After crossing the Arctic Circle and our "Polar Bear Swim" last night we arrived in Akureyri Thursday morning. Bright and sunny, up to 20C, but very strong winds. The city of almost 20,000 in the area lies at the head of Eyjafjordur and it began about 1600. While fishing is it's main business it also relies on brewing,food processing, and tourism. There are about 40 cruise ships annually and while we were there a mega ship, Celebrity Eclipse(3000+ pax) was also in port. It is Iceland's second largest city. Snow covered mountain tops and magnificent scenery.
Our tour today was with 4 other couples to an automated dairy farm, an old farm house being restored as a museum, and another dairy farm that makes ice cream on site.
The dairy farm was highly automated with about 100 cows producing about 25 litres of milk each per day. For a pair of city slickers like Deen and myself it was a fascinating operation to see. Basically one person can run the operation of the barn and it' s mostly just watching. Even the cleaning of the cows, the manure cleanup, and the feeding is automated. You readers in North America familiar with dairy operations will probably think this is small time but we were impressed.
From there we went to an old farm house being gradually restored by a couple. Interesting to see what they have found and are doing to restore the old building. They say that people have lived there since the Vikings.
Final stop was a dairy farm that specialized in making ice cream at the farm. While we couldn't see the actual making of the ice cream they provided us with samples and they were very tasty.
We returned to town so we could walk around a bit and do some some last minute shopping. It also gave me an opportunity to continue my Viking Beer Tour. With all the people from the 2 ships and the nice day bringing out the locals it was busy in town. As you can see in the picture there were even pirates!
We all had to return on board by 3:45 pm to get a good start as the captain promised us all scenic cruising of Prins Christian Sund in Greenland which attentive readers will recall we missed due to the storm in the first part of this trip. After our usual visit to the Crows Nest, dinner in the MDR was a rock n roll theme. The guy pictured top right is Lukman, one of the dining room attendants and the guy at the bottom is Sadu, the Assistant Dining Room Manager. You can see they really got in to the spirit of it all.
The next two days are sea days as we head for the east coast of Greenland. So far so good that we will actually be able to get there. Our clocks go back another hour tonight so we'll be 3 hours ahead of Eastern Time.
Location:Akureyri ,Iceland
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