hunavatnshreppur

Date traveled: February 22-23, 2017

Outside of Reykjavik, I don’t know how to pronounce any of these Icelandic towns, nor differentiate them.

When we were in this small town (“Hunavatnshreppur”), we woke up to see that we were between a bunch of mountains right next to the Arctic Ocean. It’s funny, you think it’d be colder along the banks of the Arctic Ocean, but it was 4 degrees (our car always dinged when it’s 4 degrees outside for some reason, so we knew this for a fact).

It was a shorter drive, so we spent some more time in Akureyri, talked to a gregarious British woman about how we both saw buses tipped over on the side of the highway and went to see the university. There wasn’t much urban life in Iceland outside of Reykjavik, so being in a place that had things caught our eye for an afternoon.

It’s interesting how trips are marketed to young adults in Iceland. To sell the idea of travelling to North America, the ads mention trees a lot, which makes sense because there aren’t a heck of a lot in any of Iceland.

We stayed in a farm house about 8km off the main road, which was an adventure to drive to, and I hiked about 2/3 the way up this mountain it was beside but had to turn back cuz it was getting dark (and let’s be honest, climbing up an incline of snow with no path was exhausting). We planned to drive to Reykjavik early in the morning but there is a huge storm of super high winds (60 mph+), so we had to stay at the farm until the roads re-opened, and even then it required a lot of focus to keep the car from blowing off the highway.

We tried to open up the hot tub even though it was February because the pictures of the airbnb (which was just a hostel), but the straps were frozen. We quickly forgot about that cuz we were able to see the northern lights for the first time. They’re like swirls, like a giant paintbrush sort of swept the sky a few times, whiting out all the stars. The stars beside the white light swirls were bright and spectacularly numerous.

The windstorm, the northern lights, the rugged remoteness, are the things I will remember about here.