We woke near Djúpivogur. The weather was the same as the night before. Low cloud, wet air, and rain on and off. Nothing had cleared. The forecast was not good for the day either.

So we had two choices. Stay where we were and wait. Or drive the rest of the East Fjords and take them as they came.

We decided to drive. There are a few places down here we still want to see properly. Moving north put us closer to the roads into the highlands, and that seemed like a better use of a wet day.

But we did stop at Djúpivogur first. The town sits on a narrow point of land between two fjords, Berufjörður and Hamarsfjörður. About four hundred people live there. It is a very old trading place. The main building on the front is called Langabúð, and it is one of the oldest commercial buildings in Iceland.

Then we drove about half a mile west of the town to see Eggin í Gleðivík. The name means the Eggs of Merry Bay. It is a work by the Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðmundsson and it was put in place in the summer of 2009. There are thirty-four stone eggs set out along the shore. Each one is a copy of the egg of a bird that nests in this area, and each is a different size and pattern. They stand right at the water, so you walk the line of them with the bay on one side.

After that we got back on the road. The East Fjords road follows the coast closely. It goes in to the head of one fjord, back out the other side, then does the same again for the next one. The sea is on one side and a mountain wall is on the other. There is not much room between them.

Today the cloud sat halfway down the slopes. It cut the tops off all the mountains. Water ran off the rock everywhere. Thin waterfalls came down the fjord walls in long lines.

The rock here is the oldest in Iceland. It is about thirteen to fifteen million years old. You can see this from the truck cab. The cliffs are made of lava flows stacked one on top of another. Each layer was one eruption that spread out and cooled. The layers run along the walls in flat bands for miles. There are no active volcanoes in this part of the country. This ground moved east and went quiet a long time ago.

We kept moving the rest of the day. From inside the truck it was still a good drive. We were warm and dry and watched it all go past through the glass. Most of our pictures from today were taken from the truck cab. The road, the mountains and the water.

Then the road turns inland and climbs away from the coast. That is the end of the fjords. It comes down into Egilsstaðir.

Egilsstaðir was our first stop on Route 1 when we started. So today we closed the circle. We have now driven the whole road.

The town is not old. It was founded in 1947. It grew where the roads met, and it is one of the youngest towns in Iceland. It sits on a lake called Lagarfljót. The lake is long and grey and full of glacial silt. You cannot see into the water at all.

We are camped a little outside town at Svartiskógur. The name means black wood. There is a real wood here, and that is not common in Iceland.

When the Norse arrived, about a quarter of the country was covered in birch. By the early nineteen hundreds it was down to about one percent. The trees were cut for timber and charcoal. Land was cleared for grazing. Then sheep ate the young trees, so nothing grew back. Planting started again in 1907.

That leaves us with a short list and some time. We have three ways to go from here.

The first is the highlands. This is why we came north. Hrafnabjargafoss and Aldeyjarfoss are about a hundred and sixty-five miles west of here. Askja is south of them, deep in the interior. The way in to Askja is an F road with rivers to cross and no bridges. After several days of rain, the rivers matter more than the track. The weather matters too. There is no reason to drive that far and then stand in fog.

The second is to go back and finish the East Fjords. We passed a few places today that we would rather drive to.

The third is the Faroes. Our ferry out leaves from Seyðisfjörður, one fjord east of here. It stops at Tórshavn on the way to Denmark. So the islands are not a detour. They are already on our route. We could get off there and take a later sailing.

We have not decided yet. The weather and a call to the ferry company will decide most of it for us tomorrow.