Day 4

(Current Time & Place: 1/3/17, 6:30pm, en route from Reykjavik back to Boston)

Day 4 - 12/30/16

Jon:
Today was a bit of a strange day.  We were originally supposed to go on our glacier tour today, but that ended up being scheduled for tomorrow so we had an extra day to catchup on some things in the area.  We started the day by driving north to Höfn to get some food. We arrived at the grocery store as it was opening at 10am and stocked up on snacks and food for breakfast and lunch.  As we learned the evening before, there wouldn't be anywhere else to get food until dinner...  This was the only grocery store for at least an hour, maybe two.

Mike:
Then we started making our way back down route 1 to see all the sights we missed the evening before due to the lack of light.  Now instead of darkness we could see the ocean to our left and mountains to our right; it's beautiful.

We slowly made our way along the road, photographing everything.

We have enough pictures to do a national geographic magazine on Iceland.

There are waterfalls everywhere, flowing down the sides of mountains.

 As we go, we keeping seeing the glacial ice of Vatnajökull peaking out through mountain ridge lines.

On our way south we stop briefly at the guesthouse we will be staying at this evening, Gerdi, making the car a little more comfortable when it's not overflowing with luggage.  We also confirmed that the guesthouse would be serving dinner at 7pm.  Great!  We won't have to hunt for food tonight.

Recharged after a cup of hot chocolate, we continue down the road and about 15 minutes south of the guesthouse is Jokulsarlon Glacial Lagoon.  The lagoon has chunks of glacial ice floating in it.

As we observe we can see the ice changing, pieces breaking off and flowing out of the lagoon to the ocean.  The sight is really hard to put into words, so luckily we have copious amounts of pictures.

A half hour more along the road, and we arrived at Skaftafell Glacier Park.  The information sign here was really bad.  We were planning to hike up to Svartifoss, the black waterfall, presumably the only waterfall on the trail.  We saw a small waterfall at the beginning of the path, and then continued until we reached a good sized waterfall. It was pretty with patches of frost and snow forming from the spray. A winter wonderland.  Yay!

But not really.  Apparently we didn't go far enough along the trail, and this was actually waterfall number 2.  We turned back too soon and missed Svartifoss (Bryan found out while looking up more information during dinner).  Boo this really bad sign that wasn't at all useful!

On our way back to warmth and food, we saw a road going off towards the glacier and decided to drive down it.  We found a small parking lot, right at the edge of the glacier, and enjoyed some spectacular views.  Now we were super excited for our glacier hike the next morning!!

We took a couple hour nap after dinner, with our alarms set for midnight.  The Kp ratings for solar activity were going to be highest tonight and tomorrow night.  It was time to see the aurora!  We drove a little down the road just to get away from the light pollution of the guesthouse, and found a nice place to pull over and set up.  The night sky was absolutely stunning.  This was our first clear night, and you could see the Milky Way glowing brilliantly.  We also got some hints of the aurora but mostly it was just star gazing.  While the predicted Kp had been high, the actual reading were pretty terrible.  We need to be up early for tomorrow's glacier hike so after an hour or so, it's time to call it a night and get some sleep.