Itinerary: (288 km, 4:10 hr.)
- Reykjanes Lighthouse
- 1300 Whale Watching (Reykjavik Old Harbor)
- Hotel in Vík
Route:
First Leg: Keflavik to Reykjanes Lighthouse (~30 km, 0:40 hr.)
I reserved a Tesla dual-motor Model Y AWD. Gas costs $8/gallon in Iceland, but electricity is practically free. Charging isn’t, but this was an excellent chance to drive an electric car and see what the buzz was all about.
Picking up the rental was a breeze. Keflavik is so small that it was an easy walk to the rental lot, and we found the car easily. The next step was learning to drive a Tesla. I had ridden in one once, and that was the total of my experience, and I was not prepared for just how different it would be. It was the equivalent of handing a lifetime Windows user a MacBook for the first time. I get into this in detail in the section on driving.
It took us 20 minutes to get on the road, and I was glad our first leg was away from civilization. Keflavik is already at the end of the Reykjanes peninsula, but the lighthouse is south along the coast towards nothing in particular. This gave me time to get the feel of the car and find most of the important controls.
The navigation system was pretty intuitive, and we found the lighthouse with no problem. However, the potholes on Route 44 were amazing. The road was very narrow, so maneuvering around the craters was challenging. At least there was rarely oncoming traffic. Fortunately, there was no paint on the road, so the car didn’t whine much about leaving my lane.
This area is a fissure field from previous (millennia) volcanic eruptions. The “soil” is just weathered rock and pumice; it looks like another planet. In fact, here’s a comparison with Mars (slightly colorized).
We didn’t go into the little museum at the lighthouse or walk up to it. I had the views I wanted of the outside, so I took those shots, then we walked over to the ocean and communed with nature for a while. We spent maybe an hour there in total.
Second Leg: Reykjanes Lighthouse to Reykjavik Old Harbor (~70 km, 1:00 hr)
The lighthouse didn’t take long, maybe 90 minutes total. There was still plenty of time before we had to be in Reykjavik for the whale watching boat tour. Looking at the map, we saw that we could pass a hot spring by taking a slightly different route back. This was a small lake next to a geothermal power plant.
Leaving the “main” road immediately caused us to reconsider life choices. This smaller road was brutal with potholes. We managed to get to the parking area near the hot spring, but that area didn’t have a view, so we didn’t park. Then, we encountered our first navigation failure of the trip: you can’t get there from here. The road didn’t go through anymore; it became a pedestrian boardwalk.
Well, it seems newish, and this is a remote area, so we’ll give Elon a pass on map updates. We turned around, carefully picked our way back to the main road, and returned to Keflavik. There’s really only one way out of this area: you pass the airport and then get on the main road to Reykjavik. From there, you can head North or East to the rest of Iceland.
Arriving in Reykjavik with time to kill, we decided that we’d charge the car since it looked like we’d be down to around 15% by the time we got to Vík later that evening, and it seemed unnecessary to test the predictive power of the navigation system at this point. So began our trip-long odyssey of screwing around with car chargers.
I’ll skip the details, you can read all about that in my rant on car charging. The tl;dr version is that on the second station, we managed to get the thing working and after 20 minutes, we were topped up (to 80%).
After all that, it was not getting close to time for the boat tour so we headed to the Old Harbor. This is right across the street from where we stayed last time, so that was easy to find. Parking, on the other hand, was not. The tour company we booked did not have it’s own parking area. There was another company in the same dock area that did. Unfortunately, they guarded it well.
Now to find public parking. This lead to the second navigation failure. I’m driving heavy traffic (for Reykjavik) so Jess is calling directions. “Turn right here.”
“I can’t.”
“This is our turn.”
“I can’t, there are concrete posts.”
So we go around and get to the most expensive parking garage in Iceland. It’s 600 Kr/hour ($4.60). Ouch. But we’re down to 15 minutes before check in time and it’s a solid 10 minute walk from where we are, so there is no time to hunt for an alternative. Grr.
Whale Watching (Elding Cruise Company)
Check-in was a breeze, and we were directed down the dock to the boat. I climbed up to the top deck, got a nice rail spot near the bow, and settled in for a chilly ride. We dressed for this in layers, knowing that while it’s a pleasant 45 degrees or so, once we’re out on the water doing 10-12 knots, it will be right chilly. And we weren’t wrong.
Neither of us took pictures on the Cruise. It was cold and nothing to look at really.
The tour was supposed to last 3 hours. Of course, they don’t guarantee you will see whales, but they will do their best. We didn’t see a whale for the first 2 hours. They kept chugging away NE from the harbor area towards where whales were last spotted, but saw nothing. Ours was not the only boat out looking for whales. There were four others, and they all communicated by radio so they could search a larger area. After two hours of nothing, I was done. I was thoroughly cold and had been awake for 34 hours. So I went to the cafe area to warm up and catnap until we returned to the dock.
Screaming children prevented any real rest, and 20 minutes later, another boat spotted a possible whale, and the boats all converged like mad, further and further down this narrow area between two islands. Because we hadn’t seen anything for most of the trip and because this was the last tour of the day, the crew decided we could stay out a little longer to get a view of the one poor whale located by this fleet of boats.
The water here was pretty shallow, 20-30m, so a humpback whale didn’t need much effort into diving. We never saw a tail or anything—just a blast of mist when it came up for air.
Underwhelming. I had seen more on the Alaska cruise last year, so I didn’t bother to go back up on deck. But I could check whale watching off The List and waited to return to land. But that didn’t happen nearly as quickly as I would have liked.
These boats can only do 12 to maybe 15 knots, and we’d been heading out most of the time, though not at full speed. As a result, we were out over an hour longer than planned. I would have been pleased with the crew’s dedication to ensuring we saw a whale. But the car was burning cash in a garage, and I was looking at a two-and-a-half-hour drive, having been awake for 35 hours now.
Third Leg: Reykjavik Old Harbor to Vík (188 km, 2:30 hr)
Parking cost 2400Kr ($18.46), yikes. We have 188 km to our hotel in Vík. Outside the city, the speed limit is 90 km/hr. We’ve heard that Iceland takes speed limits seriously, and given this is a foreign country, I’d rather not have an impromptu interview with the police. That said, outside the city, all the roads are single-lane in each direction, usually not divided. So that felt pretty reasonable to me.
In the photo, notice that the center lines have worn away; this is common in areas away from the city. Also, the shoulder is no-shit a foot wide, and that’s a little more than average. Also, the price of failure here is minimal as there is no drop-off. It’s uncommon for the drop off to measure in feet. As much as 20 feet. They don’t waste metal on guardrails except on mountain sides and bridges..
As a result, it really does take us two and a half hours to get to Vík, which is about two hours longer than I wanted. We got to hotel around 1930. Luckily, it’s light for another two hours this time of year. That helps us find our way as this was another time the nav computer let us down. It was a stretch as tired as I was.
