More idiots. Only one other van was left when I got up and they’d locked the toilet block from the inside. Not the individual cubicle but the whole block. I tried the door and got a mumble from within. Ten minutes later, I did everything short of smashing the door down. Communal space! Warmth! Water! Toilets! Not your personal whatever-you-think-you’re-doing-in-there-for-so-long! I was so angry I drove off to Snaefellsnes without basic morning jobs like washing up my plate & knife, brushing my teeth or even getting properly dressed.

It was less rainy than it had been and eventually the sun came out. I did the usual itinerary – Bjarnarfoss, Radfelgja, Arnarstapi, Hellnar, Djupalonssandur, then I climbed Saxholl, a crater I promised two or three years ago to come back to. 486 red iron steps up to the top (or possibly 388 – I counted both going up and coming down and was out by a whole hundred between the two numbers) or a perfect crunchy red pumice volcano.

Give or take photo stops, it was straight down to Akranes. I caught the red sunset reflecting on the mountains behind Borgarnes and I finally got Snaefellsjokull silhouetted against an orange sunset by the time I was on the road into Akranes, after it had been sitting under a cloud for the whole day as I drove round it.

The campsite at Akranes is right opposite Snaefellsnes – well, it’s on the other side of the bay. I parked up, paid, spied a sign with the wifi password so I got out the Kindle to try out the Experimental Browser, after several days with no phone. As I stood outside the office, I glanced up while waiting for it to connect and spotted a pale green streak right across the sky above my head. Northern Lights! Within five minutes they’d turned to huge swooshes of white and green and pink, so close, so rippling, so amazing, more vivid than anything I’ve ever seen before. I caught them on camera, although for once they looked better in real life (which is the opposite of what usually happens). I’ve never seen the Northern Lights without a foot of snow, temperatures in the many minuses and I’ve never ever seen them while wearing sandals. However, it wasn’t too warm and when the Lights had faded away, I returned to my campervan, to my Kindle and internet, and book and went to sleep.

It rained overnight. Again. I splashed across the field in my sandals, washed up yet again and headed out to the wonders of the west. Barnarfoss and Hraunfossr first, then five minutes up the road to Husafell, the end of civilisation. It’s the pickup point for trips up onto Langjokull but it’s also somewhere between a village and a small resort, with a bistro and little shop, a country hotel and golf club, outdoor geothermal pool and a surprising amount of shrubbery. Barnarfoss is a proper active river, still in the process of carving out a small canyon from the rock. It’s all autumn colours and although it was grey and wet and miserable, the green and orange and yellow leaves were bright and vivid. Hraunfossar is fifty or so yards further west down the river, where water flowing through the lava field tumbles out of the riverbank and down into the river, although there’s no river on the surface for it to fall from.

Next I went to Reykholt. Snorri Sturlusson is an important figure in Icelandic history, not least because he wrote Egil’s Saga, one of the Eddas and Heimkringsla. However, I’ve never managed to be very interested in his museum. The interesting thing about Reykholt is Snorralaug, Snorri’s pool. It’s a fairly small shallow pool, better for sitting on the edge and putting your feet in than sitting in and of course, it’s geothermal and warm. Across the field/garden, down by the road, is something that looks like a normal duckpond but it steams. I did not go and stick my hand in the water I know nothing about. If you stick your hand in the steaming water back at Geysir, you’re likely to end up with serious burns. I picnicked again in the back of my van in the car park.

Deildartunguhver is having some work done – walkways and fences being built, mostly, to protect tourists from violently bubbling very hot water. It’s always hard to see what’s going on at Deildartunuhver because it generates a lot of steam but at the moment, you can’t see much of it behind fencing and machinery. The dog was still there – it lives nearby and it spends most of its life seeking attention in the Deildartunguhver car park. It’s getting a bit old now, its fur is quite matted in places and it’s starting to limp – it nearly got “rescued” by a tourist earlier in the year.

What next? Grabrok, the little crater at Bifrost. I don’t think I really went there to climb it but of course, I ended up climbing it. I climbed it in 2014 and I’d forgotten how many steps there are up to it – for this is a crater with a set of wooden steps up to the rim and a gravel walk around the top. It rained. It’s quite a spectacular little crater, overlooking a second crater and there’s also the ruined outline of what may or may not have once been a longhouse.

