What an awful breakfast, well its not truly awful, only in comparison.
I woke up on day 3 at 6:30 am , I was in the one person tent while shai/Amit were sharing the 2 men tent. It's nice to wake up early in a sleeping camp, birds chirping, the air is fresh , blue skies with the glacier and the mountains nearby, people snoring… not me this time since I am now awake. I still cant use the showers since the store is closed so I do the alternative sink shower and wait for them to wake up, when they finally wake up we go to breakfast, this time we opt for the hotel restaurant , the other side from the gas station, now we really tried all the food place this area has to offer.
What a breakfast… it's not grandiose, simply healthy. Today we woke up at an American hotel chain on the way to a state park, hocking hills and this is a decent chain, holiday in express and you simply cannot compare. Well I'll try any way
Cheerios cereal with mil vs granola and yogurt. Scrambled oily eggbeaters eggs vs baked eggs with vegetables inside. Oily fatty sausages, v.s steamed hot dogs. Creamed mystery meat v.s fresh herring.
While I don't like all the food Iceland has to offer, I do recognize the healthiness of it, so much better. It turned out, that for me this is the best breakfast of the trip. These hot dogs are so good and a machine that served good hot chocolate (v.s. yucky orange juice). We stock up on sandwiches and other questionable snacks and begin hiking up the mountain. Since we have a mixed group we don't really know how far to push, perhaps we will split later on with some of us reaching the peak and others not, this is a high mountain, at over 1200 meters with the base starting at 100 meters, it's quite a hike. The lower parts are in a low forested area. The trail is narrow and partially steep at parts. We see some more flowers and cross narrow streams and every so often the view opens up overlooking the glacier, so we take many photos and continue heading up. After an hour or so we reached the 1st formal view point and rest a bit, at this point trails converge and this is the 1st point where we can chose to circle the low end of the mountain instead of climbing higher. All the gang chooses to go. The weather gets somewhat colder, but I am still not dressed, but also windier. While the rest are in hiking boots, I go with sneakers since the boots hurt my feet. But sneakers is not the best choice for a muddy trail which is wet at parts, waters starts to creep in and after a while I give up and just walk full on in the stream, realizing this will be a long wet day, at least I have wool socks on. The trail passes now on the side of the mountain where the glacier is right next to us, but there is little vegetation, mostly low moss, every now and again we hear this strange chirp and fail to identify the source. Finally we do, its some small walking bird, not sure if flightless or not, it chirps once, its friend answers on the other side of us, and they keep calling each other and run forward and approach us with every chirp, it crossed the path about 10 meters in front of me and kept chirping on the other side. We were heading for the 2nd trail breaking point after another hour and something of walking with frequent rest stops. The next 2 parts will be harder, much much steeper. The weather continues to get colder and I give up and put on a jacket. They said it wouldn't rain today and all I can think of Is that they were right when hail begins! And I am in short pants, well hail is not rain. All of us are somewhat intelligent folks, but all of us idiots didn't bring good rain gear!!!, lucky the hail doesn't get us wet, just snaps my face because of the winds, but soon rain does come and my light goose feather (well some kind of feather anyway) seems to invite the rain to go through. We reach the 2nd deciding point and now fog covers the peak and we decided it's not fun to hike up in the cold only to see no views and chose to hike to the other side of the mountain. This mountain has 2 main paths to the peak, each from a different sides and a trail connects them that goes just below the secondary peak of summit. Wet and fogged out, we took the trail to the other side of the mountain, forcing us to go up another 100 meters of elevation. But it was worth it, instead of going back the route we came from, the other side was much prettier, isn't it always is?. While the original side had glacier views, it was mostly barren, but this side had green meadows and lots of wild flowers, but also the fog caught us and for a while it was walking in the cloud, if you ever wondered what the cloud is, I can tell you first hand. From the other high point we finally began mostly descending along a wide path occasionally getting my feet wet some more, Moti and Amit started walking much faster leaving us alone to take more view photos and the various plant life, when we finally reached them after some time, they had been waiting for over 30 minutes for us turtles. From there we detoured to see water falls over basalt shaped like hexagons. Israel has a similar place, the hexagon pool. But it is still impressive to see all these massive hexagon rocks, 45 minutes later we finally returned to camp under purring rain and went for a much needed meal after 6 hours of walking an 18k total. I devoured a basic pizza while the rest had bears with whatever they ate. We drove back to camp where I finally obtained a shower card, used it right away crawled in the tent and was asleep way before 10 pm…
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