When you plan a trip in three days, and when you take along a baby and a toddler, there’s only so much you can plan. All we managed to do that first Sunday was get the camper van and drive 30 minutes to our campground in Reykjavik, and the only scenery we saw was fields of lava rock with mountains in the distance.

I slept like a baby (actually better than the baby) and woke promptly at 8 am. Getting out without waking anyone was a real challenge, as baby Hannah was sleeping in the stroller parked in the middle of the camper. I hopped from my bunk to the counter, then to the floor, squeezed past the baby, and grabbed my shoes and tea things from the closet. Then I pulled a sweater over my PJs and slipped out the door.

It was a drizzly, overcast day. I made myself tea in the hostel kitchen, sat next to a plant, and start writing a blog post on my phone.

“Do you want some ponchos?” asked a man with dark hair and a pair of felt cherries dangling from one ear.

“No thanks,” I said. Then I re-thought my answer. “Wait…are you selling them?”

“No, I’m just giving them!”

Right. Like the Canadian couple, he was at the end of his trip, offloading things he didn’t want to drag home with him. “Okay, I’ll take them! Thank you!”

Eventually I returned to the camper for my laptop, thinking surely the others were awake now. But nope! Turns out I’d conked out a good three or four hours before everyone else and slept through a LOT of chaos.

It all worked out, though. As crazy as it may seem, I’m trying to also get work done on this trip as well as see the sights, and I was able to put in a few hours before everyone else woke up.

Still, by the time everyone had woken, showered, and eaten, it was long past checkout time, so we paid for another day and took our time.

The plan was to take the ring road around Iceland. But should we go North (clockwise) or South (counterclockwise) first?

“Obviously we should go North first,” I said. Being a clockwise girl, it had never occured to me that we might go counterclockwise around the Island.

But the nice Canadians who had showed us how to shift into reverse and given us their unused pasta recommended we go South first. “We did the ring road, and while the North was nice, we loved the South. We could have spent the whole time in Vik. Vik was amazing.”

Okay then. South it is. “That way, if we decide we don’t want to go North after all, we don’t have to,” I said. “We’re adults, we can do whatever we want.”

But first we had to get out of Reykjavik, and that was challenging. There’s nothing like a lot of stoplights to frustrate someone who’s not used to driving stick shift. Plus, we had errands to run, and we ending up visiting multiple pharmacies to find a medicine Annie needed. Hannah, who rarely cries, was inconsolable. It was too much. We pulled over in downtown Reykjavik for a break.

Annie focused on Hannah. Stephen focused on Daniel. I grabbed a PB&J and hopped out to wander and explore. Ah! The bay smelled just like home!

As I wandered between buildings, I saw what looked like a low fog along the ground. I came closer. Was that steam? What was it coming from? Then I saw a small stream that opened suddenly from the ground and cut through the pavement, growing wider and wider until it spilled into a bigger pool.

I stuck my hand in. It was hot! Geothermal water!

Still, I’m not sure why it was there. Do kids in Iceland wade in warm water during the winter like kids in other places wade in cool water over the summer? But surely you don’t want your child getting wet in cold weather!

Anyway. It was all right outside of this cool building.

I had no idea what this building was, but I just looked it up now and realized it’s the Harpa concert hall.

Past the concert hall I walked along the bay, hopping from rock to rock until suddenly I saw this.

It was a geocache. But I didn’t sign the logbook because I didn’t have a pen on me. Of all times to not have a trusty pen in my hair.

Finally, after about an hour, the baby settled down, Daniel got his wiggles out by running around outside, and we drove South. Ah, nature and long straight stretches of road at last! We didn’t stop until we got to Seljalandsfoss, a famous waterfall you can walk behind.

I pulled on the black free poncho, and Annie pulled the blue one over herself and Hannah. We walked out to the thundering falls. This is it! We are really, truly in Iceland.

This is all of us in front of our home on wheels…except for baby Hannah who’s hidden away under a poncho somewhere.

We stopped at another waterfall briefly, and then went on, into the endless sunset.

As we approached Vik, we saw a red-roofed church on a hill, bright and white in the deepening twilight. It was nearing midnight, and when we pulled up to the campground, we realized reception had closed at 11 pm. Oh well. We’d just pay in the morning. We found an empty spot, plugged in, set up the beds, and fell asleep.

The next morning I woke promptly at 8 am again, sneaked past the baby, and headed for the camp showers. But as soon as I saw it was a communal shower I decided I wasn’t quite that adventurous, and got ready in the bathroom instead.

