Hey, look! Sun! Oh, wait. No.

That’s pretty much how the weather in Iceland goes. You learn to adapt by day five. But after a night of high winds and rain that woke us up multiple times, Iceland greeted us with sunbreaks over the Ytri-Ránga river in the morning. Probably because it was my birthday.

Our little cabin was great, and we can’t recommend Arhús highly enough.

We had a lot of ground to cover, so we cruised up to the gas station, grabbed a coffee and some skyr (FAR superior to yogurt of any kind) and set off east down Road 1, a.k.a. the Ring Road. But not before taking a picture of this:

An Icelandic translation of Charlaine Harris’s first Sookie Book, Dead Until Dark. It was on every gas station book display we saw. (Quick note about gas stations in Iceland: they’re more like a U.S. truck stop. They usually have camping supplies, groceries and a restaurant, in addition to gas and junk food. Really helpful when the town you’re in has a gas station, a hotel, a campground, and that’s it.)

Not too far down the road we stopped at Seljalandsfoss.

Toward the bottom right of this photo you can see the trail that allows you to get behind the waterfall. We didn’t make it back there, as it was already drizzling and we’d just spent an entire day soaking wet.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before now, but getting a sense of scale in photos of Iceland is very important and often difficult. Lucky for me, this man came to my scale-needs rescue. As you can see, it’s a really tall waterfall. There were two other small waterfalls to the left, which we named adjacent-foss and other adjacent-foss.

This particular area was greatly affected by flooding during the volcanic eruption this year. Here’s a video of that flooding, where you can see Seljalandsfoss and get an even better sense of scale. They sure repaired the road quickly. (Video pilfered from Jón Frímann’s Iceland Volcano and Earthquake Blog)

It was a really windy day, and heavy clouds clung to the tops of the mountains, obscuring any view of what might be higher behind them. We kept thinking we were missing something, but were hopeful that on the drive back west the weather would improve.

We named these guys windy-foss. The wind was so strong that it blew the water right off the mountain.

And just FYI, everyone who lives in the countryside has a waterfall in their backyard. No, really.

This was essentially the view to the left all day long: beautiful scraggly mountain-tops dotted with waterfalls and sheep farms at the bottom. Occasionally a river, often with a one-lane bridge. There were almost no other cars on the road. We’d bought a CD in Reykjavík by the most popular reggae band in Iceland, Hjálmar, and we listened to that for most of the drive.

After Sjelandsfoss there was Skógafoss.

And this is where my photos of the day end. Not by choice, but because of the Great Memory Card Debacle of 2010. After we left Skógafoss, we stopped in Vík, ate burgers (mine with a fried egg, mmmm) at the gas station, then went out to the beach to shoot the jagged peaks of Reynisdrangar, the big lava rock formations (or according to legend, trolls who were caught out after daybreak while trying to drag a three-masted ship to land) just off the coast. After that we passed through 60km of no-mans-land which was mostly an old lava flow bed from where the glacier atop Katla retreated. It was now just huge lava rocks covered with really thick, soft, squishy moss.

We stopped in Kirkjubæjarklaustur when we spotted a beautiful waterfall behind the town that wasn’t on the map. You could hike behind the huge boulder that blocked the majority of the falls from view. There were even picnic tables. It became my favorite town in Iceland. We crossed countless streams and saw beautiful farms and sheep and horses.

There were about 120 photos of all of it. That is, until we got to Fosshotel Skaftafell, and started downloading to the laptop after dinner. Turns out the battery in my camera was almost dead, and finally quit on me while downloading. After we got a fresh battery in the camera, we went back to download the rest, but got the error that the images which had not yet been copied could no longer be copied because the computer could not repair the disk. (Update: Still can’t get them off the disk, even with special recovery software. Can see them in the display on the camera just fine. Annoying.)

At least dinner at Fosshotel Skaftafell was great. I had more lamb and some kind of crazy delicious chocolate lava cake thing that was brilliant. The day almost ended on a sad note until I realized I could recreate those lost shots since we’d be passing by all of those places on the way back across the country. And who knows, maybe there would be better weather…