Another Tuesday, another video. Today is day two of my summer Iceland vlog series, in which I pack up my car, set off to Akranes to sort out a tyre and have a dip in a seaside hot pot and then drive five hours to Akureyri, arriving just in time for my appointment at the Forest Lagoon.
What behind-the-scenes shall I have today?
- Well, there was the cutest surprised Pikachu drawn on the toilet wall at Þingvellir
- The complaint about the tyre is that the “low tyre pressure!!” warning came on half an hour after leaving the airport. I decided to deal with it at Akranes since there’s not a lot you can do in the wilds of the Golden Circle at 7pm. The first petrol station had no air machine. The second had a broken hose. There was a lady washing her car who tried to help. There was a couple waiting with a campervan who wanted to use it who tried to help. I phoned my dad back home in England. At the third petrol station – bless Akranes for having far too many amenities for a town of its size! – there was a working machine and it swapped between pressure units so I didn’t have to convert from what it said in the manual.
- Guðlaug Baths are gorgeous – ok, a bit concrete but what a view and you’ll forgive hot water a lot on a miserable morning where you’ve had a panic over a tyre. And only 500kr!
- I wish I’d stopped more along the way up to Akureyri and taken more photos – I describe it as something like “pleasant but nothing spectacular” and it’s true that there’s a lot of meadow, albeit meadow between mountains but you also climb up and through at least two mountain ranges and sometimes you don’t notice that until you realise how long the roadside marker poles have got.
- I drove up to the campsite via the old road because I didn’t want to pay the tunnel charge. I very soon learned my lesson – the satnav had been telling me something like “ten minutes” left and suddenly, once it realised I wasn’t going through the tunnel, it became “forty minutes left!” and after driving all that distance, I could have cried. The eastern end of the tunnel is less than five minutes from the campsite. After stopping for literally ten minutes to put the tent up and have a drink, I headed straight back down to Akureyri to the Forest Lagoon, though the tunnel – not least because at that point, I didn’t have time to take a forty-minute detour.
It wasn’t the most exciting day, so not a lot behind the scenes. Let’s go straight to the video.