We travelled quite a ways today. And, a good bit of that was through areas where there was still quite a bit of snow on the ground. So different from what we’ve seen for most of the trip so far. To be fair, we are rapidly approaching the part of the country that is covered in a massive glacier.
Our first stop was the small town of Seyðisfjörður, located on the edge of a fiord. We found a great coffee shop and next door was a cute ‘rainbow’ street leading to a church.
Kermit even got to meet one of the locals!
We wandered into town and found a beautiful waterfall just a short hike up from the street.
I find it hard to imagine living where everywhere you turn there is a waterfall. But today, they were literally everywhere! Greg spotted a roadside display showing the aftermath of a landslide in 2020 that just missed the waterfall but took out several houses and other buildings in town. Turns out, they’ve been having landslides every 3-5 years for some time now. I don’t know about all of you, but I’d take that as a sign it was time to relocate!!
You can see where the landslide broke loose just above and left of the waterfall.
Within a year, it had already overgrown with new vegetation. Speaking of which, we’ve been seeing lupine everywhere.
The hillsides are covered with it.
The fiord is surrounded by strikingly beautiful mountains.
There were waterfalls everywhere on both sides of the road as we came down into the town. We stopped at this one on the way back out.
We also went through a couple of tunnels, taking us from one fiord to another. One was over 3 miles long!
The landscape was otherworldly. Massive valleys without so much as a house, or for the most part, even a tree. Just jagged hillsides pushed up out of the earth that formed terraced cliff faces of giant jagged stones covered in moss, or in some cases, with no cover at all, just a giant mountain of loose small stones that looked like something from an oversized gravel quarry.
And then, there they were! “Reindeer!“ Ellen cried out from the back seat. We quickly found a place to pull over and get a better look.
A small herd just ambling along the hillside above the road, unfazed by the traffic.
What a cool treat. We hadn’t been expecting to see anything like that. Soon, a couple more cars had stopped and the reindeer decided it was getting too crowded for them, and they quickly trotted off away from all the commotion.
We pulled into a roadside stop for a late lunch break. Of course there was a waterfall there as well 🙂
We passed through another tunnel and a couple of small towns set along the fiords. Reyðarfjörður, has a 9-hole golf course and a WWII military museum. The museum doesn’t open until June so we just kept going. Fáskrúðsfjörður, is a quiet little town formerly a base for French fishermen.
It was now getting late in the afternoon and had covered a lot of ground today. We were ready to be out of the car and settled into our accommodations for the evening near the town of Höfn.
As we neared the town we caught our first glimpse of the glaciers to come. Our rooms for the night were at a farmstead set near the base of the mountains just outside of town named ‘Glacier World’. We gave it a ‘Wayne’s World’ sort of pronunciation, being Americans and all, and thought perhaps another name like ‘Glacier View’ might set a different tone:).
We got a bonus surprise as we left town on our way to Glacier World – another small herd of reindeer out in a big field along the road!
After we got sorted into our rooms, we headed back into town for a quick bite of langostino lobster sandwiches and pasta before finishing the day with a nightcap and some more card games back at Glacier World!
