Sunday July 11th: We woke up to sunshine with some clouds moving in. We broke camp and had breakfast down by the stream. We had thought about hiking the mile or so up to see the waterfall but during the night the water level dropped quite a bit so we decided to test the limits of the Kia! Steve donned his neoprene booties and cleared the largest of the rocks. The water wasn’t swift or deep but remember, we are rocking a crappy car! Tserka did another great job navigating the obstacles and we started to feel not so bad about our ride! *see end of story for day 3 for an update….

The waterfall was neat but the clouds made for not great pictures. We headed back down the F road we came up yesterday, meeting three cars of people coming in. These roads must eat so many rental cars…

Our next stop was a 2 hr drive up to the Kerlingarfjoll Mountain resort, a fancy little place that also had camping. The road up took us between the two large inland glaciers of Iceland. The land is so rocky and stark, cut through with glacier streams. We stopped for some roadside coffee when we found a clear stream and got to sort of chat with a local! He was an older sheep farmer who was out hunting foxes. He had either killed 60 so far, or the foxes had killed 60 of his sheep, it was really hard to understand! I love listening to the Icelandic language and I feel bad butchering the pronunciation of places so bad! As we were finishing up our coffee we saw a herd of horses being driven across the bridge. I said after our last visit that I really wished we’d done a horse tour, and yet we didn’t plan one for this trip either! Guess I’ll just have to come back!

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The Kerlingarfjoll Mountain resort was a lovely set of huts nestled in a valley. The camping fee included showers, and a kitchen hut. The big draw for this resort was it backed up to the Hveradalir Geothermal Site and that is had a hot spring a short hike away. Our plan was to do a big hike around the mountains and then a short loop around the geothermal area. We had a later start than planned so by the time we got started for the hike, the sun was out but clouds were moving in. We nixed the big mountain hike since by the time we made it to the top it would be completely clouded over and instead did a bigger loop in the geothermal area. This was a great choice! Such a cool area with tons of thermal activity! There are no hot springs you can sit in here but the views make up for it! We tootled around for 2.5 miles and took way too many cool pictures!

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After figuring out the hot spring we wanted to sit in was off of the trail back at the campsite, Tserka decided to hike the 4 km back to camp while we picked up the car and drove back. The hot spring was a short 0.6 mile hike down along the river. Steve was concerned that it was very small but we were happy to find that is was larger than expected and not super crowded. It was a little cooler temp wise than I’d hoped for but still, wild hot water just can’t be beat!

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The nice soak and a curry rice packet dinner at 10:30 pm should have been a recipe for sleepy but the lack of extreme hiking coupled with no darkness made it so I couldn’t shut down!