Relative Something

On this trip, we selected a wide variety of overnight hotel accommodations, all of which offered pretty similar and thoroughly satisfying continental breakfast choices. The pub of Hotel Laxness offered most of the usual bread varieties, a toaster, jams, cheeses, hardboiled eggs, oatmeal porridge, beans, breakfast meats, scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, sometimes pickled herring, yogurt, fruit, muesli cereal, sometimes a waffle, coffee, tea, juices that we had become familiar with from previous days.

We checked out of our rooms and set out for a 50-minute drive around the coastline of the Hvalfjörður fjord toward the Glymur waterfall. We didn’t tend to stop on the road to photograph sheep or horses that pepper the landscape but these three had just stepped off the road after stopping us, so I took a quick pic before we continued.

Glymur was one of the more challenging hikes we tackled.

In addition to areas of easy, wide trail, some rock hopping and a bit of hands and feet grappling at steep elevation changes were required.

Research had made us aware of a river crossing that consisted of a log and a cable hand-hold that can barely be discerned in the distance of the photo above (click to enlarge). We all agreed a decision could be made when we reached that point. I’m glad we chose to press on because the route included a pretty cool cave that was worth the experience.

When we dropped down to the river level, there was a couple just crossing that we were able to observe in action. The water flow was a raging torrent compared to the picture of the log crossing Cyndie had seen earlier. I found this example on the web:

This is what it looked like for us:

Mike was putting tension on the cable to reduce the wobble for the person crossing, the same as the guy had just done for the woman he was hiking with who preceded him. As if the water rushing over the rocks wasn’t enough to make it a “no-go” decision for us, seeing that the guy needed to duck under the cable and switch hands to get on the other side of it when reaching the log made it all the more convincing.

It meant we wouldn’t actually reach a view of the high drop of the Glymur Falls, but we were all just fine with that outcome, safe and dry as we were.

On the way back, we ventured to an outcrop that was way more dramatic than photos convey. Mike made a good effort to show the steepness.

We got all the adventure we wanted out of this hike on this day.

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