On the way back to Hverinn, I stopped at Borgarnes. I wanted to see if I could get a phone of some kind at the biggest settlement in the west (I couldn’t). I sat in the roadhouse with a hot chocolate I didn’t really want so that I could borrow their electricity and try to charge my phone. It had charged on Monday but then refused to ever since. Maybe there was something about the campervan it didn’t like. Whatever it was, it didn’t like it about the roadhouse either.  Since I like Borgarnes, I went down to the headland, near where I usually stay when I don’t have a van. It’s pretty down there.

By 8pm I was back at Hverinn, reading. At 9.30, I noticed the van parked next to me – right next to me – had been sitting with its engine running and its lights on for a long time. Much later, when they hadn’t turned either off and I wanted to go to sleep, I resorted to flashing my headtorch at them. It worked. They stopped it. Half an hour later, when they thought I’d forgotten, it all went back on. Engine rumbling, lights on. Enraged, I wrote them a message on my misted-up window. There’s not a lot of space so it had to be short, pointed words, easy to write in mirror letters. English, fortunately, has some excellent words for this purpose. They didn’t notice. I flashed my torch again.

At 5.45, I woke up cold and realised the engine was rumbling again and the lights were on. They’d been slamming the doors all night – at one point, I’d heard the side door open and close three times in under three seconds (yes, really!) and now they were doing it again. I’d spent part of the night fantasising about how I could destroy them – sugar in the fuel tank, was my knife sharp enough to slash the tyres, was there some way I could blow up the entire van with what I had in the back? – so in a blind fury, I climbed into the front seat, started the engine, put on the main beams and turned round keeping those lights on them as much as was humanly possible before driving to the other end of the campsite. I climbed back into the back and lay down. This end of the site was much lighter than where I’d been. In fact, it was brighter than those annoying lights switched on next to me. It took nearly fifteen minutes for it to dawn on me that my headlights are not automatic and I hadn’t thought to switch them off. I climbed back into the front again and tried to go back to sleep.

Tuesday’s blog starts Monday night, in a campervan, listening to the wind wailing. I’ve stayed on this campsite before: in the height of summer, there seems to be no one running it – I never found anyone to pay. There only appear to be two or three other vans here tonight. I would rather be at Þingvellir or Selfoss with their non-freaky campsites but I’ve been to Fontana & it’s gone 10pm and I don’t fancy a drive tonight.

I made a friend in the hot tub – Kathleen, from St Petersburg, Florida. She’s here on her own, driving around, making it up as she goes along. Next she’s off to Finnish Lapland.

At Geysir today – yesterday? – we all learnt why we don’t stand downwind of an erupting geyser. Because the wind will blow a very heavy shower of near-boiling rain straight at you! That said, the people who got soaked found it hilarious. And so did everyone watching.

My campervan is just a mattress in the back of a Davis Docker (d-something; I’m not going out to look now). There’s a sort of wooden cupboard arrangement above it which is very handy but reduces getting into sleeping bag wiggle room down to zero. Gets you warm, struggling to get into bed. To lie there at 10.30, not sleepy yet, listening to the wind wailing.

I woke up to find the campsite at Laugarvatn less weird than I had in the dark last night. It was a campsite. Toilet block with showers, washing up sinks, bins, children’s playground, hot water throughout – as you’d expect from a place whose hot springs literally appear in the stories of the Settlement of the country. These hot springs were where the ever-practical Vikings decided to be baptised, following conversion at Þingvellir in the summer of 1000AS. The water is cold at Þingvellir. I know, I’ve paddled in it. The only thing that’s weird about Laugarvatn’s campsite is that it’s unstaffed apparently all year round so there’s no one to pay and no notice up telling you to pay at a nearby amenity.

I made Þingvellir, just half an hour away across a high, desolate heath road, my first stop. It’s not at its most charming in the mist, cloud & rain. They’re now introduced parking charges – 500kr for a day, valid in all the assorted car parks. It’s an entrance fee, really. Even in the less than six years since I fist went there, it’s changed a lot. More car parks, more toilets, more facilities, more foothpaths. A lot more toilets.

After I’d wandered Þingvellir and made my first visit to Öxarárfoss, I went to Borgarnes via the WHale Ford. Partly because I didn’t want, at this early stage, to hand over 1000kr to use the tunnel but mostly because it was too early to go straight to Borgarnes. It’s a long way round the whole Whale Fjord. I stopped on the south shore and climbed into the back for lunch before driving on.

