Ring Road Day 2

We all slept in fairly late today (pushing our checkout time a little), and weren't on the road til 12. Weather was very windy and a bit rainy today, with lots of low clouds preventing our view of what probably were very amazing mountains :(. We drove out around Vatnsnes peninsula (yes, the combination of consonants in many Icelandic words just doesn't seem to make sense) to see "Iceland's largest seal colony", which mom tells me was a total of 6-7 seals (it was a long way down the path, and about half-way, after seeing some birds sitting on the rocks, I decided it wasn't worth withstanding the horrible weather, and returned to the warm car). Along the way we saw a lot of green farmers' fields, and the bottoms of green mountains. Tons of sheep and horses of course. We also saw some sort of contraption where people had hung fish to dry, so that was kind of cool. They were dried whole, and looked like freaky deep-water fish. Daren decided to take us on a "short-cut", which ended up being a narrow gravel road with some steep grades, which wound around and over a bunch of hills. It reminded me of Mike's and my trip to find the chasm in the Otago peninsula in NZ, but anyways... it was an exciting drive.

We stopped at a gas station which had some fast food, and I tried an Icelandic favourite...the hot dog, or "pylsur". Mine was extra exciting though, because it was wrapped with bacon. It was longer than a normal hot dog, and came with onions and the usual toppings, but you could also get chili ketchup and some sort of un-translatable sauce (which I didn't try, though it looked like an orange-y mayo). It was quite tasty. I know that Iceland people love their hot dogs, because I read a magazine there which had an article on 8 different ways to dress up your hot dog. And just about everyone in the line ordered one. On another food note, candy here seems to contain a lot of marzipan and licorice. Ew.



Afterwords, we stopped at Glaumbaer, where we saw an old-fashioned (preserved) turf farm. It consisted of a number of little joined huts with walls made of slabs of earth, and roofs of turf (grass). Very cool, looked kind of like hobbit holes. We also stopped at a little store selling Icelandic crafts (mostly wool stuff, some purses made of FISH SKIN, and keychains of all sorts of bird feet...ew). It was really interesting. I just remembered another little interesting fact - since wood is scarce in Iceland, they use driftwood to build things such as fences. When a piece of driftwood washes up on a farmer's land, they can put their mark on it and claim it.

We continued on to the coast and drove along Skagafjordur, which was supposed to have spectacular views. The coast was quite nice, and again lots of green farmers' fields with sheep and horses, and we could see that there were bottoms of what probably were spectacular mountain ranges...unfortunately couldn't see the tops of many of them though. At one point along the coast (I think it was near the fishing town of Hosfos), we saw some very cool black basalt columns...hard to describe but I will post a pic later. Near the end of the peninsula, we got to take a series of VERY LONG tunnels which went under this giant mountain and joined with the fishing town on the other side. The tunnels were very cool...not rounded out on the inside like our tunnels, and often one-way (they had pull-outs for passing all along though).


Black Basalt Columns on the Coast of Skagafjordur
Tonight we are staying in a cute apartment in Akureyri. We went out for dinner, and I had a traditional Icelandic meal. It was fish hash (not sure of the Icelandic name) - a combination of fish and potatoes with cream sauce in a casserole dish, topped with cheese. It was sort of like a creamy baked macaroni and cheese. It was delicious.