North Coast, Iceland – Day 5

Here we are now on the morning of Day 5!  At this point in our travels we realized that we were ahead of schedule as we were not due back into Reykjavik for another 5  more days to drop off the camper and get our flight back to Canada.  This meant we would plan to not only drive the Westlands as suggested by the Happy Camper guy, but we would also head for the Westfjords!  This was super exciting as we would cover more than we had initially planned. For now we were covering the North Coast, waterfalls, towns, and what we were told was the “best swimming pool in Iceland”.

If you have not yet checked out the first few posts please follow these links: Golden Circle – Day 1, South Coast – Day 2 &3, East Coast – Day 4.

We bought some extra groceries on Day 4 to stock up for the next few days and purchased some strawberries and bran to add to our oatmeal to make it not so boring. We continued with our morning routine of looking at the map, looked for our route for the day, and played our made up game of “backsies-frontsies” with our gear.  This game was necessary to add some humor to our morning and evening in the camper.  As you know the camper had a back seat that is required to be put down in order for the bed to be made suitable for sleeping. During the day, our gear would sit on the back seat meaning it had to be moved from the back seat to the front seats each night for sleeping and vice versa in the morning for our driving, hence the “backsies-frontsies” game. 

Once fed we drove further up the road to check out more of the Asbergi cliffs.  The end was a horseshoe shaped canyon supposedly created by one of Odin’s horses. That must have been one big horse as this canyon is about a kilometer wide and three kilometers long!

We meandered along the North Coast and eventually stopped at the waterfalls Goðafoss.  Before heading to the falls I had to visit the restroom and got a good laugh over the “signage” for male and female bathrooms.  I also made a “friend” outside the gift shop.

These falls were amazing, as usual!  We had a hard time leaving each falls site and driving to the next attraction.  Eventually we hit the road and continued on the journey.  Our lunch break that day was a stop in the town of Dalvik. We didn’t have a roadside picnic place to eat that day, so we found a gravel parking lot with a great view to enjoy lunch.

After lunch we headed around one of the northern tips and through tunnels that passed under the mountains.  The second tunnel we traveled through gave us a bit of a shock.  We had followed the vehicle ahead of us, but then quickly realized this was a ONE LANE TUNNEL and it was SIX KILOMETERS LONG. At various locations in the tunnel there were pull over lanes.  When there were vehicle headlights heading your way, it was your responsibility to pull over into these lanes and wait for the vehicles to pass.  It was like playing chicken with a safety net of pull over lanes.  We were both relieved when we exited the tunnel.   

As our Happy Camper guy has instructed us, we stopped in Hofsós to swim in the “best pool on the island”.  The reason for this was the pool was on the edge of a cliff with views of a fjord and it gave the illusion that it was an infinity pool.  This is also where we found out that it was actually a law to shower with no swim suit on prior to entering the pool. Good thing this wasn’t our first visit to a pool!  We spend some time swimming in the warm waters and then sat for some time in the hot tub. Both of these are warmed up from naturally occurring hot springs in the area.

We noticed that our evening pool and hot tub visits not only allowed us to relax and get showered, but they also drained a lot of our energy.  At this point in the evening were ready to find a campsite, eat supper, and just relax in our Happy Camper.  Our campsite for the night was in Varmahlíð where we had some yummy burgers followed by a beautiful sunset.  Seeing the sun go down meant that this was another long day for us.

This campsite did have one fun surprise, but you will have to come back next week to read about it in Day 6 and 7, Westfjords.