I was in the pool at Borgarnes by 3.30. For five minutes I had it all to myself, then other people arrived. I made a quick trip into the lane pool but although it’s geothermally heated, it’s not all that warm so mostly I just drited in the 37° hotpot. The 39° pot is ok but the 41° is far too hot.

I got out. I went to the campsite at the top of the fjord and got settled in. It was a bit early so I thought I’d have something to eat. First I had to wash my plate and knife from lunch. No washing up place. Toilets and showers locked. I rained fury and rage down on Borgarnes, my favourite place in the whole country and consulted my Guide to West Iceland. Unless I wanted to go back to Akranes, on the other side of the Whale Fjord, there was only one campsite likely to be open within two hours, near Reykholt, a place I know because it’s Snorri’ Sturlusson’s home. The campsite is actually in the next hamlet to Reykholt, attached to a little country café/bar/restaurant – which I’m also familiar with. I paid, was given my sticker and invited to “stay as long as you like”.

Instantly I revised my woolly plans. This was an interesting part of the countryside. Deildartunguhver, the biggest hot spring in Europe, was just across the fields, the steam literally visible from the campsite. Reykholt was two miles away, two spectacular waterfalls half an hour away. That was Wednesday’s itinerary then.

I walked down the road to take photos of the scenery, since it had now stopped raining. I made friends with three dogs, who followed me along the road and refused to go home. When I got back, I finally washed my plate and knife and had a chat with another visitor at the campsite. He was also washing up and while we discussed the insane price he’d paid for his Range Rover 4×4 converted campervan, he was holding a knife with a blade a foot long. We have a very similar knife at work; I know it’s nowhere near as sharp or dangerous as it looked. And besides, I had a knife in my hand too. The blade is hardly longer than my longest finger but it’s frighteningly sharp so overall, I seemed to be at the advantage if he decided to stop chatting and start attacking. Which he didn’t, and which I didn’t think he would anyway.

I got into bed at ten to eight and put down my book to have what turned out to be an extended nap at nine. There’s not a lot else to do in a dark campervan in the middle of the countryside in the rain.

This blog is literally coming to you from a hot tub. It’s 7.30pm & I’m in the raised pot at Laugavatn Fontana, which I’ve always found too hot but is apparently a great temperature for blogging. The phone is safe in a waterproof case and according to the LCD clock, it’s 11° at the moment. Warmer than Reykjavik and it’s hardly rained today.

Day started with early breakfast because I knew I had to pack. After I packed, I sat & killed some time because I wasn’t picking the car up in Hafnarfjörður until 12 and I wasn’t going to carry my luggage any further than necessary. Then the finger on the bottom corner of my phone felt hot. The phone felt hot. I pulled out the cable – smoking, black and melting. Fortunately, it didn’t quite kill the phone – or me.

I took the bus down to Hafnarfjörður, picked up my van & asked where I could get a new cable. Elko. Just Elko. They’re entirely in the metropolitan area I intended to avoid. I guess if you live somewhere like Egilsstaðir, you make a special multi-day road trip or a cross-country flight for a new cable. Or never use your phone again, I guess. I decided fate would find me one and off I went.

I wanted to get onto the Ring Road without driving through Reykjavik. Too much traffic, too many lanes, too many junctions. I’d looked up a suitable alternative on Google Maps. An hour to Selfoss.

Three hours to Hveragerði, which is ten minutes west of Selfoss. I got horribly, horribly lost in the suburbs. I did stumble across Elko & get a new wire, though. It’s Icelandic PC World – literally. Same layout, same signage, same KnowHow. Just a green frontage & a new name.

I did some shopping while I was lost, so lunch was in the car park at Hveragerði, in the back of the van.

I went to Geysir, watched at least a dozen Strokkur eruptions. Went to Gulfoss. Realised I didn’t fancy a long dark evening in the van so here I am at Fontana, blogging from a hot tub covered in fairylights. No wifi, though, so I don’t know when you’ll get to read this

It was grey and rainy and miserable again on Sunday so I walked down Laugavegur with a plan. It wasn’t early but being a Sunday, the only shops open were the tourist shops and the occasional cafe. That surprised me – as far as I’d seen, Saturday and Sunday opening hours were much the same. They definitely were at the swimming pool I was headed for, I’d checked. I planned to walk but it’s a long way from the city centre (and as it turns out, I didn’t actually know where it was) so I turned back & got the bus from Hlemmur instead.

