I made an enemy and a friend last night. The people in the caravan opposite took their dog out and when it came back, they clipped it to a long rope and it roamed around outside – until it caught sight of me in my van with the door open. There’s a line in Good Omens that goes something along the lines of “a growl that started in the back of one throat and finished in the back of someone else’s” and that’s exactly what this dog did. When it had barked furiously at me for a few minutes, the owner came out to see what was going on and I came out to assure the dog I wasn’t scary. It’s a big black lab. It didn’t take much to become friends. His name is Mason and the owners are from Hafnarfjörður, trying out a hired caravan and using Eskifjörður as a base.

Today didn’t start brilliantly. Because it’s a bank holiday, the pool was closed so no early swim to make up for a lack of late one yesterday. Google Maps said the one two villages around the next fjord on the Ring Road at Stöðvarfjörður would be open – but it wasn’t! Ok, well, the roadside hot tubs outside Djúpivogar have to be. Nope! They’re dried out and empty and with a “closed” sign on the well, owing to an investigation into the hot water.

I carried on. Today was always going to be a long driving day. It’s only a couple of hours to Djúpivogur, not far enough to stop, and then there’s nothing until Höfn.

Actually, there is. There’s a tunnel that cuts through Vestrahorn (it bends and I slightly scraped a tyre on the kerb in there last year – I get on with this van so much better that I know where its edges are, so no repeat of that this year) and immediately after it is the turning to Stokksnes, which is an Instagram favourite and a place I’ve never been.
It’s a headland with a craggy mountain which reflects in the wet black sand. What Instagram doesn’t mention is that you have to stop at the cafe at the end of the gravel road, pay a service fee and get a QR code to open the barrier down to this view. Nor does it mention:

• the Viking village (abandoned film set)
• the radar station
• the sea views with potential seals

My next job after writing this is to find out what the village was built for. The beach is nice – kind of like North Devon in that it’s huge and square and the sea is miles away. Normal people hop from sandbank to sandbank. I wade. Of course, the water is never deeper than about halfway up my foot and it’s surprisingly warm. I guess it’s shallow, it’s lying on black sand and the sun’s been on it all day.
I took my reflection photos, went to the village, walked around down at the headland and had a cup of hot chocolate back in the cafe. Then onwards to Höfn. It was pretty early but Höfn has a pool and the next pool if I skip Höfn isn’t until Vík. Anyway, if it’s not open tonight, I can at least go first thing tomorrow, I can stock up on juice and top up my fuel – I’ve almost definitely got enough to get to Vík but when you’re going to be driving a stretch of coast like this, it feels silly to risk passing fuel, especially when my last fill was yesterday morning in Mývatn. Mývatn to Vík is a very long way. Normally I’d have got some in Egilsstaðir but I still had more than 7/8s of a tank at that point – the first eighth burns so much slower than the rest.

Höfn is only 20-30 minutes from Stokksnes, on the other side of the fjord and you can see the mountains from the campsite. In the other direction, you can see Vatnajökull, Iceland’s biggest glacier and Europe’s if you don’t count the massive one halfway along Russia’s north coast. There are three “storeys” of van parking with patches of fake grass between them. I dare say someone will park on one of those patches at some point before midnight but for now I have a garden to cook pasta in (once I’d bought a new gas canister; I tried making pasta at Hverir and it just wouldn’t boil. Took the canister out this afternoon and shook it. Completely empty).

The pool was open and it’s just a six minute walk away – although as already demonstrated, I’ll walk quite a long way to save my precious van space. I alternated between sitting in the cooler of the two hot tubs (37-39° or 38-40° depending on which sign you chose to trust) and swimming lengths. Their lane pool is much warmer than Akureyri’s!

Back for pasta, washing up, trying out the wifi, updating blog & scrapbook, reading and bed. Hopefully some roadside hot tubs tomorrow.