It was a fairly sunny but cool morning when I woke up at 6:30 AM and headed to the restroom. It was not far, but getting out of a warm bed to put on more clothes and to walk to the restroom is not that fun, but is definitely part of camping.
I made coffee when I got back and worked on yesterday’s blog post. I am running about a day behind, and that is not too bad, at least I can remember most of what we did. Of course, I will always remember a little more after we get back, but at least I am capturing the bulk of what we are doing each day.
Photos will come sometime in the future, but right now, Stephanie is doing a great job with photos and some details on Facebook.
As usual, I woke Stephanie up at about 8:00 AM, we are trying to get into a routine where we can get on the road by 9:00 AM. We both got dressed and then made breakfast, yogurt with some small muffins, and a banana.
After breakfast, we visited the bathhouse to brush our teeth and were ready to go. We also filled up our water bottles and took out our garbage to the large cans at the campground.
We were on the road at about 9:15 AM, we are getting closer to the target time.
Today, we have a lot of driving, there are not that many sites to visit as we exit the Westfjords and head south, just enough to get around the one remaining fjord and then head north again into Northwest Iceland. The Westfjprds are sort of a separate area and are not that frequented by tourists. We have enjoyed the peaceful and quiet time driving here.
We did have a waterfall on our list of sites to visit today, and it was about 45 minutes from the campground. We arrived at the parking area, and could not see a waterfall close by. There was one far off in the distance, but it did not look like the pictures of the one we were trying to visit, plus it was too far away for us to walk to.

We did see a sign telling us it was a 2.0 Km hike to the waterfall we were looking for, but could not see from here. What we could see was a large ravine on the side of the mountain, but could not see any waterfall in it. The pictures of the waterfall looked spectacular, so we headed off with the camera gear and drone in hand. It was a calm morning, and partly sunny, so I hoped to be able to fly the drone at the waterfall. We were the only car in the parking lot, but the trail was well-used and there were trail markers along the way to guide us. Even with the trail markers, it was sometimes difficult to stay on the trail, there were also separate paths made by all of the sheep in the area.
The trail started out being nice and wide, but then we went through an area where we had to cross several very small streams and it was muddy from some of the recent rains over the last couple of days. There were quite a few sheep around us as we walked.

We crossed a small bridge, and on the other side, the trail was in better shape as we got closer to the waterfall. We were almost all the way there and we could still not see any water, but we could hear it. The ravine the waterfall was in was deep, and it angled away from our view. We crossed another larger bridge that crossed the stream made by the waterfall and then walked up a steep portion of the trail and found a nice flat area where we could finally see the major waterfall.
We were there by ourselves but could see two other people approaching, about halfway from the parking area.

I pulled out the drone and started my flight. I headed over to be closer to the falls, and then took the drone to the maximum altitude allowed, 320 meters above the ground. I still was not above the start of the waterfall at that altitude. I flew around and took videos and some still pictures. I did not want to get too close to the ravine walls because of updrafts from the wind that had started to pick up shortly after we first arrived at the falls. The drone was hard to see at times, I often lost it if I looked down at the controller screen and then back up to the drone.

The other couple were almost here, so we brought the drone back down and used it to take pictures of us sitting on a rock with the falls in the background. Then we took some selfies with Stephanie’s phone camera.
We packed everything up and headed down the steep and slippery section to the bridge. The other couple had arrived and we told them the best views were on the other side of the bridge, and up the embankment. There was a sealed steel box with a latch nearby to the trail and inside was a sign-in book for visitors, which Stephanie signed in by just writing we were from South Carolina and the date we visited.

Now for the fun return walk back to the camper. It was not easier, but seemed a little quicker to get back. Maybe because now we knew how long it was. As we approached the parking area, there were several more cars parked, and two small groups of people were heading to the falls. We were glad to be back, our legs were tired. Even more cars arrived as we were getting ready to drive off. We were glad we had some time at the falls to ourselves.
There were not a lot of designated stops on today’s drive, but Stephanie found a couple of places to visit. One was a museum dedicated to the arctic fox preservation, but it did not look open when we arrived, and we decided to skip it, we are not museum-visiting people, especially on a long driving day.

We did find an area for watching seals on the nearby rocky beach, and so we stopped there. There was an observation area near the parking lot, but the seals were basking on the rocks a short walk back up the road, so we grabbed my zoom lens for the camera and headed to the other area. There were several people out on the flat rocks so we headed out there too. It was not a difficult walk, the rocks were generally flat and large, but there were a few areas where it was a little tricky. We were lucky it was low tide, the rocks were probably underwater at high tide.

We picked a spot and watched the seals basking. They were funny at times, rolling around and making strange noises. We were there for about 15 minutes and headed back to the camper. When we arrived, we were not sure we could get out. A car had parked really close behind us for some unknown reason, and it was there when we left to watch the seals, and still there. Now a camper had parked pretty close in front of us and we had to do some maneuvering to get out. Stephanie had to direct me so we could get as close to the car behind us as possible before I attempted to go forward because the camper does not turn very sharp. People……they just don’t think
It was getting to be time for lunch, but we did not want to eat in the crowded parking area for the seals. Down the road a few kilometers, we found a picnic area and pulled in. There was a camper there already, but we never saw anyone in it, maybe they were asleep or had gone hiking nearby.

We enjoyed our ham and cheese sandwiches with chips for lunch. After lunch, Stephanie wanted to fly her kite that she had brought from home. We had purchased it in Alaska last summer. It takes a lot of wind to fly it because of all of the long tails it has, but there was plenty of wind here by a fjord. With that mission accomplished, we headed out.