There’s never bad weather for a trip to the pool. Laugardalslaug has an outdoor 50m pool, an indoor pool split in two halves, four hotpots, a seawater spa (a salty hotpot), a sociable pool, a play pool and a lagoon pool, not to mention saunas, steam rooms, slides and play equipment. I swan ten lengths of the outdoor pool, splashed around the play pool & sampled the cooler hotspots – 40° is more than enough for me. The sun came out. The rain bucketed down. The sun came out. And so on.

I took the bus home and had a late lunch, then I went into central Reykjavik for a bit of shopping & sightseeing. I’d eaten all the cheese so I replaced that but it wasn’t until I was walking home, enjoying a husky paddling in Tjörnin, that I realised I hadn’t got bread. Never mind. I didn’t need it for breakfast and it would only be another thing to carry out to Hafnarfjörður to pick up the campervan.

I woke up stupidly early again – too many people in the guesthouse slamming doors & spending forever putting their shoes on outside my door (sounds ridiculous: you can’t know how noisy this is until you’ve experienced it at 5.30am.

Eventually I had to admit defeat and get up. Breakfast was on offer at the mothership around the corner – no hot fresh rolls sadly but there was toast and real butter and the usual sorts of meat & cheese and cucumbers (who eats cucumber for breakfast? This is not a thing!) and hard-boiled eggs and so on.

Back in my room I was still plaiting my hair and trying to delay going out in the wind and the rain when housekeeping let themselves into my room. 9.30 is a bit early but I’ll bear it in mind for tomorrow.

I went down the road to the far end of Tjörnin, saw some nice dogs, decided I did need my waterproof trousers on after all (learnt that they’re warm & windproof too!) and went down to city hall where I watched ducks dabbling in the moat. I always like watching the birds in Reykjavik. Tourist information is now in city hall so in I went, only to find a huge relief map of Iceland on a table. It’s so interesting! To see where the mountains really are, to see how flat the south is, you can actually see the line of Laki craters, Herðubreið in the middle of nowhere. It was also very hot inside in full waterproofs.

Walking out of city hall, past the new (new! 1881!) parliament building, there’s not a hint to be seen that the Icelandic government has collapsed in the last week and that for the next month, until the snap election on October 28th, there’s no one in charge. Anywhere else in the world there would be anarchy & riots. Iceland? No sign anything’s wrong. Read about how that all happened for yourself.

I crossed Ingolfstorg, saw that the old TIC is now a boutique and went over to the Old Harbour. Unsurprisingly, given the weather, all the whale watching trips were cancelled bur moored were two actual whalers – whether current or previously, I don’t know. I tried to imagine a dead whale on the steep deck. How would you even get it on board?

The subsequent mental discussion about whaling and therefore the 17th century Danish trade monopoly took me down the road, through the roadworks & into the famous flea market. I’ve never been in there. It’s a lot like Wimborne market with more ring-necked jumpers, lava jewellery and dried fish.

Stopping in all the tourist shops on the way, I headed home. I was being picked up at 1.30 to go to the Blue Lagoon and I needed lunch and to pack. Figuring they were easier to put on damp feet than boots, I wore my sandals and nearly froze to death waiting for the minibus in the howling gale. I enjoyed the effect it had on the bushes, though. The top layer has turned a bright red. The lower layers are still yellowish-green. When the wind blows and the leaves turn, the entire shrubbery changes colour. It’s quite magnificent.

First job at the Blue Lagoon was exploration. It’s been expanded since I was last there. The in-water bar has moved and now the silica mud masks come from a facial bar rather than a wooden crate, there are two new bays and part of the cooling basin has been drained, leaving a kind of white silica beach. Other than that, there are minor changes, like a facelift. It’s not unrecognisable but “there used to be a kind of beach somewhere around here”, “why does this feel more open?”, “I think the bridges are new” – and most importantly, they’ve cleaned the floor! No more don’t-think-about-it sludgy hairy bottom. Very little gravel. It needed doing. I’m glad they’ve done it. I took ridiculous selfies and a greeter took & emailed photos of me too.

 I had a blue slushie and later, to stave off starvation pains, some crisps and the thickest richest hot chocolate ever. But as the evening wore on, it became harder to ignore the wind and the rain, especially as the sky grew darker. Soon, lying on your back in hot milky crackling water, looking at a heavy black sky with your nose & ears nearly frozen off in an outdoor pool, you start to question why you haven’t gone home yet. I gave in half an hour before I planned too, before I punched a tourist who was proudly declaring “Viking was disappointing” (it’s a tiny wool-making village which happens to have a black sand beach and a petrol station, what were you expecting of it?) and “Geysir doesn’t fire anymore. Why would I care about seeing it?” (I can’t even).

