Snaefellsjokull

Today we picked up our rental car, an AWD Ford Kuga, and traveled from Reykjavik to Hellnar on the Snaefellsjokull peninsula.  The drive was a little over two hours including stops at a roadside café for lunch and at Yri-Tunga for seal view.   Lunch was vegetable soup with bread, fairly simple but tasty.  Unfortunately, the stop at Yri-Tunga did not yield any seal sighting, however there was lots of wind, beach, and crashing waves.  I was sad there were no seals but we have a second chance for seals later in the trip if we stop at the seal center.  After that we continued to, we’ll be nice and call it a town, Hellnar. 

The Hellnar hotel is located on a nature preserve and is fairly tiny. We are in a very tiny room (10 x 14 foot) which is part of four room cabin.  We will need to squeegee the floor after we take a shower, classy. The photo on the left is our room, taken at 16mm. There is a door on the bathroom it is just behind my husband who is taking the picture.  We will call the room cozy.

After we were all checked in and situated we headed out to Londrangar, which is a rock formation.  The sign said it would take 40 minutes to hike there but the walk to the lookout took about 3 minutes and we weren’t sure if there was a second train to get closer to the formation due to the lack of marked trail.  Thus we continued around the peninsula and started stopping at points of interest marked on the map, which was hit or miss.  We climbed a small volcano crater and would have had a beautiful view except the clouds coming in and hiding the mountains. We also stopped at a construction barrel orange light house at Ondverdarnes. Getting to light house involved a going on very rough narrow dirt/gravel road which had several blind hills and numerous twists and turns through the lava field. Was it worth it, possibly, was the road entertaining, yes.  

Rock Formation

Very Orange Light House

Overall the landscape in Iceland is very rocky and boarding on desolate, but can be interesting along the coast with the waves. However, I think if we would have waited a week the grassy moss like vegetative matter would be greener making the place seem a little more hospitable, but we would have lost the snowcapped mountains.  The trip is looking up.

Tomorrow we head out to Lonkot Resort.