07/22/21 – Hiking Landmannalaugar

The five hours of sleep at the b&b was glorious! This is a hidden gem of a place and I really wish we had been able to take full advantage of it. We did enjoy the heck out of the breakfast toast and coffee. The day was looking to be pretty overcast and rainy but it was our only day to visit Landmannalaugar. This is one of the best known and most visited areas in Iceland, when you can get to it! The roads leading in are F roads and last time we were here, none of them were open yet. This time we had a clear shot on all of them but chose the one that was longer but did not have any water crossings. The plan was to do an 11 mile hike, about half of it sort of backcountry and not well marked. Due to the late start of the day and several false starts at finding the correct trail, we didn’t really get started hiking until about 3 pm. Given our best possible pace of 2 miles per hour that still allowed for site seeing and such, we decided to hike up to the top of the first area and see how it looked. The clouds kept moving in and once again we found ourselves hiking in a cloud. This area is know for the amazing views and varied colors of the landscape, but we just weren’t going to get lucky with the weather to see that. I think we were all feeling a bit beat up from the late drive and poor food choices we’d made since coming back to the mainland (gas station food since we missed the grocery store). Rather than continuing to fall behind on our schedule and have another super late night arrival at our hostel, we cut the hike short, doing only 5.25 miles. Spending that extra night and half day out due to the dang ferry really screwed up our timeline.

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We headed out for our last big drive down to the Start Hostel, about 3 1/2 hrs away. This took us back to the big city of Keflavik. Back when this trip was originally planned, we had this hostel so we could fly out to Scotland for a short trip and then fly back to Iceland. We couldn’t get a refund so we had to use our hostel vouchers this time with no trip to Scotland. Luckily though, this hostel was pretty close to the recent volcano so we had a plan of something to do rather than just be stuck in a city. We splurged for our second actual restaurant dinner of the trip, a nice Indian restaurant. The lamb vindaloo was delicious!