My dad always told me a story about how he first learned to drive a manual transmission. He and his friends were driving from New Jersey to Florida and they each took turns driving. When it was his turn, they put him in the driver’s seat, gave him a half hour to practice in the parking lot and then hit the highway. They always say “like father, like son” since that is more-or-less how I learned if you don’t include a quick lesson on a friend’s Honda Civic two months prior. Except it was self-imposed.

The real adventure in Iceland began as we checked out of our hostel and caught the bus back to the airport, where we were going to be taken to the van rental company. We rented a camper van for four nights from Happy Camper so we could point to the flamboyantly decaled van and say, “that’s our ride.” I signed my life away for the next few days and set myself up for a mild panic attack or two when I realized I could barely drive the van was just rented in a foreign country with signs in a jibberish-seeming language. At least they drive on the same side of the road.

But for the fun part of the trip — everything from here on out was up in the air. We had no plan except for some sites that we wanted to see and a general area that we knew we would need to turn around in order to get to the Blue Lagoon a few days later. Fortunately for us, Happy Camper’s had a stock of food that saved us from spending time going grocery shopping — when people have excess food, they drop it off at the office and it becomes a small food bank. We grabbed pasta, sauce, some spices, coffee, some snacks and more, which was enough to hold us over for a few days with the occasional meal out. And since we weren’t going to be driving at night, we decided to try and find a state-run liquor store (Vinbuðin) since we killed what we bought at the airport Duty-Free back in Reykjavik. We weren’t successful until day three on the road when we picked up some beer and a bottle of wine.

The gist of the next few days was to pack as many hikes, waterfalls and other outdoorsy things into as few a days as possible. Because we were there during a continuous period of rain, all of the waterfalls were given a pretty significant boost, with some flowing down the mountainsides where they would not normally be. Ultimately we ended up making nine stops including the Blue Lagoon on the way to the airport in four a half days. I’ll cover three days in this post and the final day and a half in the next.

After a very nervy hour of driving on the highway, we somehow managed to make it to our first stop — the cute little town of Hveragerði. There is a thermal river that flows in the mountains beyond the town that visitors swim in as steam rises out of the mountainside. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the river since the hike was several miles and several sources that we found gave us conflicting information. I was hesitant to drive the van through the town since we would’ve had to drive up a decent sized hill and I wasn’t that confident yet. We ended up walking through the town to the base of the trail which killed nearly an hour of sunlight.

Once we finally reached the trail, it was like being in a different world. Hiking up along the mountainside as the town disappears around the bend, steam coming out of vents in the ground and from little streams flowing alongside the path. After about an hour and a half of hiking — it was getting late and the sun would soon be dipping below the clouds — we decided to turn around to not get lost in the dark.

Steam vents rising out of the mountainside

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