Hofn, Iceland

Now that I’ve figured out how to blog for my travel journal, I thought it’d be nice to start collecting memories from past trips. I can say goodbye to the paper journal!

Ben and I visited Iceland in June of 2018. It was a wonderful trip and the first where we didn’t have the entire thing planned out. We did book all our lodging ahead of time, but since we had a car, we were more flexible in what we saw and when. Sometimes, you hear about interesting places when you’re in the country that you may have missed in book and internet research.

I start with our stay in Hofn, a town in southeastern Iceland. It was near the end of our trip, but we had one of our funniest mini adventures here. Ben and I still joke about it whenever we see a flock of birds.

I booked a stay in Hofn because it was about as far from Reykjavik as we could go in the time we had. It is close to a national park and some other sights that looked interesting. As we drove in, we were greeted by friendly streetlights. They also had speed displays with frowns if you were speeding!

We arrived the late afternoon, so after checking into our airbnb, we went to eat dinner. Food’s expensive in Iceland–almost everything has to be imported–so to save money, we would buy food for breakfast and lunch at a grocery store and go out to eat for dinner. We developed a bad habit of grabbing oreos as a car snack. We ate at a wonderful restaurant near the water, the Pakkhus Restaurant. I remember that the food was good and the beer exceptional. The beer deserves its own post.

Ben had read about a trail around Hofn that included a scaled down model of the solar system. It started in Osland, a conservation area on the water. We headed there after dinner and parked as close as we could to the park’s monument and the center of the solar system model. Little did we realize we had driven into the center of a nesting area for the Arctic Tern. As we got out of the car, we noticed quite a few birds around us, mostly lazing on the ground or soaring about. However, about a minute after we got out of the car and headed toward the monument, they became vicious dive bombers attacking the new enemy–us. Now by this time, we’re running forward, already committed toward the monument. We got pecked in the head a few times and pooped on once or twice. I could barely run fast enough I was laughing so hard. I’m surprised they didn’t lift one of us to a secret lair. Lucky for us we’re big and heavy! Unlucky for us–the car was now on the other side of the nesting area. Yep, we’d have to go back through chaos to get the car. Should’ve thought of that when we kept moving forward… (Full disclosure, this conservation area didn’t have a parking lot we could see, and no one was around.)

The solar system model was pretty cool. We started at the sun and found almost all of the planets. We searched for a while for Neptune and Pluto, but they were around a golf course and residential area. We started to push the gray area of trespassing, so we finally gave up. I found a photo of the monument, but I couldn’t find any of the model. I’ve included one from their website: https://visitvatnajokull.is/the-nature-trail-osland/