It is our third consecutive day of rain.
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Just outside of Holmavík, we saw yesterday's iceberg again. It had drifted closer to shore. |
| We drove for quite awhile before we got to Þingeyrar, which was the site of the first and longest serving monastery in Iceland, from 1153 to 1555. The monks of the monastery authored some of the important medieval Icelandic literature. This stone church - Þingeyrakirkja - was built around the turn of the century. |
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A 15th century alabaster altarpiece inside the monastery. |
| We also drove pass this mock shrine of some sort. Not sure who that is supposed to be. Maybe Baldur. |
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The next church we saw was turf-roofed. The entrance fee was 100 Icelandic Krónur, so we stayed outside and got some nice pictures. |
| We saw some strange jagged mountains. (We were not to find anything like these again, the rest of our drive around Iceland). |
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By evening, we arrived in Akureyri. You can see here that the car wasn't as spotless as before, but this was actually quite clean by Icelandic standards. |
| See Ming found an antique store, but everything was too expensive so she did not buy anything. |
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We had dinner at Frederic V's restaurant. The food was great. |
| The airport was just a few minutes away. We got on this little plane to fly to Grimsey which is bisected by the Arctic circle at 66°North. |
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When we landed, the weather was quite rotten, so we went indoors immediately. The family that ran the guesthouse and tourist center were looking quite bored inside. |
| The obligatory picture with the famous Grimsey signpost. |
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We went outside to look for puffins. We saw a few and snapped this blurry pic, and then went back indoors. We were on the island for about an hour and we only spent about fifteen minutes outside. |
| On the flight back to Akureyri, See Ming took this picture of the setting sun her window. |
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Back in beautiful Akureyri. This is right outside Guesthouse Ibudir, our accomodation for the night. The room we had was really nice. |
| Akureyri is quite nice. We took our time driving around town for awhile. |
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As it got late, we decided to wait for the sun to set. However, since light was bouncing off the clouds in many places, we didn't know where the sun actually was. |
| We drove up this Hlíðarfjall Mountain and parked our car by the side of the road. |
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Akureyri, as seen from the top of Hlíðarfjall Mountain.
| Sunset at Akureyri. It was a year ago today that my wife and I started dating, so this was a special occasion for us. |
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Midnight. The sun is behind the mountain. Almost everyone was asleep by then but a car drove up and a young man wound down his window to advice us not to wait for the sun to set, lest we would be up all night. They were missing the point, but we didn't bother to explain. |
| Back to Day 5 <<< | >>> Day 7: The drive to Reykjahlíð |