It was time for a Charger Quest. In order to get work done I needed power, and they use a different sort of plug in Iceland. I had a vague idea that there might be a shop just south of the campground that would sell such a thing, and sure enough, when I looked across the field I could see the logo of the discount grocery store.

Walking through the campground and across two streets to the store, with the red-roofed church on the hill to my right, I started to get the idea that Vik might be small. Like, really really small. Smaller than Harrisburg, Oregon. Smaller than Halsey, even.

The grocery store ended up being part of a larger complex with a coffee shop and a huge store that sold every bit of warm weather gear you could want. Did Vik exist only to serve tourists?

I was easily able to find what I needed—a block that converted the Icelandic outlets to USB. Then I walked back to the campground, went into the communal dining area, made tea, and started working. Stephen joined me eventually, rubbing his eyes and making coffee, and then walked off to pay for the campsite.

He came back a few minutes later. “Reception closes at 11 am.” It was 11:10.

No problem—we’d just spend the day in Vik and come back to pay once reception opened again. Stephen pulled out of the campsite and drove over to pick me up in the communal area, inadvertantly forgetting to unplug the power cord from the camper van. And that, my friends, was the end of the power cord.

We headed off to the black sands beach. And it was glorious, reminding me of Oregon with it’s crisp breeze, dramatic waves, and cold, cold water on my bare feet.

At the same time, it was new and fascinating with its expanse of black, pebbly sand. Pictures can’t capture just how black the sand was, how smooth the pebbles were, and how satisfying it sounded when you clinked them together.

On the other side of The Big Cliff was an area where we were told we might be able to see puffins. So we got back in the camper van and drove there. Unfortunatly, there were no puffins. But there were views.

I’m realizing now that I didn’t take many pictures of this place, and I never bothered to get Stephen and Annie’s pictures either. But it was wonderful. We wandered the hills for a bit, looking at the succulents and other tiny mysterious plants that covered them.

On this trip I made the decision to dress warm and practical instead of cute, and 98% of the people I’ve seen so far have made the same decision. The Icelandic people themselves seem to prefer basic black clothing. But every time I see someone deliberately looking great I’m fascinated.

Thus, I took the above picture of Annie while secretly actually taking a picture of the Girl in White.

“Imagine looking that cute while in Iceland,” I whispered to Annie later.

“I bet she’s even showered,” Annie whispered back. (She, too, was put off by the communal shower situation.)

By now, it was afternoon and we were ready to move on down the road. But first, we had to return to the campsite and pay. Guess what? We were too early.

It was 4:30 pm and reception didn’t open again until 6.

“I can burn an hour and a half in Vik, no problem.” I set off walking, leaving the others to take the camper van wherever they chose.

My first stop was the coffee shop, where I attempted to work for a while. Unfortunatly I’d burned through the power of all my devices. With my new power adaptor I couldn’t plug my laptop directly into the wall—I had to plug my battery pack into the USB port and my laptop into the battery pack. But with them both mostly drained I only was able to work ten minutes before the whole system died.

Still, I had a whole cup of jasmine green tea to finish, so I worked on this blog using my phone. And then, tea finished, I decided to walk to the church on the hill.

It was an easy walk. I went up the main street, turned down a short residential street, and there was a footpath up the hill. The whole hillside was flourishing with the most glorious lupines.

From the top of that hill, I could see the whole town of Vik. I could see the black sands beach, the grocery store/coffee shop/warm clothing complex, and the campground where we’d spent the night. I could see footpaths and bridges connecting these locations.

Then, I saw the most mysterious thing of all: behind Vik was nothing but a straight line sand and the ocean beyond. There was no bay. No harbor. No way for boats to land. How can a town exist along the Ocean with no bay? This puzzled me excessively.

It was 6 pm. Should I head back to the campsite? But I could see the campsite, and the camper van wasn’t there. I scanned the whole town until I finally saw our camper van parked next to a playground. After a bit, I saw Stephen walk around and climb into the driver’s seat, so I walked down the hill and met everyone at the campground.

With the campsite paid we’d solved one problem, but the power cord issue still loomed large. We needed a specific type of cord to connect the camper to the campground power sources, and they didn’t carry such cords in Vik. We had to go east to Höfn, but it wasn’t practical to drive all the way there that night, as the hardware store in Höfn was already closed.

“I think we can survive for a while without a power cord,” Stephen thought.

I was less hopeful. “I have to get work done somehow, and all my devices are completely drained.”

So we headed east, to camp at the foot of a glacier and book it to Höfn the next morning.