After warm, wonderful showers we took off on what we knew was going to be a long driving day through the fjords of Iceland. Fjords are deep ocean channels that are the result of two mountains going into the water.

Beautiful stop on our drive through the East Fjords

Even though the distance we had to travel wasn’t far, it was windy, so it took a fair amount of time. We soon came about a small little fishing village that apparently is home to Petra’s, the worlds largest personal collection of stones and minerals. While we didn’t visit Petra’s itself, we did stop to have a coffee and hot chocolate.

Back on the road we saw some reindeer, and very few cars. We traveled for about 45 mins at one point before passing another soul.

East Fjord roads

Beautiful small fishing village

Reindeer

Looking at one of the maps we had printed, we saw a small town that appeared to be a tourist attraction, I read on Wikipedia that there was a nature preserve with puffin colonies – sold! We made the 10 mile drive east of the town to find a small gravel parking lot with a sign that indicated we had a 4K walk = 60 mins, I let Nick decide whether we went, and we headed out. The hike would not have been bad except most of it was on a stone road. After over an hour we reached what we found out was a small inn, and we still needed to hike beyond that to see said puffins. So we kept going, don’t get me wrong the view was beautiful, but sadly there were no puffins ever to be found, so we turned around and hiked back to our car. This time I started by Apple Watch and it calculated our hike was 3.25 miles one way! That sign fibbed 😁

A rock with painted puffins, but no “real” puffins to be found.

 After our four hour detour, we just decided to head straight to our camp for the night as we still had a little ways to go, so we gassed up outside of town and were on our way. It’s hard to complain about being in a car so much here as the drive is just spectacular, snow capped mountains all around, green fields, stone fields that make you feel like you’ve landed in the moon. It’s ever changing and never boring. It funny how often we say to each other “oooh look over there”! Plus the waterfalls that just happen to peak our aren’t half bad either 😉 I had read prior to coming that you can’t stop take pictures of everything as you’d never get anywhere, this is so true!

As we got off route 1, we drove about 3 miles back to camp. Three miles doesn’t seem far but on these roads it takes forever! They are as bad as some Morrow County roads, the only thing here is if you drive faster you don’t glide over them, you just hit them harder. Hearing that the rental companies will look for anything to charge you for, I prefer we take it slow.

This camp seemed to be nice, they had a little convenient store and restaurant. I got us checked in and paid for showers and the tax. It was quite windy as we were out in an open field surrounding by the mountains so we thought that we might just eat at the restaurant, so we army up and grabbed a menu to look at. Thank goodness we did not request a seat! I was telling Nick I didn’t understand how people in Iceland make money, but I’ve now figured it out-on meals! If we had eaten at this tiny place in the middle of nowhere, granted all good was local sourced, it would have cost over $100. Like Nick said he’s willing to pay that for a nice meal once in awhile, but not on a Wednesday. So back to the car we went to make some soup, Raman noodles and applesauce, oh and we had some wine. Unfortunately it was super windy, so we just rearranged the car and settled in knowing that we wanted to get a head start on the day in the morning.