Northbound
Iceland has a state church, the “Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland” (aka Þjóðkirkjan or ‘The National Church’). Yes, you read that right, Iceland does not have a separation of church and state. Although this irks me somewhat, one happy result is that Easter is a big national holiday, with Thursday, long Friday AND the Monday after Easter all off from work.
Since I finished teaching on Tuesday 19 April (yay!) we decided to skip town the day after and visit our good friends Kata and Jói in/by Akureyri up north. We last visited them some two years ago (how can it be so long?!?!) so a visit was very overdue. We set out around 2pm, and it was relatively smooth sailing all the way to Akureyri where we arrived around 7pm. The kids stayed awake the entire time, and did pretty well, even though all we had for entertainment was the car-radio which turns out to get very few stations out in the middle of nowhere…
In Borgarnes where we stretched our legs and got a few chocolate easter eggs for the kiddos.
Slightly north of Borgarnes. This photo was taken from a moving car...
Hello mossy lavafields! (Also taken from a moving car.)
We made a quick pitstop on top of Holtavörðuheiði (a big 'heath') because...
... the Wee One needed to wee. I suspect he mostly wanted to pleasure of weeing onto the snow. Fun! ... and Cold!
Chugging right along. We couldn't find our travel/map-book before departure so I don't quite know where this is.
Can somebody decipher that sign for me? 🙂 This is the same house as in the previous picture.
The view from Anna's seat though Bjarki's window.
We saw quite a few horses on our way north. There were a few sheep-sightings too, but no cows. The farmers probably won't let the cows out for another month or so... (Anna took this picture).
Hay-bales. These can be seen by most farms. (Anna took this picture.)
We made a very quick pit-stop at Blönduós, mostly to stock up on biscuits/crackers and some drinks. This is a view of the gas-station there and the mountain behind it. I think I'm looking mostly east...
This is how you know you're approaching Akureyri. Here we are in Hörgárdalur.
And we have arrived! We had initially thought we'd be eating dinner in Blönduós, but since the kids were doing ok and it was kind of early to eat dinner while we were there, we decided to power on. We arrived in Akureyri around 7pm, and shortly afterwards Jói came how with a stash of pizzas. Oh, the power of cell-phones. Also: Yum! 🙂
Jói and Finnur inflate a mattress using a very powerful, very manly air-compressor. 🙂
Click on the image below to see bigger versions of these images (and a couple of extra ones).
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| 2011-04-20 Driving north |
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