On the way to Aukureyri

I’m heading to Akureyri, Iceland, to take part in a workshop and a NABO Open Meeting.  It’s a fairly long trip from Barrow to anywhere, but Icelandair is now flying direct Anchorage-Reykjavik, so that’s a help.  Not surprisingly, seats on the July 4th departure were very, very cheap, so it was more cost effective to fly me to Iceland then, and put me up in Reykjavik for a couple of days before I head to Akureyri.

When I left Barrow, the ice had come back in.  I got a good shot of the only operational heavy icebreaker in the US fleet, USCG Polar Star lying off Barrow.  You can see masts belonging to much smaller vessels off her bow.  They are a French group who are trying to take a catamaran to the North Pole (it apparently can move over ice as well as water, or they hope so).  They beat  Polar Star to Barrow by a couple days.

The flight from Anchorage leaves at 3:15 PM AKDT, and gets in at 6AM local (GMT) which is before bedtime in Alaska, so I didn’t get much sleep.  I was wiped, so I took a nap, planning to get up and go wandering about Reykjavik.  Alas, the weather didn’t cooperate.  When I got up, it was raining & blowing 25+.

So I confined my walking to a trip to the grocery store and bakery.  Lots of nice local vegetables for good prices–geothermal greenhouses can do wonders.

This morning the weather had improved, so I headed out to see some sights.  I had intended to check out a Danish restaurant, but wound up doing something else entirely.  I found a food truck selling grass-fed beef hamburgers, which smelled wonderful.  So that’s what I had.  Then I wound up heading down to the harbor.

The green buildings on the left are former (mostly) fishmongers’ stalls that have been converted to shops & restaurants.  I wound up getting a bracelet made of wolfish leather.  There are still the old ladders, presumably for self-rescue by unfortunate fishermen who fell in on the way back to the ship.

There were the expected Icelandic coast guard ships.  There were also a Danish naval ship and a German Fisheries Protection ship tied up.

And there were several large fishing vessels out of the water.