This photo was taken at Hofn in southeastern Iceland. We were in Iceland from May 24-June 6. May is considered the "shoulder season" - there are a few tourists, but not too many. We didn't pre-book any of our hotels, and didn't have problems finding a place to stay. It was common for the highway to be empty in both directions as far as the eye could see. Come June 1st, the high season begins. We happened to see the ferry come in from Denmark on June 1st, and caravan after caravan came spilling out onto the road with license plates as diverse as UK, Romania, Germany and Spain. This also meant a huge increase in hotel prices. When the Hotel Hofn wanted to charge us 30% more than we had been paying elsewhere, we thought it was just a part of the seasonal increase. The room was ok, but nothing special.

We went out in the evening to look at the ocean. The water was perfectly still, and the sky (at times) was almost the same color as the water. I fooled around trying to take some long exposures by resting the camera on a park bench as I was too lazy to walk back to the hotel and get the tripod. None of them turned out. The best shot ended up being this rather simple composition with a normal-length exposure and interesting clouds.

The Hotel Hofn advertised breakfast from 7am-10am. By my way of thinking, this should mean that a person could show up in the dining room at 10am and eat. By Graem's way of thinking, it means that everyone should be finished eating and ready to clear the dining room by 10am. In either case, we went for breakfast at 9:40 (plenty of time to grab a piece of toast from the buffet and a cup of coffee), only to find that the dining room was locked and breakfast had been put away. I was fuming about the scathing review I was going to write for the Hotel Hofn online, and Graem was insisting that it was actually our fault for being 'late'. When we checked out, they apologized for putting the breakfast away early and deducted 6500 kronur from our bill, making the hotel only slightly more expensive than what we were used to paying (for hotels that included breakfast). I made a mental note to increase the hotel's rating from 1 star to 2 in my review.

I intend to review all of our Iceland hotels, though haven't gotten around to it yet... the pain of being home from Iceland is still too strong for me to think about the trip objectively in the past tense. All of my reviews will be glowingly positive or neutral, except for the Hotel Hofn. If I return to Hofn, I'll probably stay in one of the two guesthouses there rather than the hotel. I know nothing about the guesthouses, but I figure it would be worth the gamble.