Finale:Scotland to Iceland #12

Our first hotel in Iceland was the Grand Hotel in Reykjavik and in some ways it was state of the art. I had never thought of electromagnetic pollution but you can read all about it on the large sign posted by the doors in the lobby.

Electro magnetic pollution

The Grand Hotel was quite a change from our  cabin on the ship. Another big change was being responsible for our own transportation. Since we weren’t scheduled to pick up the rental car until early afternoon, we found ourselves a little nook on the second floor and moved in there with our bags for a few hours.

View from the nook

We occupied our time by doing word puzzles and people-watching since we had a good view of the lower level. When the time came we got the hotel to call a cab for us and we went and picked up the rental car which was listed as a Toyota Corolla or similar. Turned out to be a Kia hatchback.

Our wheels

 We stopped in a little fast food place to have wraps for lunch. The wraps were good enough but it there were no washrooms there. In fact, finding public washrooms in Iceland turned out to be a bit of a challenge.

There was some pretty incredible scenery en route

Pretty nice scenery

before we arrived at Hotel Ork in Hveragerdi. [Apologies to Icelanders that I’m not finding the correct symbols that go along with the language so I’ve typed the names in naked English.] Just across the street from the hotel was a Bonus grocery store so we picked up berries, yogurt, cherry tomatoes, potato salad, zucchini, peppers, and cheese. I bought a tiny Swiss army knife in Scotland and it was a bit of a challenge to slice up the cheese and peppers but we made it work.

Urban picnic

The package from the rental company came with a self guiding tour and a wifi hotspot for the car. It took us a while to figure out that the directions for our driving tour and the hotels we were booked into were the reverse of each other. Once we sorted out that little detail things became easier.

After spending the night in a room with a view of steam coming out of the distant hillside,

Geothermal park

we found a Geothermal Park about 4 minutes from the hotel.

geyser

 It was quite small but there was lots to look at including a geyser. The park had a little greenhouse warmed year round geothermal energy. The gardener showed us around and gave us little sprigs of rosemary and lavender from the greenhouse. He said they would normally have had bananas but there was a very cold spell during the winter so the banana plant hadn’t done as well as it usually did.There was also an industrial hemp plant for cloth manufacturing and another marijuana plant that is used to produce flowers for CBD.

Legal plant

You can boil an egg over one of the steam vents (we didn’t) or try some of the rye bread that is baked by putting a can down into one of the vents. We did try that and it was delicious.

Yummy!

There were also warm mud basins where you could soak your feet. We gave that one a pass too since all of these were above the cost of admission and we didn’t feel like doing things just for the sake of doing them. We could have spent longer in the little oasis but got on the road and visited a geyser we had been to by bus to when we did the circumnavigation of Iceland with Adventure Canada in 2019. It was very busy but they did have potties. We ate our lunch in the parking lot. From there we decided to follow one of the connector roads but we only got a little way up it when we came to the dreaded ‘no cars’ sign.

We saw a lot of these signs

 If we were to drive in Iceland again we would definitely opt for a small SUV that could tackle some of the backroads which crisscross the island. We turned around and went through a 6 km tunnel.

Some of the tunnels in Iceland are interesting in that they are one way.  There are two arrows at the entrance of the tunnel. If the black arrow is pointing the direction you are heading,  you have the right of way. We did. That means that vehicles coming in the other direction have to deek into little pullouts in the tunnel to let you pass. If the red arrow is pointing in the direction you are heading you must yield the right of way to  oncoming vehicles.  It must be a bit nerve wracking to have to judge the distance of the oncoming traffic and the distance to the next pullout. Cars tended to come in bunches so, I imagine, it could get a little frustrating waiting for one batch of cars to pass only to find out that another batch was close enough behind that it wasn’t safe to leave your pullout. I’m sure people who drive the tunnels all the time are used to it and can time their timing down to the second. We spent our third night in Hotel Bifrost.