Our troubles in Iceland started on the 27th. We went to a couch surfing meet up to talk to like-minded and interesting people, and possibly score a place to stay the night, considering we had nothing lined up. We met an Icelander, who had moved there from the states a few years ago, along with his brother, visiting, and a woman who was staying at his place. A few more people, including some some Germans, a Ukrainian, and some polish countries. One of these people happened to have a backyard that we could camp in, in secret, so we should leave before 8 AM. No problem! Little did we know, we would be leaving much earlier than that..
Before we go on, I have a noteworthy mention about SOL (Survive Outdoors Longer) products. Their escape bivvy, an insulating shell for your sleeping bag, says "waterproof" on the package. It is most certainly not. It rained that night, and my sleeping bag was wet in a half hour, in light rain. Don't buy SOL products, or you will be the more appropriate use of the acronym....
Moving on! There are good moments in some of the worst ones, and seeing the northern lights for the first time in my life was one of them.
I will provide for you the poorest photograph of the northern lights ever captured, taken in in desperation as an effort to provide something for the blog. I cry inside that I am the person to have taken this miserable picture, but I had an iPad. I will try to take a better picture later.
Needless to say, I was ecstatic, and even bothered to wake up the Ukrainian, who had also come with us to camp. Things were good, until the rain. We packed up and left during a dry spell at around 2:45 AM, and grabbed some milk at a convenience mart to eat some cereal. After that, we walked the street almost aimlessly, and proceeded to look for dropped Icelandic krona.. At 6:30, we entered a geothermal pool, and hung out for a couple hours. We felt good, but tired, and figured we would find out what to do. I bought an extra tarp at a hardware store, and we ended up taking the bus out of Reykjavik, to the Mjod station at the outskirts. It is here that our greatest letdown was had. The but passes we bought for 10,000 ISK only made connections within Reykjavik. We were under the impression we would be able to make connections to other cities, and this was not explained to us. We went into the Mjod bus station, and they told us we could trade our passes for 30 bus tickets each (worth 10,500 ISK) so we took it, glad to have been able to get some kind of exchange. But the five tickets we were told it would be to get to Vik, tuned out to be much more. It took 4 to get to Solfoss, and the bus driver told us the transfer would count as our last ticket to get to Vik. When we changed buses, the driver then asked for 10 tickets! It would cost 14 tickets each to get to Vik, each way... I was crestfallen, and started to panick. Hannah suggested we hitchhike, so we did. We were picked up by a lady from Spain who works at a hotel outside of Vik. We stopped sooner than that, at the Eyjafalljokull museum, and camped behind it in the company of some German cyclist going the other way.
I decided there that hiking the volcano was a terrible idea, and it is here that I realized how Ill prepared we were for Iceland. We hitched the rest of the way to Vik with some picture happy American tourists on their way to Vik for lunch. We decided to have lunch too, and they ended up buying us lunch as well! After that, more geothermal pools (as is the theme of our trip..) and on our way to the plateau in Vik. We saw some friendly horses, some less friendly sheep (they ran away) and puffins! 
We camped on the bluffs that night, and woke up late, as usual.. Black Beach is pretty cool (other side of the plateau) and I promise to put up some film pictures at a later date, because our iPad was dead.
And at this point, we headed back to Reykjavik.
We hitched a short distance with some Germans in their sweet travel van! And then we walked some more. We met cows 
(This picture isn't where we are....)
And some some super happy sheep, who thought we had tasty treats. They were so cute! But we disappointed them, so they proceeded to ignore us, thus, no pictures...
Along the way, we found a young sea bird, stranded on the roadside. Hannah said she read a poster in Vik saying they fly away, but can't keep flying with their young wings, so they look for rivers to take them back to the ocean. Roads, to a bird, look like rivers, so they get stranded, and cannot fly away. So I took it to a river! It did bite me though...
After this, we were picked up for our last stretch into Reykjavik by an Icelandic woman from an east coast farm, on her way to Reykjavik for college. It was fun talking to her, and sharing information about our countries. She informed us that the bird I picked up will often spit terrible smelling stuff on people if they're stressed, so luckily that didn't happen..
Now, we are in Reykjavik at an expensive campground, and we will take the bus to the north west tomorrow morning.
As a final note, there is one more terrible thing that happened.. I lost my one of a kind, homemade French press when we left for Vik, and I will never see it again.. So sad!
Right now, we are pretty tired, happy, and looking forward to tomorrow. Goodnight!
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