest of the year”), and some information indicated that there might be gravel parts as opposed to all tarmac, we decided to stay on Highway 1.
According to Google Maps it only added about 10 minutes to our time and at least we knew it would be paved. I’ll leave you here with some more landscape pics from the drive today.
