It wasn’t a long night, but we awoke not too tired this morning. However it was cloudy and raining some. At breakfast we talked to the B & B hosts about where we should visit today, and decided to travel the south coast route towards Vik. The man suggested we drive what is known as the pipeline road, as the views were better than the main highway, so we did that.
There were many flowers blooming. Especially pretty were the fields of lupine that covered the rugged hills. The clouds did break for a bit in the morning as we drove by the Nesjavellir geothermal power station’s main collection point for the pipeline.
The pipeline is insulated and about 80 cm in diameter, covered with a rockwool insulated aluminum sheath. The pipeline carries hot water to Reykjavik. According to our hosts at the B & B the water starts out at about 98 C and loses only half a degree by the time it reaches the city about 30 km away. I touched the covering sheath and it was very cool. The pipeline rests on rollers and has many bends to counter both thermal expansion and earthquake tremors. There is plenty of hot water here at the B & B, though it has a slight smell of sulphur. I wonder how this will affect corrosion in the pipes.
We ate lunch in Selfoss, then bought a bit of fruit and some cookies at a small grocery store. On our way out-of-town we saw a much larger store so stopped there to get Enid some granola bars. They had interesting cool rooms built-in to the store. One was for the fruits and vegetables. A second one was for meat and dairy. I would imagine that this is much more efficient than individual refrigerated coolers.
After lunch it began to rain much more heavily. It’s unfortunate that the clouds were so low and heavy, as the scenery we could see was nice. It would probably have been spectacular if we could have seen the tops of the mountains.
When we did reach Vik we stopped for a bit in a sweater store, and they had some nice wool items, though since I’ve already bought a sweater on this trip we didn’t purchase anything. We drove to the ocean where there were large waves, a long black sand beach, and some jagged rock spires out in the water. However it was cold, wet, and you couldn’t see much in the rain, so we quickly left.
There were two beautiful waterfalls along the highway. The first was at Seljalandsfoss where the water falls over a cliff about 50 or 60 high. There are trails up to and behind the waterfall. We didin’t go in, but there were several people behind the waterfall. Along the same cliff there are several smaller falls. The biggest falls is Skogafoss near the village of Skogar. It is a large falls that also plunges straight over the cliff. We walked close to the bottom of it, and as it was both pouring rain and spray flooding off the falls, we would have been thoroughly soaked but for our rain gear.
There are many, many horses in Iceland, in fact I think we probably saw more horses than sheep or cattle. We stopped for supper at Hella, after looking at a number of small restaurants (that weren’t very promising) along the way. We thought about having the Iceland meat soup, but since there were at least half a dozen horse meat items on the menu decided not to try the soup, not sure of what the “meat” was, and instead had fish and chips.