Late on a sunny afternoon in Akureyri, I decided it might be time for the party to continue. I was warm, I was dry, the skies were blue, it was a perfect time to get out there and see something new.

I headed east, but turned north before the main road headed over the pass towards Mývatn. I was going down side roads! I wasn't going to bother going all the way to Grenivík. My car isn't big enough to take the road north out to the sea, and I wasn't really feeling like seeing the other side of the fjord, it was time to go to new places.

I stopped at Laufás, which is an old turf mansion. It's a fairly typical old times museum, but better presented and arranged that typical icelandic tourism. A good collection of artifacts, well presented, and a high quality gift shop and tea room. Not ordinary icelandic tourism at all.

The tea room here had a wonderful set of old newspapers and nature guides under the glass on the tables, and it was here that I finally learnt the names of the mushrooms beside the road, but also of the names of a puffball type of fungus I'd found once or twice in the past as well.

Still, moving along, there's only so much you can see at an old house, I took the road through Dalsmynni, which was very picturesque, parts of it were even lightly wooded. The entire length of the valley is a little bit spoilt by posts indicated fishing permit zones every few hundred meters. Fishermen are fine, but assigned 100m stretches of numbered pieces of nature is not really my idea of a great day out fishing.

Along this road I came across a boat. Or part of a boat. You can see it in the pictures. It was most unexpected.

But enough, the pace slows, the reader grows impatient, the number of kilometers of road taken up with every sentence is simply too few. I was headed towards Húsavík, the gateway to the northeast, but I wasn't planning on going all the way. I headed north just past Ljósavatn, and then kept on north when the road to Húsavík bent away to the east.

I was driving out to the end of the road, Bjargakrókur, or Kaldakinn, depending on why you go there. I passed the last farm, Björg, but the road book indicated that the road was passable, and although it deteriorated, it was indeed passable. Well past the last farm, I came across an old man on a bicycle, laying electric fence cable. We had a bit of a chat, and told me the road was indeed fine, and yes, I could stay the night if I wanted to. He told me a story about who's father had owned what farm, and if I remember correctly, he'd lived on that farm all his life, and had no intention of ever leaving. I wrote this down far too longer after the fact however, and as happens to often, the details of this charming old man on his bike are now lost in the mist.

Bjargakrókur is a nice place. The mountains on your back are huge, the shore is wide, there's indications that people are near, but they're not nearby. Fresh water streams off the hillside in multiple places, and the ground is soft and grassy. I take an afternoon stroll, taking some pictures of the lagoon and the seashore in the sunset, before a nice dinner.

But not bed. Not yet :) But that story really belongs to the next day. The day that starts with a campfire on the beach, and ends in Húsavík itself.