It rained all the eighth and it did not stop once, so a hike would have been wet and cold and not worth doing.

The camper needed nothing, so there was nothing to clean and nothing to fix, and we rested. It was a welcome rest.

The ninth looked no better on paper, but we went anyway. The plan was two waterfalls in the highlands, Aldeyjarfoss and Hrafnabjargafoss.

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.

We left the campground at the national park on a very wet day. The rain was steady, but there was one stop we wanted to do before moving on, so we drove the short way to Svínafellsjökull.

We woke to clear skies. Then we drove east toward Múlagljúfur canyon, and by the time we got there the clouds had come in. We started up anyway. As we climbed the weather began to clear again, and by the time we were high on the trail it had mostly broken open.

The next day we came back to our own route, and the first thing on it was Jökulsárlón again. This time we did it differently. Instead of the main car park by the bridge, we drove to a parking area further east, one that most tourists never use. There is a network of trails out here on the sand, and one of them runs all the way from the glacier in the national park down to Diamond Beach, about seventeen kilometres end to end. We did not do the whole thing. We walked a little over two kilometres of it, out to a quiet stretch of the lagoon.

We camped that night at Stokksnes with the German family, out on the peninsula under the mountain, and spent the next morning there with them.

We left the campground at the national park and drove east toward Jökulsárlón, the glacier lagoon. On the way the size of the icecap began to show itself. Glacier tongues came down out of the mountains one after another, reaching from the high ice out onto the plain, and you started to feel how much of Vatnajökull there is behind them. The day was clear and bright.

For most of Iceland’s history this stretch of the south coast was among the hardest parts of the country to reach by land, sealed off less by mountains than by the meltwater draining off the ice above it. The rivers crossing the plain changed course too often for a bridge to hold, and the terrain shaped by that instability, sand flats, braided channels, glacier tongues reaching down to meet them, still defines the walk above Skaftafell.

Skaftafell sits inside Vatnajökull National Park, on a strip of land where the ice cap’s outlet glaciers meet lowland once farmed for centuries before the park absorbed it. The area gives a rare vantage point in Iceland, a place where an ice cap, an active volcano buried beneath it, and an outwash plain shaped by that combination are all visible within a short walk of each other.

We wanted to reach Skaftafell, an area in Vatnajökull National Park where the glaciers come down close. Today was the drive east to get there. It turned into a day of small stops, waterfalls and cliffs right beside the road that almost nobody pulls over for.