The weather forecast for today was wet and windy with a 100% chance of low lying fog, so we decided to head for the beach.

Along the way we happened upon some amazing waterfalls.  When doing a bit of research before leaving home I envisioned us hiking over lava fields and perhaps up a hill or two to find Iceland’s famous waterfalls, but in actual fact, the waterfalls almost come to you – like, they’re on the main road!

Here’s me looking completely blown away by my first small waterfall….

Here’s a bit of a snow capped mountain for you and look at that cloud formation!

As we can’t read nor pronounce the names of places here, we just picked a place on the map and said, let’s head for that place – it turns out that it was the end point for the greatest lava flow on Earth since the end of the last Ice Age!!!  It only stopped because it touched the chilly waters of the Atlantic.

And here’s what it looks like now – not terribly inviting for a swim though.

Next stop – Seljalandsfoss

This man climbed over the sign that said – ‘keep to the path’ and walked across the field and up that hill near the waterfall to take a photo.  I assume he enjoyed the area and I didn’t see him litter, so….

Here she is up close and yep that’s a bit of rare blue sky you’re seeing there…

And here’s proof that we were there… looking like the Bobbsi Twins!

Me Jenny’s first wearing of her new beanie…

The landscape is quite barren and yet beautiful and the cloud formations are even better.  The wind is so strong that they don’t last too long though…

A bit of lovely landscape…

Next stop on today’s road trip was Skogar with a little stop off at the museum…

Did you know that in Iceland there is no Father Christmas – instead they have 13 yule lads – the 13 sons of the troll woman Grÿla and her husband Leppalúôi.  Every night from the 12th December until Christmas, they go from house to house and leave something behind if you’ve been good, or just an old potato if you’ve been bad.

The museum has an outside section showcasing some old buildings from back in the Icelandic day…

I’ve never been to Hobbiton, but I guess that this would be similar, except not as cute and not built or lived in by actual hobbits.

There was a church that has been restored on the outside, but all the inside bits and pieces are the originals.

A school house – this would have been a nice class to teach… there’s room for 4 students!

This map would be quite unusual to the people of the land down under as we’re normally on the other side of the flat Earth map, but most countries, when printing a world map, will print themselves in the middle – a little big of world trivia there for you.

On the other side of Skogar Village (which consists of about 4 buildings) is Skogarfoss… This sucker is 60 metres tall and 25 metres across and I’m sorry to tell all you drone fanatics out there – but drones are forbidden!

We were heading to the village of Vik in the south and saw a turnoff with a name we recognised from the map, so we took a swift right hand turn and we’re glad we did… check out this black sand beach with random rock – it’s a little bit our Great Ocean Road on a really blustery day – this photo has no filter and hasn’t been altered in any way – the day was just really black and white!

A bit more landscape…. same same, but totally different!  You can see why films/TV shows like Star Trek and Game of Thrones were filmed here – it’s like another planet!

And that ends our road trip for today.  When we left this morning we drove away with a mobile phone, a Tom Tom and a built in GPS in the car as well as an old fashioned paper map, but didn’t think about taking the co-ordinates that would get us back to our hotel. The name of the area doesn’t register on the GPS, so we were left to remember.  Bare in mind that when we arrived last night there was so much mist and fog that we were driving blind and couldn’t see beyond the side of the road and therefore relied solely on the GPS to get us there….. so on our way home this afternoon, when I realised that I didn’t have the numbers and we were left to use our wits, we didn’t panic and I’m proud to say that we got home without so much as a single wrong/missed turn.  Well done us!