My third day in Iceland was going to require a lot of driving but I made a couple of quick stops not far from my hotel in Kirkjubæjarklaustur before hitting the road. First up was Kirkjugólf, or “church floor” (above). A natural feature of basalt columns that resembled a tiled floor. Nearby was the waterfall, Stjornarfoss:

I was still trying to make up time for the day before when I’d had to return to the international airport to retrieve my “lost” luggage. I’d hoped to have gotten to another waterfall, Svartifoss, on day two and then photographed the mountain Lómagnúpur at sunset on my way back to the hotel. I’d had to cut my day short, however, so I finally passed Lómagnúpur early on the morning of day three:

I stopped at the trailhead for Svartifoss but the shorter trail appeared to be closed and I didn’t have time to take the longer route. It became another thing for my “on the way back” list and I kept moving eastward, occasionally distracted by the glaciers which were now beginning to appear to the north:

It’s really amazing the amount of diverse landscapes that you can encounter in a few hours driving along Iceland’s south coast. There’s generally a flat plain along the shore that makes for easy, level driving but, just to the north of the road, the land often abruptly rises up in a fantastic array of crazy mountains. Then, after crossing another vast field of black sand and rock, you suddenly arrive at Jökulsárlón — the iceberg lagoon:

Here, large chunks of glacier calve off into a bay and are trapped until they melt enough to drift out to sea. On the ocean side of the road, remnants of the ice dot the black beach waiting for the tide to return and take them out into the Atlantic.

Back on the ring road, I continued east and eventually found myself in Iceland’s East Fjords:

I stopped for a late lunch (mushroom soup) in the village of Djúpivogur. I ate at an outside table, overlooking this quiet bay. The weather was absolutely perfect. Pleasantly cool, sunny and very little wind.

I also had my first experience buying gas just outside Djúpivogur. Opportunities had been few and far between, the farther east I went, and I didn’t want to get caught with an empty tank on some lonesome stretch of road. I found a station on the outskirts of the village that was unmanned on the weekend, its doors locked, but the pumps appeared to be self-service. I remembered (luckily) that my Tiguan required diesel, and set about trying to decipher the instructions on the pump. I inserted my card and was prompted for a PIN, which I never have to use in the States. I made my best guess, hoping that — if I was wrong — it wouldn’t keep my card and run it through a shredder inside the pump. Luckily, I managed to guess right, but was then prompted to enter the amount I wanted to spend on gas. Hmmm… Diesel… in liters… in krona… who knows? I made another guess — which was woefully inadequate — but in a second attempt at the whole process, managed to end up with a full tank once again.

As I continued on, I left the Highway 1 and took a gravel road to a waterfall — Foldafoss — that I’d found during my online research. It was a fantastic setting, with the sun setting and backlighting only a bit of the canyon wall above the falls (see at right, below):

I made a few photos here and then decided to continue on up the gravel road to shortcut my path to that night’s hotel in Fljótsdalshérað. The gravel road was well-maintained but became extremely steep with sharp switchbacks as it climbed its way up the mountains. I rejoined Highway 1 once on the ridge and the rest of the drive was fairly uneventful, although it passed through some beautiful country. Occasionally, I’d catch glimpses of the bridges left over from previous versions of the ring road:

For the first time on this trip, I was beginning to see signs of the volcanic activity taking place in Holuhraun. The eruption had begun even before I had arrived and there was some question of whether it might progress to the point that it would disrupt air traffic like the eruption in Iceland in 2010. So far it was fairly well behaved, although the hotel lobbies in the eastern part of Iceland had large signs giving volcano updates. Air quality was getting poor in some areas but the wind direction had so far kept the smoke and vapors well away from the area I had been traveling in. Now that I was circling back on the east side of the volcano, however, the sky began to show signs of volcanic particles. The sunset was one of the odder I’ve ever seen, at times taking on an almost oily quality.

I settled in to my hotel and walked across the road to a grocery store, thinking to lay in a supply of snacks for the next few days of driving but, being a saturday, the town seemed to close down after 6:00 and all I could find that was open was a Subway sandwich shop. Not my most glamorous meal while in Iceland, but a welcome one after a long day’s drive through some spectacular scenery.