Iceland Trip: Day 10 - Ride in the North of Iceland

Today is a day which we will use Akureyri as the base and we will ride and explore different parts of the North of Iceland.

But first we went to the Iceland Motorcycle Museum just down the road (we have a separate post in the blog for this).

We spent about 90 minutes seeing the museum and decided that next stop would be Grenivik which is on the East side of and is the northest town on Eyjafjordur.

It was a beautiful 25 km ride to take your breadth away. The weather was cool and crisp and we travelled slowly to take in all the beauty of the mountains, snow, fjord, vegetation and the abudant bird life.

As we were arriving in Grenivik we were met wit a common sight in Iceland. Horse tours.

Grenivik is a very small town and we did a quick check on the harbor and decided to eat at the only restaurant available. It was a grill and it belonged to a young man (probably 35 years old) that somehow had an affinity with Texas so we were able to enjoy BBQ ribs and grilled chicken with honey barbeque sauce. Go figure ...

But the highlight of our lunch was a merengue dessert which was extraordinary. Also made by the owner.

Well fed, we got back on the bike, but before we took a picture ...

Very close to our lunch place we stopped to admire the way Icelanders used to live and dress by visiting the old farmhouse Laufas.

The next two hours we would make our way towards the Tjornes Peninsula and visit one of the most impressive sights I was looking forward to be in it, which is the horse-shoe shaped canyon Abyrgi.

The weather turned on us after about one hour ride and we caught a lot of wind, rain and fog as we travelled east over the Tjornes Peninsula so our visibility was somewhat minimized.

The horse-shoe at Abyrgi is 3.5 kms in length and 1.1 kms wide and the walls are over 100 meters high, and you can actually ride and walk inside the canyon.

The walk has beautiful green vegetation and interesting birds ...

On the arrival at Asbyrgi there is a visitor center with a very nice geology exhibition. We stopped there to warm up and enjoy some education.

We doubled back and on the way back (west) the weather improved significantly and we were able to really enjoy the high cliffs and beautiful blue water of the Tjornes Peninsula.

We even stopped and took a number of pictures. The peninsula is very much worth visiting as the blue color of the sea there we never saw it again. It must be related to the fossil shells around this area. The presence of the fossil shells that can be found here shows something interesting. Those shells belong to creatures that require the temperature of the water to be 12°C or warmer. Now the average temperature of Icelandic coastal water is 4°C. It seems the water was much much warmer some millions of year ago and, therefore, so the climate was.

The view was beautiful but the air was cold and the wind factor made it even colder. We did not remove the helmets nor any gear ...

It was getting late and we still needed to ride for about two hours to get to Akureyri so we got back on the bike and made our way back arriving at about 11pm. The sun was getting lower in the sky and the resulting colors were just beautiful.