Wrapping up our time in Reykjavik and heading out to begin our road trip adventure

We woke up fairly early, made our oatmeal and coffees and then stopped into a few areas in Heiðmörk again. The morning was sunny, so we got to see the area literally in a new light. My husband also got the opportunity to use the drone since it wasn’t raining!
When we were here before, I noticed to be what looked like a sculpture made out of a tree, but we drove by so quickly, we didn’t bother stopping. This time around I made sure to give my husband a heads up! And sure enough it was a bear head! Very interesting.

Up the road a little further we noticed a hiking trail through some moss covered hills, so we took some time and walked around a bit. The rest of the day was filled with more exploring of Reykjavik and photographing unique architecture, and for our lunch break, instead of having hotdogs (we knew the next few days were going to be hot dogs galore) we went to Ikea and had a delicious lamb burger meal!

We left Reykjavik about 7pm for Kirkjufellsfoss, taking route 1 through the tunnel to route 54. The tunnel is faster and so this is why Google suggested we take this way, BUT a much more scenic drive would be to split off from route 1 before entering the tunnel, to 47 and back around again. This will bring you around a beautiful bay. We planned for a little zig zagging in the beginning of our trip because of the activities we wanted to do and the areas we wanted to see, so we were lucky to take route 47 on our way to Thingvellir national park, but if you are going in this direction only one time I’d highly recommend you take the extra 30 min around the tunnel. The stretch of road before the tunnel is absolutely beautiful and it does continue on the other side, so expect a great drive either way, but if you want to see even more, definitely go the long way!

on a side note; be careful of speeding. Especially in tunnels. I hear they have speed cameras in every one. 

The weather in the evening was AMAZING (albeit quite windy) Perfect golden light to boot! So of course we found ourselves stopping. A LOT. It was such an odd experience to see bright light so late in the evening, when it would normally be completely dark. One of my favourite road side stops on our trip happened this night. Although I could say that about all of them! Iceland is nothing short of amazing.

Since we stopped a few more times than planned, we got to Kirkjufellsfoss about 11:30pm, and then to our campsite town of Ólafsvik, about 12:30am. Before setting up camp for the night though, we swung by Ólafsvíkurkirkja, a beautiful Scandinavian church a few minutes away. By the time we made it to the campsite to sleep it was around 2am. I would have thought the midnight sun would inspire many to stay up later, but surprisingly there was only one other couple who was getting into the camp too.