We leave Iceland tomorrow. We came off the ferry on the twelfth of June, sixty two days ago.

Sixty two days is a long time to spend in one single country, and we saw a great deal of it. As a reference, the average tourist stay in Iceland during the peak summer months is around 10 days. We did not see all of it but we saw a lot of it. Iceland is about forty thousand square miles, the size of Kentucky, and it holds countless number of waterfalls, and canyons, calderas, tuyas, lava fields, ice caps, fjords, small towns, historical places and black beaches. A few easily accessed by the ring road but the vast majority only reachable by 4WD dirt roads and the most remote ones located deep in the highlands and only accessed by F roads or even smaller tracks. That is not enough time to reach them all. There were things we did not do. We never made it to Mælifell for instance, the green cone on the black sand near Mýrdalsjökull that next to Askja on our list. We leave it for another time when we can come back and concentrate exclusively on the highlands remote areas.

This morning we left the farm at Möðrudalur and drove east toward the ferry. The ferry is the Norröna, and it sails from Seyðisfjörður to the Faroes and on to Denmark. It is the only car ferry off the island.

We stopped at Rjúkandifoss, which sits beside the ring road in the east. The name comes from the Icelandic word for smoke, for the spray it throws off. Then we walked in to Stórurð, which means the big boulders. It is a field of huge rocks left behind by a glacier, with pools of clear blue-green water among them, and it sits under the Dyrfjöll, the door mountains, a jagged ridge that stands over that part of the east. Far fewer people come here than to the ring-road stops.

To reach the ferry you come first to Egilsstaðir, the main town in the east, and then climb the Fjarðarheiði pass, two thousand feet up and seventeen miles of road, before dropping into the fjord on the far side. Seyðisfjörður sits at the bottom, under Mt Bjólfur on one side and Strandartindur on the other, both over three thousand feet. We are camped here tonight.

This fjord was the first thing we saw when we arrived, and it is the last thing we will see when we go. The mountains on both sides drop steep to the water, and waterfalls come off them the whole length of it.

We had meant to leave on the twentieth of August. A place came free earlier on the ferry, so we sail on the thirteenth instead. That gives us a week in the Faroe Islands on the way south. Iceland was the whole summer. The Faroes are next, and they start tomorrow.