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Woke up early again still feeling kind of crappy, dressed and sat in the common kitchen to at least be up and awake. I couldn't even bring myself to eat, so I just made a sandwich and packed my yogurt for the trip. The three of us walked to the Harpa centre where we were picking up the rental car. Lexi filled out all the paperwork and we were taken to the garage to pick up our little Hyundai.
Because this was sort of a spur-of-the moment thing, we hadn't really planned where we were going to go. The people at the rental place had suggested to the girls yesterday that the East peninsula was really nice, so we decided that sounded good enough and set off driving. I was in the front manning the GPS, which they gave us with the car, thankfully, Lexi was driving and Melanie was in the back. I'd did a quick search that morning of places that might be alright to go on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula so I had a couple places that we could try and find.
We managed to get out of the city alright, even with all the roundabouts. The GPS showed that there was a really good shortcut (that took a couple hours drive time off) that was going across a inlet area. I thought it was going to be a bridge, but as we kept driving, we were suddenly headed into a tunnel! It's called Hvalfjörður tunnel, and it's almost 6000m long. It went down really quickly, to go under the ocean, and then back up again. It is a toll tunnel, but we didn't mind because it was pretty neat to drive through and we were glad to cut that hour off of our travel time.
We did have to drive for a while. I managed to have a bit of breakfast in the car while watching the lovely scenery. There were low clouds over the mountains that were really fascinating. And the landscape itself with the flat land from the sea to sudden mountains was breathtaking. We were expecting a grey and cloudy day like the past few days, but as we kept driving, the clouds started to clear and we were left with a beautiful sunny day.
Out first stop that I had decided on was a place called Gerðuberg (which we inevitably made fun of) that was a large line of basalt columns. Melanie and Lexi hadn't seen the columns yesterday, I was was excited to see some more, so we were happy to stop. We missed the turn by one road and had to backtrack to it. Totally worth it, though.
Because the basalt cliffs were really long, we stayed to one end of it while a tour bus did their thing at the other end. Lexi and I climbed as far up to the formations as we could. She did a bit more climbing and managed to get ontop of them, I just went about halfway. It was still a really fantastic view of the landscape and being up close to the basalt columns was nice too. These ones were a bit bigger than the ones I'd seen yesterday on the beach.
We hopped back in the car after a bit of exploration and headed out to the next place on my list, Ytri Tunga. It was supposed to be seal colony, but no suck luck - no seals at all, but it was a really nice beach. We climbed on a few rocks and looked out at the ocean. There wasn't much else to do there, so we got back in the car.
Our next stop was a town called Budir, which was not a town at all, but rather just a church and hotel with a graveyard. Melanie and Lexi wanted to go scrambling along the heath. I just walked along the road instead, choosing not to get muddy again with just my sandals. Melanie and I stayed at the church and looked at the really old graves while Lexi ran over some sand dunes to go check out the beach. Once she came back we said hi to some sheep that were standing around, then were back in the car to try to find somewhere we could stop to pee.
On our way to the next town, Lexi saw somewhere she wanted to stop, so we pulled over. The cliffs on the one side of the road were almost deformed with large cracks in them. The place was called Rauðfeldsgjá gorge. It was a really long way up to the gorge, almost an hours walk if the sign was anything to go by. Melanie and I both didn't really want to trek up the gorge, so we let Lexi, the runner, jog up quickly by herself while we took a look at the stream nearby. According to Lexi, there was just a small waterfall inside the gorge to look at.
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