We spent all morning in the pretty, lupine-surrounded campground in Vík. We walked to the Bónus market to get a few more groceries, looked at the IceWear store, and had some lunch at the Lava Cafe, all in a little enclosed mall.
Around 2pm we went up to the road above a red-roofed church to take our version of what’s become an iconic picture of Vík. There was a little cemetery there. We had a good view of the town, laid out on the flat plain next to the mountain ridge. The sea stacks off the Reynisfjara point are visible from both Vík and Dyrhólaey, with the mountain ridge cutting off any views of each other.
Shortly afterwards we resumed our drive along the Ring Road heading for a pair of glaciers, Fjallsárlón and Jökulsárlón, that calve icebergs into small glacial lakes. We were driving across a black sand delta area at the glacier’s edge and arrived first at Fjallsárlón around 6 pm. We stopped to take lots of photos of the glacier and icebergs. We spent about 45 min there and then headed on to Jökulsárlón. At Jökulsárlón we continued taking many, many photos of icebergs, birds, and glaciers.
Around 8:45 pm or so, we headed across the road to Diamond beach. This black sand beach is notable because as icebergs from the Jökulsárlón glacier float down a channel and wash out to sea with the tides, they also wash ashore on the beach covering it with partly melted chunks of glacial ice.
We left the beach a little before 10 pm, stopping for photos of Icelandic horses and swans on the way to our campground in Höfn. We arrived there about an hour later. The campground is on a hillside and was terraced to create flat areas for tents and RVs. At 11:15 pm we were still taking photos – this time of a strange sunset sky that gave really strange exposures.