As the morning of Day Three arrived, I was quite happy because this meant I wouldn't have to sleep in the car any more on this trip. Veronica had a hostel booked for the next 3 nights for us which I was very ready for. The reason we booked it for 3 nights was because there was a 2-day music festival called
I Never Went South in Ísafjörður, one of the Northern most cities in Iceland, in the West Fjords. The festival was free of charge and with Iceland's most popular bands so we decided that would be a good way to end our trip.
The morning of Day Three, Thurday May 21, we checked the roads on the internet via a hotels free computers but they were not all updated. Only about half the roads had statuses on them and the rest had question marks on them for a good hour after the road.is website claims to have them updated (at 7 am). Nevertheless, I just wanted to be sure that our route was not sealed off by snow which I was pretty confident of anyways, so we hit the road at around 8 am.
This was basically the route we took. The East Coast of the West Fjords had more dirt roads and pot holes than the more inland route but that was to be expected. As you can see, the start and stop destinations are marked with flags as is the ROAD OF DEATH and the HOSTEL.
As we drove up the East coast of the West Fjords, the main road often changed to dirt roads with many pot holes, making it next to impossible to maintain a highway-worthy speed. I was nervous this would severely hurt our time of arrival but the dirt roads never lasted too long. All along the coast there was tons and tons of driftwood along the shore. Some people had even gone as much as to bundle up large bunches of driftwood with rope and leave them there for pick-up in the future. Driftwood could be used for a number of things: furniture, fences, souvenirs, etc.
Pay close attention to this photo, because the one right after this one sums up Iceland's ridiculously rapid weather changes perfectly.
As soon as we hit the road marked with a skull and crossbones on the map, the road looked like this, with huge winds pounding the car, visibility of less than 10 meters, and the only visible thing in the midst of white was the yellow poles marking the edge of the road. For half and hour I was bloody terrified driving through this. I had to get Veronica to adjust the wipers for me because of I was too scared of slipping and losing control of the vehicle from taking one of my hands off the wheel.
As soon as we got through the road of death it was smooth sailing to Ísafjorður. Our hostel we booked was about 20 minutes past Ísafjorður though, so we weren't done driving yet. When Veronica emailed the people that run the hostel, all we got as directions for our drive to them was, "go through the tunnel, over the bridge, turn left and go into the valley, then you will pass three old unfinished houses, then look for a white house with a blue roof and that is ours". The weather was very rainy and made following these directions very stressful and difficult. As soon as we turned on the "road into the valley", the roads went from having only some rain puddles to deal with to 6 inches of snow, wet slush, and ice. As if the road of death wasn't enough, this was almost just as bad. I had virtually no control of the car for some two second intervals as we were following a windy dirt road covered with slush, passing abandoned houses and knowing if we just barely slid off the road we could be stuck for hours. We had to make a guess as to which house was our hostel because all the roofs were covered with snow and our options were cross two fairly stable bridges or cross one rickety old bridge. Thankfully the two stable bridges was the right guess and we made it to the Hostel, which is the house in the left of the picture above, as two kids peeked their heads out of the building and began to laugh at my very emotional reaction to getting there alive. The Hostel was actually a very nice place and I'm glad we ended up staying there because it turned out that it was completely booked, and we ended up seeing a lot of students at the University of Iceland that we knew through class and soccer, etc. The two kids that were staying there the same nights as we were were the grand-kids of the Hostel owners and were having a blast running up and down the stairs and playing other games kids do while giggling the whole time.
The morning after the drive to our hostel, we woke up after a much needed sleep in an actual bed and set off to explore Ísafjorður and its surrounding towns. It rained overnight and washed away most of the snow and slush so the roads were just road and exponentially better than yesterday which was such a relief for my anxiety levels. Our first stop was at Ísafjorður, exploring the docks and old buildings where museums our open during the summer.
Old ships parts laid out in front of the huge mountains we saw plenty of on the drive up the West Fjords.
Rogue cats are everywhere in Iceland
Old ships docked indefinitely
Kayaks set out for lessons
the Ocean
Not one rouge cat, but two!
It knew I was a bird kind of guy...
Crazy Icelandic locals going for a swim in the barely above freezing weather.
The church in Ísafjorður. The red torando looking thing is actual hundreds of handcrafted birds all individually placed on the wall. Very cool.
Statue of fishermen fishing. It's what they do.
It was quite a beautiful day considering the weather of Iceland and Iceland's weather in general.
The catholic church. I'm guessing it's just the priests house and people come over on Sundays for mass since Catholicism is very minute in this country.
I was impressed with the number of Icelandic flags in this town. More than any other by far.
Our adventure continued to Suðureyri where we saw a caged off area for traditionally drying fish.
View of Suðureyri. Along the northern outskirts of this town, there was a drive along another dirt road that was along the edge of jagged obsidian rocks with water spewing out of the side of the mountain like broken fire hydrants. That was to our left. On our right was another breathtaking view of the ocean and huge waves crashing against the black-rock beaches. I wanted to enjoy the atmosphere for more than just a couple of minutes so we parked the car and cracked the windows and had some lunch in the car to the sight, smell, and sound of the ocean.
Old boat in Bolungarvík. Another of Veronica's favorite things.
The view of Ísafjorður wayyyy off in the distance as we were coming back from Bolungarvík. I really liked both Bolungarvik and Ísafjordur because these two communities had paved walking, running and biking trails connecting the two communities. I saw many people jogging along the route and wished I had more time and more of a desire to run in general so I could experience the scenic route of these northern Icelandic towns for myself on foot.
After parking our car in front of what we deduced was the venue for the music festival, which we were told was a "rickety old building with a lot of construction going on around it" from one of our friends, the festival finally got underway.
Day one setlist for the festival
Funky smooth jazz band with very talented musicians. Awesome band to start with. A great surprise for me since I was under the impression most of the Icelandic bands at this festival was going to be guitar driving and not my style.
The crowds favorite. Every Icelander knew the words to all their songs. On the drive back to Reykjavik we heard one of their songs on the radio.
The sky back at our hostel at 11:30 pm!
We ended up leaving the festival early, being that we were all tired from the length of the trip in general and our day of driving and walking around different towns, not to mention the fact that Emily was fighting of a pretty heavy hitting cold ever since day 2 of this trip. We also made the executive decision to leave the next day and head back home since Emily needed to sleep in her own bed and couldn't last another day standing all night at a music festival. Also, we were schedule to drop off the car on Easter Sunday at 4pm since that is when they closed, which would have been next to impossible if we left Sunday morning even with perfect road conditions.
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