Iceland is so picturesque that you can literally find a “picture” anywhere. I originally thought that being in a car driving for hours every day would be a waste of time, but it turned out to be a great part of the trip and an amazing way to see the country! We would constantly stop on the road because we see a nice view, and we had to stop ourselves from doing that too frequently (but it’s so hard!). Today, we will be driving through the northern Iceland and explore a few attractions (focusing on turf houses!). We took the scenic route, meaning driving around the fjords, not cutting through it to make sure we see the best views.
Laufás
Laufás is very close to Akureyri. This is considered a rich farm and one of the larger turf houses you will see around Iceland. It dated back as early as the 800s and it was rebuilt in the 1800s. Super cool to visit!
Grafarkirkja
This is one of the 5 church turf houses standing in Iceland and this is believed to be the oldest one. You can see it from the main road when we were driving, but it took us a while to find the right turn to drive into the parking lot. As you can see from the picture, this is not the most popular tourist spot (there is nobody else but us!), but we appreciate the fact that we can have the place all to ourselves. From the parking lot, you just follow the narrow path between the grass and flowers to the church. It is such a beautiful place surrounded by mountains and greeneries. Unfortunately, you cannot go inside, but we walked around it and it is super cool to see these type of architecture, especially in the middle of nowhere.
Glaumbær
This is another cute historic turf houses worth visiting in Skagafjörður. There is a beautiful church with a small cemetery right next to the turf house. Since this is on a small hill, it also offers you a nice view.
Reykjafoss
This is our last stop of the day before heading to our Airbnb. It was super hard to find (we almost gave up, and glad we didn’t). We saw a couple people who were parked at the bottom of the hill trying to look for it as well. It turns out that you will need to drive up the hill a little to see the gate. What’s crazier is that from the parking lot to the waterfall, there are 4 more gates you need to pass through on the trail and I was wondering why is there a need for all these gates! Anyways, one thing we didn’t know is that there is a small natural hot spring next to the waterfall (we didn’t take picture because there are people in it), we would have brought our swimsuit with us if we knew! Anyways, the waterfall is also very nice and again, this is one of the attractions with very few tourists around and we loved it!
After 325 km / 200 miles, we finally reached our Airbnb for the night, which is a dairy farm I think. We didn’t want to walk around too much because it was already quite late (although it looks bright in the picture, it’s almost 10pm) and also it was private property, so we didn’t want to be lurking around. But we definitely saw a lot of sheep hanging around the place!
