Leaving Stykkisholmur we turned onto a gravel road. Our route wound back and forth, traversing the fjords, avoiding the occasional sheep in the road, and seeing lots of swans and some geese.
We got a tour of a reconstruction of the first home in Iceland of Eirikur the Red and Leifur Eiricksson - Eiriksta∂ur. The tour included a summary of the history of the settlement of Greenland and discovery of North America.
Eirikur often did not get along with his neighbors, so after a feud that resulted in him killing a neighbor, he was exiled from this valley. He dismantled the wooden parts of his turf-covered long house and moved them to a nearby island, where he built a new turf house around the wood. However, his new neighbor on the island was a relative of the person he had killed, so after a couple more years, another bloody feud with that neighbor led to him being exiled from Iceland altogether. Instead of returning to Norway (where he was born) or some other European country, he had heard rumors of a land to the west of Iceland, so he decided to try to find it. He sailed west and found land. There he settled in an area which turned out to be one of the best places in what he named Greenland.
He was a good sailor, and he made several voyages back and forth between Iceland and Greenland. He was a bit of a salesman and he built a business by charging people for transport and help with moving to Greenland. He managed to convince over a thousand of the approximately forty thousand people in Iceland at the time to move to Greenland.
His son Leifur eventually tried to replicate that business model with voyages to and settlements of North America. He was not as successful, partly because the native people in the area where he settled resented the amount of fishing that the settlers did.
There was a small gift shop here and my wife bought a knitted loop scarf.
We drove a while longer and arrived at an area less “volcanoes by the sea” and more “glacially sculpted valleys.” Here we stopped at Gauksmÿri, a horse farm. They train, breed, stable, and rent horses. They also serve horse meat in their restaurant, where we ate lunch. Horse meat is pretty tasty - like beef but perhaps a bit tougher.
They put on a demonstration of the five gaits of Icelandic horses. The four common gaits: walk, trot, tölt, and gallop (or canter); plus a fifth gait: pace. The tölt is a very smooth gait for the rider, and the horses could move quite quickly in this gait.
After the demo we could visit the horses in the stable, and these were almost all as friendly as the ones we met the day before.
I bought some lava grit soap in the gift shop without asking about the price beforehand - it is the most expensive soap I’ve ever purchased. They also had several fancy-looking chickens at the farm.
There was still quite a ways to go to Akureyri, but not far from here we joined the main route from Reykjavik to Akureyri so we returned to paved roads. We stopped at a gas station / gift shop / bathroom break with a fun motorcycle artwork outside.
We stayed at an Icelandair hotel in Akureyri with small-ish but very efficient rooms. They had a sense of humor in the room decor, and many of us visited the happy hour at their bar.
Akureyri is the “big town of northern Iceland.” It is fairly large, and is a cruise ship port, so there are a number of tourist amenities. Our tour included a steak dinner at the hotel restaurant. I do not recommend you order steak in Iceland – the steaks would have been very expensive if not included in the tour, but they were tough and stringy. The lamb we had elsewhere was much nicer.
Afterward we walked to the town’s botanical garden. I was impressed by the wide range of plants all growing outside.
