Turfed Roof of the World - Part 3

Click here for Part 1.
We started this day at a HUGE turf-roofed farmhouse. It was by far one of the coolest things we saw. And it was free because it was Sunday. The clever little thing was that the rooms were very warm and dry, and they had tiny dormer windows, so they were actually quite cozy and charming. Livia looks like a wax figure below.

Above was this glorious view (ruined by a bus shot) of the valley as we came through the Öxnadalsheiði mountain pass, on the way to Akureyri.
Akureyri has this odd cafe in the pedestrian area which was vastly more pleasing to the eye than the big church for which it is famous. The rest of this town (second largest city in Iceland) was functional and disappointing like much of Iceland's architecture. The town sits deep within Eyjafjörður, the fjord shown below.
Húsavík is a quaint little harbour village from which many whale-watching tours depart. As a result, there was a very good whale museum -- just down the street from the Icelandic Phallological Museum. As the girls were accompanying us, Ariel and I were unable to visit. Now that we're home, I'm a bit disappointed we didn't get to see it as I have since learned that said museum has 245 penis specimens in various forms of preservation. This quote from the Wikipedia is my fave: "Although the museum does not yet have a Homo sapiens specimen, in the interest of advancing phallological knowledge, a patron (Páll Arason, born in 1915 and currently 93 years old) has donated, presumably posthumously, an affidavit for his penis."
They also had a lovely church.
I took this photo for the colors on the mountainside, but I can't tell you from where. Somewhere between Húsavík and Tjörnes, I think. Notice the trees in the foreground.
Can't see it here, but Lena is standing on a beach on the Tjörnes peninsula. Trees don't really grow in Iceland, and when they do grow, they don't get very tall. All of the lumber in Iceland is imported from Norway now, but before that, it was imported from Siberia via Mother Nature. Driftwood travels down the rivers of Siberia to the sea where the ocean currents carry it to the North Pole. There it gets encased in the ice flows and circles around until it gets caught by the East Greenland stream and eventually -- 4-5 years later -- is washed onto the North coast of Iceland, to such an extent that in some places the beaches are white with giant driftwood logs.

Occasionally, the same East Greenland Stream brings polar bears on ice flows to northern Iceland, about 2 every year. Since polar bears are not native to Iceland and don't make very good tourists, the Icelanders shoot them on sight. Various polar bear-friendly groups get very upset by this, but since the bears have been known to kill people when they arrive, the Icelanders just thumb their noses at these groups and maintain their Only-Good-Polar-Bear-is-a-Dead-Polar-Bear policy.
Finally we ended the day by visiting a horseshoe-shaped canyon. Between the cliff birds and the acoustics, it was lovely, like my contemplative Livia.