There is no clock at the luggage store where you shelter from the weather while waiting for your bus and I’d deliberately left my watch behind. Buses park opposite but you can hardly see what company they belong to, let alone the card destination signs, not in the dark with dazzling headlights on.

We came into the back of Reykjavik, past Harpa all lit up in blues and purples. Much to my surprise, we didn’t go to the bus terminal and get doled out into minibuses for once. Today the full size coach was taking us home, even up to bus stop 8 in the narrow streets around the big church.

I have asked all the gods, Norse & otherwise, for better weather. I may die in the campervan if this keeps up.

It’s ridiculous to leave home at 7am for a flight at ten past one. But by the time I’d got petrol, battled rush hour in Winchester and sat through four-way temporary traffic lights in Billingshurst, it was getting on for 11 before I arrived at Gatwick’s Summer Special car park. I have never liked leaving my car in a waiting bay & handing my keys to a stranger but this was official parking & it was right next to Long Stay, with barbed wire fences & gates and… it would have been a much better use of space to just make a traditional car park out of it.

I took the shuttle bus to the airport. Checked in, whizzed through security without getting searched, had a late breakfast of toast (toast with cheese wasn’t available until 12) in a pub actually literally packed to the rafters with men drinking pints of lager and yelling the Drunk Man Cheer.

At 12.25 my gate was announced. I fled & found my plane was Bláfell, Blue Mountain, a flat-topped volcano in northern Iceland. My favourite thing about Icelandair planes is the entertainment system, which I’ve never encountered on low-cost short haul European flights but my second favourite is that all the planes are named after volcanoes.

We were late boarding. We were late moving. We sat for twenty minutes on the edge of the runway – I was watching The Matrix & also watching the time counter on it. We were half an hour late landing at Keflavik, after heading right across Reykjanes and circling over Faxaflói back to the airport through heavy rainclouds – it had been beautiful clear sunny weather all the way to the south coast of Iceland & the couple next to me clung to each other all through the descent. We were late disembarking – staff shortage to operate the jetbridge. Has Icelandic tourism grown too much too fast? Ooh, I don’t know!

I got the bus into town. On the north side was a very bright double full rainbow the likes of which I’ve never seen before. On the south side was black sky & a window so heavily streaked with rain that you couldn’t see out. We stopped at Greyline’s terminal, tumbled into minibuses & went off to our corners of Reykjavik. They now deliver to a dozen tourist bus stops rather than to hotel or guesthouse doors. I’d booked bus stop 6 at the Culture House thinking I might want to have a look at Reykjavik on my way to my guesthouse. In the rain, carrying luggage. I hopped on a different minibus & went to bus stop 8, my actual closest.

Guesthouse Andrea is really an annex of Guesthouse Aurora, which is where I had to go to check in & collect keys and where breakfast is served. Andrea is a basalt-grey fronted house on a residential street in Asgard – the streets around the distinctive Hallgrímskirkja which are named after Norse gods. I’m on Njarðargata, named after the father of the Vanar, Frej & Freyja, if I remember rightly. I may not.

First stop after dropping my luggage was shopping. I was horrified to find my favourite big book/tourist shop has become a Hard Rock Cafe but Eymundsson’s is still intact, fortunately. Other things have changed – there’s something hugely different about the square outside the Greyline office too but I can’t put my finger on what.

Down at Tjörnin, the pond is still water rather than ice so the ducks, geese & swans are not confined yet to the one unfrozen corner. You’re also now requested to not feed them between 15th May and 15th August to help protect ducklings from seagulls.

I was getting hungry by now and it was raining so off I went to 1011 for food. Iceland is getting rid of plastic bags this month – I had my big bag and I’d also brought my Svalbardbutikken shopping bag. I have a mini kitchen in my room – well, I have a sink, a fridge, two hot plates & a couple of cups – so juice, cheese and bread were top of the shopping list. And star crisps, although I had to settle for red cheese as they didn’t have the green ones.

By the time I got back, having got lost in Asgard – Njarðargata is at 90° to Skólavorðustigur, not parallel to it – I was hot and then because the window was open, I was cold. Very cold. I’m going to freeze to death in my campervan on Monday cold. And I’d been up a very long time by then.