Vik

It was at Vik that I finally began to digest the fact that just because it's shown in the road atlas, that doesn't mean it's a town - or not anything we'd recognise as a town anyway.

Iceland has a population of around 300,00, of whom 115,000 live in Reykjavik. The towns we had seen so far were Keflavík/Njarðvík, near the airport, and the market-gardening centre of Hveragerði - small towns, but equipped with supermarkets, shopping precincts, streets, all the elements that I take for granted when I think of towns. And that's pretty much what I was expecting to find at Vik. The guide book called it a town, and said that unusually for a coastal town, it had no port; also that the older part of the town is on the coastal plain, but that the new buildings are higher up the slopes, and that this is because when Katla erupted in 1918 the plain was flooded, and so much debris was (many? were?) washed down that the coast was extended by 500 yards (as we were saying, geology just keeps on happening; I am disconcerted by the matter-of-fact way Icelanders deal with this).

So, after a happy morning playing on the black beach, we drove into Vik looking for lunch, parked round the side of the petrol station, where we noticed that there was a shop and a café, and strolled off to see what the other options were.

There weren't any. This was it.

There was a school, and a church perched high up above the town. There was a post office. There was a small housing estate, with a path down to the water, where there was a sculpture called 'For' looking across the sea to its twin in Kingston upon Hull. There were a couple of industrial units, a gifts and crafts shop, and the garage we'd already noticed. If there was anything else, we didn't see it.

This isn't a complaint. We ate at the café: durham_rambler had the soup, and I had fish and chips, which were served with pink sauce of the sort prawn cocktail used to be served in, back in the 1970s when we still ate prawn cocktail. The fish was lovely and fresh, and perfectly cooked. The craft shop was probably the best of the entire trip: the knitwear department was upstairs, and you could look down into the workshop and watch the knitters. I bought a waistcoat, and eventually decided against a poncho (though I see it's still available on their web site).

I liked Vik, it was an entirely satisfactory lunch stop; but it wasn't what I had been expecting - at it was the point at which I began to recalibrate my expectations.