Isolation

Parts of Iceland are really well traveled. A marketing dream come true is the Golden Circle- a series of natural wonders linked by paved roads that can be seen in a day with Reykivik as the home base. Oodles of tour buses line up along the route and it seemed like a bit of a zoo. Since we were moving from one huge city to the next big city, we opted for a much more quiet route to the south east coast. I'm glad we did. I found a good deal on a rental car out of the airport. Fuel was prohibitively expensive. It cost about $80 US to fill the tank of a compact, and we ended up refueling 3 times on the trip. Ouch. It is probably the one place in Europe where the tiny smart cars and sub-compacts were popular. We saw a lot of enormous pickup trucks with extra large wheels. With good reason...there is a lot of unpaved roads. We came across a few sizeable villages outside of Reykavik, and then, without warning, civilization dropped off. A lonely farm would show up here and there, but there was really nothing but tundra. Oh, and volcanoes and glaciers and waterfalls.

At one point, we hit an ashy dust storm that made the white car real pretty afterwards.

It was some of the most spectacular scenery I'd ever seen. You could see the devastation of a recent lava flow and flood. A somewhat common occurrence is that a volcano will heat up under a glacier, causing it to melt and unleash in a sudden flood. It clears the landscape completely. It looks like you could be on the moon at times. We didn't see a farm or a settlement for at least an hour once we hit this spot. Because of the lack of civilization, it can be tricky to have a place to stay the night. This website came in handy. Staying at a working farm is really your only option aside from camping. I felt like it might be a little chilly for me to want to tent out for the night, so I found accommodations at a farm called Houlmer. I don't know what was the better selling point for me: the fact that there was a glacier in the backyard or the freshly-borne lambs frolicking around. I died and went to cute heaven just then.