Hotel Kea - Akureyri, Iceland

 We drove to Stuðlagil Canyon.  I started to leave the car at the parking lot, but Deb said we could drive further.  I tried but the road was bad and I gave up after awhile and turned back to the parking lot.  As we were hiking, several cars passed us on the way to the upper lot which would have saved us two miles of hiking.  I’m sure she was thinking that I was a coward, but she was nice and said nothing.  The canyon was all basalt columns.  You can drive to the canyon on the other side but you really can’t see the beauty of the canyon.

This side of Iceland is completely barren.  There are no houses, not even any sheep.  The road is, for the most part level.  Around lunch time we stopped at the only cafe within 100 miles.  It was small and charming, built with a thatch roof and layers of sod going halfway up the outside walls.  Though it was fairly predictable; lamb stew, crème of asparagus soup, vegetable soup, and a surprise - hot dogs!

Lunch stop

From there we were off to Dettifoss  Waterfall.  A massive wall of nearly black glacier water falling a 100 ft.  A 3 mile tunnel finished the day.

Dettifoss 

Akureyri is the largest town that we have seen since Reykjavik.  It has an old world kind of charm, so we intend to explore it tomorrow.  Deb was trying to navigate using the GPS and I was trying to drive using the streets.  The two were not aligning well, so decided to park and walk around till we found the hotel.  It turns out that we were parked right next to it.  The receptionist explained that our room was fairly complicated to get to.  We had to take the elevator to the third floor, walk down the hall, climb a half set of stairs and down the hall to another elevator which would take us back to the first floor and then follow the signs to our room.  Because the walk is complicated we have a special key so we come in the back door, which just so happens to be exactly where we parked the car.  

The restaurant in the hotel served small plates, which was what we were looking for.  We had seafood soup, tiny potatoes, Brie cheese, and salmon.   A interesting thing about Akureyri: the red lights on traffic signals are hearts. (How cute!)

Tomorrow we hope to climb a dormant volcanoes on our way to 10:30 on the virtual Iceland clock.