17.07 - Day 154 - Hvoll to Stokkseyri
Monday 17th June - Hvoll - Stokkseyri (Day 154)
Better blackout curtains means better sleep at our hostel. Porridge, toast, Skyr yoghurt for breakfast, then the start of a new school week in the room, once the kids have had a run around on the climbing frame outside.
There’s noticeably fewer children on holiday here which also partly explains why we’re the first to arrive yesterday and last to leave today as others stay out longer in the day and start earlier for their walking.
We’ve a stop start road trip west ahead of us today (so brace yourself for ‘and then we drove’). All our conversations with place names involve a lot of spelling out the word, none more so than the Vatnajokulsthjodgardur Visitor Centre containing images of then and now receding glaciers and a large chest of black sand for the kids to dig in and find ‘treasure’ all housed in a Grand Designs building.
10 minutes further along is a brief stop in the now light drizzle for a loop walk through the lava field covered in moss - boards explain the moss but not the massive lava field which is what we want to know about.
45 minutes later we’re back in Vik, parking up to walk past one of the horse stables to pat a couple of the Icelandic horses - smaller than a normal horse, but sturdy and with a free-flowing mane. We run onto the black sand beach, the dark waves crashing into the beach not exactly inviting a swim, in fact encouraging no one onto the beach except for ourselves.
Vik is nestled at the base of a large headland which we drive round for 20 minutes, looping back and up onto the top, parking by the Dyrholaey Lighthouse.
The wind and rain have us eating lunch in the car, looking down over the beach at the bottom of the cliff - the elements thankfully subsiding to allow us a brief stroll around the headland, spotting what we believe to be puffins feeding in the sea at the base of the cliff. The kids happy to be able to claim to have seen puffins having been given a soft toy puffin and horse on the IcelandicAir flight from America.
It’s a 30 minute drive along the flat and mostly straight road to Skogafoss waterfall, the most (?) voluminous of the ones seen so far, sending up mist as it crashes into its pool. You can walk 20 km up and past this waterfall up a valley past many more but we settle for ‘just’ the 465 stairs to the top - and although the view is probably actually better from the bottom the kids are appeased with a sweet or two.
Back at the bottom we walk closer to the pool, but not too close having seen how wet some others got from the spray. Except, that is, for Seb who marches straight up to it.
A further 40 minute drive and we visit the Lava Centre in Hvolsvolli, starting with a short movie on bean bags of sweeping shots of the landscape and exploding volcanoes from the last 20 years. In the main exhibition there’s visuals of different lava types and how Iceland sits atop a magma plume. A shaking floor lets you experience the earthquake tremors and a wrap-around video room brings to life the volcanoes within sight of the Lava Centre (on a very clear day).
Getting closer to home we arrive after 40 minutes in Selfoss, visit our familiar Bonus supermarket for groceries, heading back to Fisherinn in Stokkseyri where our new room has its own kitchenette, but more importantly better curtains than our first room.
We enjoy more Icelandic hotdogs for dinner and after a bit more school work, a jump around on the bouncy pillow across the road.
I suspect like most people visiting Iceland we’ve driven a fair bit, but with regular stops at a mixture of Must See’s and Lucky Dips means it hasn’t felt rushed and we’ve seen some magnificent sights.