DAY TWO: SOUTH ICELAND

Day Two involved the longest drive of the trip, 568km from Hvolsvollur to Mjoifjordur via black beaches, puffins, lava fields, ice caps, a glacier lagoon cruise, mountains, fjords and ending the day with the most difficult road I've ever driven on in my life.

We didn't do a whole lot of research before heading to Iceland. Sometimes that paid off, sometimes it didn't. We went in peak summer season and booked our accommodation about two months before, which meant our choices were extremely limited and everything was super pricey. We did a mixture of guesthouses, AirBnBs and ended with a super expensive (but worth every single cent) stay in a Viking Hotel.

The small bit of research I do included a turn off at Dyrholaey, which has the most amazing views over the black beaches of Southern Iceland. The sign off the main ring road is TINY and if I didn't know about it through research we never would have made the turnoff. And we never would have seen puffins. PUFFINS!! Omg they are adorable! Sarah also started crying when we saw them, what a crybaby. Haha!

Fields of lava cover much of Iceland, formed when Laki erupted in 1783 and killed 20% of Iceland's population, and over 6 million people globally. It's just acres and acres of moss covered lava that is now just a barren wasteland. I've never seen anything like it! All you can see from every direction is this strange shade of green covering random bulbous shapes.

The original plan was to head to Jökulsárlón for the famous glacier lagoon tour. I looked into it that morning to discover it was completely booked out. OMG I was so upset and furious at myself for not organising this better! I also didn't tell Sarah that it was booked out and I'm not sure what I was going to say to her when we got there.... I figured I'd worked something out by then! We stopped off on the way for snacks and a toilet break, and I picked up a brochure that contained an advert for the glacier lagoon at Fjallsárlón and thank the gods there were still spaces left on this tour! The one thing I desperately wanted to do in Iceland was a glacier cruise and thankfully I didn't have to admit to my failures!

We had the most rubbish weather driving that day, it was cold and raining, and worst of all the sky was a plain flat grey colour that never looks good in pictures. Then for the 1 hour of our glacier cruise, the clouds parted and we had blue sky for about 20 minutes and it was fabulous! It gave the icebergs such a weird blue/grey colour. We took the boat close to the glacier and as we were parked for what seemed like forever (we were there for so long it got super awkward) and part of the glacier came down and made a huge deafening noise caused some pretty decent waves afterwards.

Across the road was another black beach, this one covered with icebergs! This was the most random site I've ever seen in my life, sitting on a beach of black sand watching icebergs floating down the river to the ocean. So incredible!

Sitting on my Ice Throne.

Jökulsárlón Glacier.