When we woke up and stepped out of our hotel room near Hofn the fog had nearly cleared. We came down to an Icelandic country breakfast buffet laid out with lamb pate, caviar in a tube, pickled herring, homemade lox, and various jams that I had never seen, like rhubarb and currant.
The hotel and its farmland were bordered on 3 sides by the glaciers, the mountain, and the ocean.
The morning drive to Egilstadur through the less-visited fjords of eastern Iceland revealed some of the most spectacular scenery in Iceland.
We drove through glass-like oceans, jagged promontories, and mist-shrouded bays.
We stopped to climb the sea cliffs and visited the sea cave at Lækjavik beach and checked out the egg sculptures at the harbor of Djúpivogur.
Bruce started feeling some wobbliness in one of the tires as soon as we drove out in the morning. When we stopped at Lækjavik beach, he inspected the tires and found a bulge near the inner tread of one rear tire. We called the car rental company and were told to get to Egilsstaðir. The tire did end up popping and going flat after Djúpivogur, so we had to pull over at a farm to change the tire as there was no shoulder on the roads. It was a good opportunity to instruct the kids in the essential skill of changing a flat tire. One of the farmworkers came over to see if we were okay but left us alone when he saw the whole family pitching in. We had a late lunch in Egilsstaðir in the Salt Cafe after the tire shop got us a new tire for the road because almost all the restaurants stopped serving lunch by 3 pm and dinner service doesn't start until after 5 or 6 pm.
In the late afternoon, we drove to the two large waterfalls Dettifoss and Selfoss through more gorgeous highlands, dotted with smaller waterfalls, and of course, sheeps on the road.
The road to Dettifoss and Selfoss waterfalls was surprisingly dry, through a high desert landscape. Only the side of Dettifoss that got watered by the plumes of mist became green with grass and moss. Selfoss (not to be confused with the other Selfoss in Thingvellir National Park) is a short distance upstream from the roaring Dettifoss.
We had a late dinner in Lake Myvatn and checked in at Hotel Laugur down the road. The Hotel is a boarding school most of the year and becomes a hotel for the summer, so our rooms look and feel like a dormitory, complete with a condom dispenser in the elevator.
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