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Vastnesnes Peninsula Restaurant and B&B at Sunset The menu was written on a big chalk board, the bread was homemade and as usual, it was a bit pricey, but good. In the middle of nowhere, we saw a sign for the Vastnessnes Peninsula Restaurant so we stopped and had a fresh trout dinner before finding our stop for the night. Golden Grasses at Hvitserkur Tide Coming in And Sun Going Down at Hvitserkur The afternoon sunlight was turning the long grasses into golden waves. Tourists were doing the usual dangerously stupid things, scrambling down steep, loose cliffs. On the way we stopped to look down at Hvitserkur rock pillar, one of the iconic places you always see in photos. It shows you various points of interest and the direction they lie in. At the top of the fortress we found one of the many compass markers in Iceland. Onto the remains of a Viking fortress at Burgavicki, after a very long drive down a pot-holed gravel road, Rt 717. There are markers naming the families at many of the ruins and a feeling of recent history follows us on our walk.įurther down the road we come to the Sato Craters and the remains of the volcano that blew them into existence. Currently there is a working lighthouse perched on top of some magnificent basalt columnar jointing. The harbor was too shallow for the bigger ships that were used after the war, so the entire village picked up and moved to deeper waters, leaving just the sod walls behind. We drove on to Kalfhamarsvik, which was a thriving fishing village until 1936, when the Spanish Civil War caused them to lose their main buyer of cod. Skagi Penninsula, North Iceland, Days 9 & 10 Columnar Extrusions

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She worries that people today do not understand how to fend for themselves by growing and building their own homes, gardens and sheep. Hedris, the docent up at the tea room, in a newer building made of wood, was very friendly and told us her history of growing up in the area.

There is obviously an art to laying the sod that has withstood so many years of weathering. It must have been very smokey in there, but snug and protected from wind. The only room that was heated was the kitchen and that only by the open cooking fires.

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Every small room had a specific use and it is easy to imagine living there, with the muffled quiet of the thick peat walls and slanted sunlight coming in through the tiny windows cut into turf grass roofs. Glaumbaer is a huge, rambling collection of turf houses that you can walk through with lots of history, old tools and stone or dirt floors. In the morning we walked the paths around camp and then drove out to the Glaumbaer Museum. We almost always had good service and fast data available with our Google Fi cell phones on our trip and we paid nothing extra. There is also good cell phone service just about everywhere and very few landlines, since cell phones came into use before they had ever gotten to running phone wires. The Gulf Stream comes close enough to even things out in the south. They get more cold and snow in the North than in the south, but it can also get warmer up there in summer. It does not get as cold as you might expect in the winter, with lows hovering around the freezing mark, but the winds and damp can make it feel colder. In the past people burned peat or driftwood but mostly just bundled up in woolly layers. With a scarcity of trees, wood heat is not an option. Taxes pay for this hot water heat and they are high, at 46%. Many Icelanders can heat their homes using hot water piped in from the big volcanic steam plants operated by the government water association.

The people furthest out mostly heat and power their homes with small hydro-electric generators powered by the waterfalls at each farmstead. Only people with greenhouses grow things like beans and cukes and tomatoes. When I asked what most folks grew and ate, he said that rural Icelanders eat lots of sheep and a few root crops. We had a good conversation with the young manager of the family run campground and learned that out here in the country, neighbors car pool the kids to school instead of using school buses as we do in the United States, and they are paid for their services. There is a blow up trampoline bag in the yard, sort of like a bouncy house without the walls. A rafting guide scarecrow stands sentry at the outdoor wash up sinks. The camp sites are shady and rimmed with hedges and the bath house is super clean. We camped at Akureyr, on the edge of the village of Varmahlio. Iceland Route Map, Counter Clockwise Day 9

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