For the last part of the day we drove east and west along Highway 1, on one of its finer stretches. The road runs under tall steep mountains here, with green valleys cut back into them, and the old sea cliffs are full of caves and dotted with turf houses, because people have been tucking shelter into this rock for a very long time. It is so beautiful that it deserves a post of its won.

We stopped at Rútshellir. It is a man-made cave dug into the base of a rock face, said to be the largest of its kind in Iceland, about twenty metres deep and tall enough to stand well inside, with a restored turf-and-stone sheep pen built across the front. It carries an old, dark story.

A little further on we stopped at Þorvaldseyri, the farm that sits right under Eyjafjallajökull. In 2010 that volcano erupted, the one whose ash cloud shut down air travel across Europe for days. This farm was in the middle of it. The ice cap on top of the volcano melted as it erupted, and the meltwater came down in floods that had to be channelled away, while the ash fell so thickly that the farm was in darkness in the middle of the day and buried the fields. The family stayed and farmed on afterward, and there is a visitor centre here now that tells the story. The volcano and its glacier were hidden in cloud while we stood there, so we saw the farm but not the mountain above it. We will try to come back on a clear day.

From there we drove down to Landeyjahöfn and put the truck on the ferry to the Vestmannaeyjar, the islands off the south coast, and crossed over as the day was ending. We made camp on the island, with the crossing behind us and new ground under us.