The direct flight from Copenhagen on Atlantic Airways takes about two hours, and it deposits you on Vágar, one of the smaller western islands, rather than anywhere near the capital. From the airport I drove east on Route 10 through the Vágatunnilin, the undersea tunnel that connects Vágar to Streymoy, a crossing of a few minutes that saves what used to be a ferry trip.

Tórshavn itself announced itself slowly, a scatter of colorful roofs below a hill, and I checked into Hotel Føroyar, which sits above the town with a long view down over the harbor and out toward Nólsoy island. I dropped my bag and walked straight down into Tinganes, the small peninsula of turf-roofed, tar-black wooden buildings that has housed the Faroese government since medieval times.

Dinner that first night was at Áarstova, a low-ceilinged, candlelit restaurant just off the harbor known for slow-braised lamb, and I ate it with the particular hunger of someone who has been awake since 4am and crossed two time zones to get there.

I gave myself two days to circle Streymoy without rushing. The first stop was Kirkjubøur, a village of perhaps a dozen houses that was once the religious center of the islands, home to the roofless stone ruins of Magnus Cathedral, begun around 1300 and never finished. Beside it stands Roykstovan, a wooden farmhouse still lived in by the Patursson family and reputedly one of the oldest continuously inhabited wooden buildings in the world.

From there I drove north to Saksun, where a tidal lagoon sits behind a narrow channel to the sea, ringed by cliffs that seem to close the village off from everything. A short detour to Tjørnuvík gave me my first look at Risin og Kellingin, the Giant and the Witch, two sea stacks that local legend says were turned to stone trying to drag the islands back to Iceland.

Day three was for water rather than roads. The Vestmanna cliffs boat tour runs a couple of times daily in summer, costs roughly 450 to 500 DKK depending on season, and takes about two and a half hours through sea caves and beneath nesting kittiwakes and guillemots. Ours turned back early when the swell picked up, which the crew treated as entirely routine.

Mykines is the westernmost inhabited island and the one everyone comes for, mostly because of the puffins. The ferry leaves from Sørvágur, takes about 45 minutes, and runs on a limited schedule, sometimes only a handful of sailings a week, so I had booked mine before leaving home and still built in a spare day in case the crossing was cancelled.

It wasn't. We landed in Mykines village, population somewhere in the low double digits year-round, and walked the hour and a half out to Mykineshólmur across a small footbridge, past a lighthouse and thousands of puffins standing at the cliff edge like they were posing for it. I sat down on the grass at one point simply because there was nowhere else to be.

The walk back felt shorter, the way return walks always do, and I caught the last ferry with about twenty minutes to spare, which is apparently normal here and not a sign that anything had gone wrong.

The Eysturoyartunnilin, opened in 2020, is an 11.24-kilometer undersea tunnel with a roundabout carved into the rock partway across, lit in shifting colors and genuinely disorienting the first time you drive through it. The toll is billed automatically to the rental car and runs roughly 100 to 140 DKK per one-way crossing. On the far side, Gjógv sits at the head of a narrow sea gorge, and I had a late lunch of fish soup at Gjáargarður guesthouse looking down into it.

From Klaksvík, the second-largest town in the islands, a short ferry crosses to Kalsoy in about 20 minutes, with only a few sailings a day, so timing matters. The hike out to Kallur lighthouse takes roughly an hour and a half round trip along a ridge with the sea dropping away on both sides, and it's the spot where scenes from the James Bond film No Time to Die were shot.

Klaksvík itself is worth slowing down for: Christianskirkjan church, built in 1963 with a striking modernist stone interior, sits a short walk from the harbor, and the town has a working fishing-fleet energy that Tórshavn, more government town than port these days, has largely lost.

I kept the last day loose on purpose. A slow morning coffee at Kaffihúsið in Tórshavn, a wander past the wooden Havnar Kirkja cathedral, and one more circuit of Tinganes to see it without the previous week's rain.

Dinner was the one reservation I had made months in advance: KOKS, the Michelin-starred restaurant that moved from its old harbor-adjacent turf house to a lakeside site near Leynavatn, serving a Faroese tasting menu built on fermented, dried, and foraged local ingredients that runs roughly 2,000 to 2,400 DKK per person before wine, as of recent seasons.

I flew out of Vágar the next morning into fog again, which felt, by that point, entirely appropriate.