I dithered a bit over what to do with my last day in Iceland. I knew I wanted to end up at a campsite at Keflavik but really, I’d left myself a little bit too long to do the south coast – maybe should have used one of those days in the east. I’d considered hiking out to the volcano, if it was still going but it was declared over a few days ago and a cold, finished crater isn’t that exciting. I considered the Blue Lagoon. And then I decided on Laugarvatn Fontana. I missed Fontana on my last two winter trips – the bus failed to pick me up the first time and then it got cancelled the second time – and it’s nice, and it’s relatively quiet.

It’s also undergoing major renovations. At the moment, that’s a new service building, with bigger and better changing rooms etc (and the changing rooms are already improved by finally getting electronic wristbands – didn’t have them last time I was here three years ago, and this is Iceland’s third-oldest geothermal tourist-oriented experience). Later on, the baths will be completely transformed, and probably not before time, not now it has to compete with nine other lagoons rather than two. It was also incredibly hot. Fontana has a few places to shelter – the black stone art in the pool makes a surprisingly good sunshade, and the changing room-end of Viska gets shaded by the overhanging roof at the right time of day.

I stayed there three hours. I was getting hungry and getting concerned about being cooked so I went up to the little shop in Laugarvatn and bought some bread and eventually reached the nice little picnic area not far from Selfoss where you can see two rivers of completely different colour and texture meet. It was very windy – too windy to sit at the picnic table and enjoy the view. Too windy even to sit with the van door open.

So then I ploughed on to Njardvik, to the Happy Campers campsite, which is a little square of land next to the Happy Campers rental place. It’s very basic and populated almost entirely by people who have early flights. Someone arrived at quarter to three in the morning and I’m pretty sure there was a car there at 5am that hadn’t been there at 3. I arrived, did my washing up, went for my walk – Njardvik has some Grand Designs-style houses on the seafront – and then pretty much went to bed, although when I got up at 11pm, there was a spectacular massive orange moonrise.

I’d set an alarm for 6am but someone was making a racket at just after 5 so I got up. It had taken the best part of an hour to collect the van. I needed to get the sleeping bag back into the big bag, I needed to finish a litre of apple juice and drop off the van and wait for the shuttle and queue to hand over my big bag at the airport.

And that was all done by 6:34. Well, my options were to be bored in the airport for three hours before boarding, fly home, drive three/three and a half hours home, then go for a walk – or walk around the airport car park, be bored in the airport for two hours, fly, drive and then get home and go straight in the bath. So I loaded my so-called hand luggage onto a trolley and walked around the airport car park. As I was returning, I met some Americans who wanted to know about car rental – as in where is it. The shuttle buses go from the other end of the airport but if you’re after the companies you can see across the car park, you just walk across to them. They were after Hertz and I’m 99% sure you’re supposed to walk to them, especially as the person at the kiosk had pointed them in this direction but they were very reluctant to believe they had to walk.

There’s a group of Guides in international neckerchiefs here at the airport – Nottingham County, and several of them are wearing two or even three neckerchiefs. I have a suspicion that some of them are wearing Scout ones as well as the international ones and a light blue one that might be a trip neckerchief or a local one. Security was a bit slow but never stopped moving and now I’m sitting outside the bookshop with a little table waiting nearly two hours for my gate to be announced. Better to be bored at the airport than risk missing the flight.