After another interrupted night of sleep for me due to jet lag, we met in our Selfoss hotel’s breakfast room for a 7 a.m. breakfast. This buffet was less crowded than our hotel breakfast had been in Reykjavik, thankfully. After the meal, we hit the road before 8 a.m., off to the site of a few waterfalls. It was another very rainy day, so we had donned our rain gear again, which had dried overnight. We beat the tourist buses to Seljalandsfoss, a waterfall that we could walk behind. The spray and rain combined to make it a very wet walk.
At the same site was another waterfall that’s partially hidden. It’s called Gljúfrabúl and it sometimes has a long line of tourists waiting to wade through a shallow river to see it. We were early enough to avoid any line and both Denise and Nathan walked on stones in the river to go in to view it up close. I didn’t want to chance getting my feet wet, since that was about the only remaining dry part of me, so I didn’t go any closer.
We walked on an alternate path back to the parking lot that passed through a field with sheep. During that part of the walk, regretfully, my feet got wet too.
Our next stop was to see the foot of a glacier that’s located on Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that erupted in 2010 and disrupted flights all over Europe. We couldn’t see the top of the volcanic mountain due to the low-hanging clouds and rain, but we did walk up to see the glacier.
It was blowing, cold, and rainy as we viewed the glacier and we were tired of being wet. But we did make one more sightseeing stop before reaching the town of Vik, where our hotel is. And that was to see the Atlantic Puffins that nest on the cliffs outside of Vik. They’re in a nature reserve and a trail leads up to one of their nesting cliffs. We could get quite close, within maybe 15 feet of some of them, which surprised me. They weren’t afraid of people and just sat on the grassy cliff and flew to and from the ocean where they were evidently eating fish. Since I saw none of them carrying fish in their beaks back to the cliffs, I believe their chicks had already fledged and were hunting on their own. They were all very cute! Denise and Cathy got some good photos and videos of them, as did Nathan with very long camera lens he had rented in Reykjavik. My photo wasn’t that good, but here it is.
After seeing the puffins, it was time for lunch. We drove into Vik and found a pub, where we enjoyed a leisurely lunch of burgers, stew or soup. By that time it was 3 p.m. and we could check into our hotel, named Hotel Kria, where we’ll be for two nights.
Around 5:30, Cathy, Denise and I walked across the street from the hotel to a gift shop and then a grocery store to buy things for dinner. Nathan had previously bought some food for himself. I bought a sandwich and some drinkable skyr, the Icelandic yogurt. We had looked at the hotel’s restaurant menu online and decided it was more formal and expensive than we wanted that night, so the grocery store food was a good alternative. We returned to our rooms and called it a day.
Lori's Travels 