A little after 9:00 am we were picked up at our Airbnb by a very nice Russian girl who was interning at Camping Iceland, she picked the two of us up in a very nice 15 passenger van, which I’m not going to lie was secretly hoping would be our home for the next 7 days, no such luck, she was just driving us to the office to pick our car up. We arrived to pick up our SUV, a Ford Escape with the seats folded down in the back with a foam mattress on top. We threw our bags in the back, checked in, and headed out on our adventure. We reserved a wi fi, only to find out they didn’t have any available. Well that was going to be problematic, as that’s how we planned to navigate around. The nice man tried to direct us to the local cell phone store to buy SIM cards, where we had to kindly tell him in America cell phone companies are jerks and our phones weren’t unlocked, so only option at this point was for them to give us their company wi fi device, which lucky for us had just been refilled with data – score!
We made a quick trip to Ikea, just to say we had been, and try to find some sort of product to store cold food in, plus we just happened to drive by. No luck though they didn’t open for another 1/2 hour.
We set out to find our first destination, Thingvellir National Park, where we saw our first waterfall! We took a small trek through the national park, grabbed a sandwich to share at visitors center and hit the road to our next stop – Geysir, the great one is no longer active, but Strokkur is and we got to see it go off several times, pretty cool and not as stinky as you would think!
We looked around the very nice gift store they had, Nick grabbed a coffee and back on the road to our first large waterfall, Gullfoss, it did not disappoint! It has separate drops, with the largest being 21 m, several times we saw beautiful rainbows coming off of its mist.
As we made our way to our campsite for the night we stopped at Kerid Crater Lake, it was our last stop on The Golden Circle. The lake is a volcanic crater lake that we walked the top rim of, by this time I was fading quickly and ready to get to camp to get something to eat and relax. As we made our way to camp we stopped by a local grocery to stock up, only to find it closed 30 mins prior to our arrival. As we drove to our site about 10 miles away I remembered reading in one of the tour books about a place close to camp having the best lobster bisque in Iceland, I googled it, noticing it had four dollar signs. We really had no other choice at this point. The town where our campsite was located was a population of 460, so restaurant options were limited. We grabbed a table, shared a meal which consisted of FREE bread ;), lobster bisque, salad and carrot cake. Like I always tell Laurie Parker, if I pay that much for a meal I better feel like death, but in all honesty, it was pricey, I was still hungry when I left, but it was worth it – it was delicious!!! While I can’t vouch it was the best lobster body in Iceland, as it’s the only Ive had, I’m pretty sure whoever said this got it right.
We entered our camp to find very few people there, most had campers, camper cans or tents, and there we are sleeping out of the back of and SUV. Eventually a random lady approached us asking to see our camping card, and beefing us to pay the local tax, equal to about $.90 USD. Thankfully she also made change for us for the showers, as they only took 50 krona, none of which we had. We made our bed, had a glass of wine and turned in for the night. I woke up several times throughout the evening to still see the sky was bright as could be, thank goodness for those eye masks 😉