While driving, we could see Vatnajokull in the distance. It got closer and closer until we were driving right next to it.

We stopped by our hotel, Fosshotel Glacier Lagoon, and checked in. When I booked the room at this hotel, I was informed a few weeks later that they needed to upgrade us to the Executive Suite, because they were out of the rooms I had tried to book. Yes, please! Our suite was on the very end of the hotel, with a roomy balcony complete with a hot tub overlooking a waterfall. A note at the front said the hot tubs were out of service, however, and we weren’t sure if that meant ours or not. There weren’t really any instructions on how to use it, so we decided we would ask when we returned from our next few stops: the glacier lagoons.

We first drove to Fjallsarlon, the closer of the two to our hotel. It was getting to be later in the day and the boat tours had ended, so it was fairly quiet here. We saw maybe around 20 other people wandering around the edge of the lagoon. We could see the outlet glacier and watched as icebergs floated peacefully around the water. The sky was still overcast, though the sun was trying hard to peak back through.

We then headed down to the road to Jokulsarlon, the bigger of the two lagoons. The icebergs here were massive! There were a lot more people here as well, though the tour buses had left, so I imagine it was still less than during the middle of the day. We walked around the edge of the lagoon for awhile, pointing out icebergs that looked like different shapes.

We then headed across the street to Diamond Beach, where the icebergs travel under the bridge out to the ocean and then wash ashore on a black sand beach. There were a ton of people here, as it neared sunset, though it was so overcast that you couldn’t quite tell it was sunset. At one point, I asked Mr. Strange to poke his head through a hole in an iceberg for a quick photo, but a wave snuck up on him. He got a shoe full of water, and I did not get a picture.

It was getting quite chilly at this point, and we didn’t want his foot to freeze, so we headed back to the hotel. We confirmed that the hot tub in our room did, in fact, work, and got instructions on how to use it. We had made dinner reservations at the hotel for 8:45, so he dried off and then we ate before heading back to check out the hot tub. We made it far too hot, of course, and by the time we got it cooled down, it began to rain, which felt kind of neat with the juxtaposition of the cold rain and the hot water.

The next morning we headed back to Jokulsarlon for a boat tour of the lagoon. It was super foggy, and I was glad we had come the evening before to see the whole lagoon, as we could barely see a few feet in front of us. They gave us floatation suits and a life vest to wear, and soon we were off on an inflatable Zodiac speedboat. There were so many interesting icebergs, and we learned that the blue parts of the iceberg meant that it had recently flipped, as the blue meant it hadn’t been exposed to the sun yet. The boat took us near the outlet glacier, and we saw a small piece fall into the water. On our way back to shore, we saw two seals lounging on an iceberg. They reminded me of my cats, the way one of them rolled off into the water, scared of us.

Back in the car, we headed back to the west for our last outlet glacier at Vatnajokull. We stopped at our hotel to check out and grabbed a couple sandwiches to eat for lunch later. As we drove, the fog cleared and the sun made another appearance. We stopped for gas, then found the road to Svinafellsjokull. We parked in the lot and hiked over to the glacier. The lagoon wasn’t as impressive, but the actual glacier had an otherworldly appearance. In fact, the ice planet for Interstellar had been filmed here, as well as some scenes from Game of Thrones.

We then headed slightly further west to Skaftafell.