We stopped several times along the way for photos, and as we drove, the weather was improving until it was a bright sunny day.
We stopped in one area to see another waterfall and had to go down a short but steep dropoff of about 3 feet on the gravel. It did not look bad, but the very end of the van hit bottom. We got out to look and found that the trailer hitch had hit, as well as the plug-in receptacle for the trailer lights. The bracket holding the plugin had gotten bent forward a little, but no real damage was done. But now we had to get out without hitting again.
We did not even take photos of the waterfall, now concerned about not hitting bottom again on the way out. We drove at more of an angle, but the tires started spinning as we climbed up the short hill. That was resolved by selecting the traction control, which allowed traction to all four wheels, I suppose like all-wheel drive. That helped and we made it out easily. This is supposed to be an F-Road capable van, even approved for shallow river crossings, but it seems to have pretty low ground clearance.

We headed on and made one more waterfall stop before deciding that we would go past our designated camping stop for tonight and try and go farther. We arrived at the original campsite at 3:30 PM, and that was a little early to stop for the day, so Stephanie picked out a new campsite about two more hours drive away.
There were several areas of gravel/dirt roads, followed by asphalt roads as we went around each fjord. The route today was very serpentine-shaped, the road generally follows the coastline, and the Westfjords gets its name from all of the fjords there are, and on each one, we had to go to the inland end, cross a bridge and then head down the other side. We could see where we had already driven but now from the other bank of the fjord.
We headed through some farmland and then along the coast to one fjord where people had written in Google Maps about stopping and watching for whales in the distance. We did not have enough time to stop for a long period, but as we drove by, we kept looking out across the water as much as possible. However, we did not see anything that might indicate whales were nearby.
One thing we did see was a lot of tree dead sections that had apparently washed up on the shoreline over time. They had been removed from the immediate water/shoreline and stacked up on the banks more inland. Stacks of logs were everywhere, and we saw them for several miles as we drove along this section of coastline. We had not seen them anywhere else today, so this area must be exposed to storms that wash the logs up onto these sections of the coastline. We wondered where all of them had come from originally, some were quite large in diameter.
We rounded the tip of the last fjord for today and were about 30 minutes from the new campground in the town of Hvammstangi. We actually turned onto the “ring road’ which is Highway 1, and it was full of traffic, more than we had seen for several days. To get to the campsite, we turned off of that road onto another secondary road and finally arrived. The campground was on the other side of the town, and up on a hill.

We couldn’t find a place to check-in, so we drove around scouting out possible campsites that had electrical hook-ups. There was one travel trailer ahead of us and they took a great spot on one side of the campground. It was protected by some trees from the wind, which was now blowing fairly hard, and it had gotten cloudy. We headed back to the other side nearest to the main bathrooms and kitchen area and found a spot behind a hedge. We pulled in sideways, trying to block the wind with the camper so our side door was on the calm side.
It was drizzling a little, so after hooking up our electricity, we sat inside and had a glass of wine. It had been a long day of driving, but the added two hours will make tomorrow’s long drive a little shorter.
We spent some time revising tomorrow’s map since we are starting from a different location. We also reviewed the stops for tomorrow making sure there were not any we wanted to skip. There was one in-and-out drive that did not seem to be worth the 90-minute round-trip drive to visit, so we eliminated it from tomorrow’s list of stops.
The campground was filling up and the sun reappeared. The wind had shifted, so we moved the camper so that we were not sideways to the hedge, we were now backed up against it, and that allowed us to have our door on the now sunny side, and block the wind some

We sat out in our chairs and set up the table so we could enjoy the views and the sunshine. We watched several people come in and set up, several with tents and that seemed to be a lot of work.

At about 7:15 PM, we headed inside the camper to start on dinner. Tonight we are having refrigerated cheese tortellini and heating up some “Imported from Italyzz’ alfredo sauce. We also heated up the remainder of our pre-cooked chicken from Mexican Night two days ago to add the pasta. We heated up the chicken in foil on a frying pan first, and then started boiling water for the pasta. The sauce was heated some on the back burner, but the stove is not large enough to accommodate using two of the pots we have at the same time, they really should be a little smaller.
Luckily, the refrigerated pasta is easier and quicker to cook, it only takes 4 minutes in boiling water. We were also having the bread we had bought yesterday, I will say it is an Italian loaf since we are having Italian food tonight. Stephanie sliced up pieces and added butter spread. We used the frying pan on the burner to heat up the bread, lightly toasting it on one side.

It was a little hard to coordinate everything just using the stove, but it worked out and everything was warm when we ate at our inside table. We had some special Icelandic cookies for dessert, I will need to add the name later. They were sort of like wafers, coated with chocolate and what appeared to be rice crispies on the outside.
We took all of our dishes over to the camp kitchen to wash them in the inside sink. We had to wait a bit on the sink, but it was warm inside the building, better than using the outside sink in the wind.
There are no showers at this campsite, but there were no showers at our original campsite either. There was a large handicapped toilet/sink area in the bathroom, and we headed there to use our special non-rinse soapy bath cloths Stephanie had bought on Amazon and actually seen used at her work.
The handicapped area had a large door we could close while we were in there. We took our modified “sponge baths” and then headed back to the camper to settle in for the night.
Stephanie made up the bed while I worked on the blog, but we were both tired and headed to sleep around 10:45 PM.
Leave a Reply