Our final day in Iceland was bitter-sweet. The trip was fantastic, but fast. We were certainly exhausted but not ready to be back home. We joked about staying, or maybe hopping on a different plane going anywhere but back.
We let ourselves sleep in a little bit and woke up to another delicious breakfast by our host. Afterward, we packed up our stuff and started driving back West.
While driving, we saw a beautiful valley between mountains that had around 10 waterfalls flowing into it, so we turned down the gravel road to check it out.
We reached the end of the road and parked, seeing a river to hike along. After awhile we saw some steam, so we decided to go as far as that before turning around. That’s when we saw the hot pool in the ground. We stripped down and changed into our bathing suits to hop in.
The water was a bit cooler than we would have liked, so we didn’t stay in very long. We changed again and started our half hour hike back to the car. We still had a few hours until we needed to be at the airport, so we decided to take a detour to a small village called Flúðir that we had heard rumor was hiding a small hot spring of its own.
It took some searching but eventually we found a small parking lot in the middle of nowhere and decided to park and hike over the hill to see if the hot spring was there. We got over the hill and saw a river which sparked our excitement, but it was freezing. We continued on over another hill, and there it was. A beautiful, clear hot spring with steam coming from it that flowed on as a stream. We changed back into our wet, cold suits and hopped in.
The water temperature was perfect, as were the views.
We knew we didn’t have long, so we soaked it in quickly and got back out to head on our way. We had spent more time there than I had planned, so we started rushing to the airport.
Unfortunately, our GPS got us lost in Reykjavik, causing me to enter freak-out mode. We finally found the highway we needed and sped to the airport, stopping just to gas the rental car back up.
My concern was for naught as we had no problems returning the car and making it to our air terminal before our plane took off.
Once back in the air, we bade farewell to magnificent Iceland and its blue ocean, volcanic landscape, and white mountains.
