Last Day in Iceland

Our day started off with a very touristy thing: taking a guided tour. We took a tour because that was the only way to get to see the glacier up close. Our tour of the Katla Ice Cave started by taking a Super Jeep to a trailhead. The Super Jeep was a fun experience, and hard to judge if we could have made it to that same spot in our own car or not, but probably not.

Once we got out of the Super Jeep, we hiked for a little bit to get to the mouth of the Katla Ice Cave. We were given crampons and started walking on ice until we went through a massive ice tunnel that was maybe 40 feet in diameter and about 60 feet long. Once there, we were in a bowl surrounded by ice mountains when we realized that the "cave" was just the tunnel. So much ice melts from this area that you can't really go underneath the ice safely in the sense that you would be in a cave, so that was the first disappointment on this tour.

The area was super cool but the weather was uncooperating and misting the entire time of the tour which also didn't help. The nice thing was that the tour was somewhat small, with only a dozen people in our group, but our tour guide was pretty new and didn't really know very much when people asked questions. Having done this at the end of the trip seemed a little bit pointless, but it was still neat to get to walk on the ice nonetheless.

Afterwards, we continued driving towards Reykjavik where our plane departed the next day. We stopped in Hulvislodor to see Seljalandsfoss and Gljúfrabúi, which were the waterfalls that we put off seeing a few days ago due to a lack of parking and poor lighting. The lighting today was okay because it was overcast, but it would have been much better if it was sunny. This waterfall was another tourist trap with tons of people there and paid parking, but it was still a good experience because the second smaller waterfall on this short trail was something that we had to hike through a small cave to get to. That experience was different than all the other waterfalls we have seen and made the stop worth it, even if it was touristy and busy.

The evening was the best part of the day. We went to a Viking dining hall, called Ingólfsskáli Viking Restaurant. The food was so-so, but the ambiance was incredible. It was like we were eating in an old Viking hall, even the silverware was hand-crafted (or appeared to be) like in Viking times. The best part was the mead that we had from Öldur meadery. They had a blueberry, a cherry, and an herb mead. We had all 3 to start and then ended up getting two more of the blueberry. The neatest part about this was that it was served in bull horns. This place went out of the way to make you feel like a Viking while providing modern food.

Luckily, the restaurant we ate at for dinner was only 7 minutes from our hotel for the night. A storm was rolling in that had "hurricane-like winds" in our area for the next half-day. There were plenty of delayed and canceled flights because of this storm, but ours wasn't one of them since the storm was long over by the time our plane departed. This was our last real day in Iceland and we had very little planned for the following day. The only things we needed to do was get some of that Öldur mead to take home and drive a little over an hour to the airport for a 4pm flight. We made it to the airport with more than enough time.