A Sunny day and Geocaching

You can definitely feel that summer is on its way, the days are ever so much longer, we have daylight dusk to dawn from around 6.30am-8.30pm and it increases about 7 mins each day.  I hear the squeals and laughter of children playing outdoors till dark and there is movement in and around the town much earlier on the weekend now.  During winter I could go for a walk on a Sat or Sun at 11 am and not see a person or car pass by.

 

 Views across from the graveyard

 on a beautiful bright,

 sunny Saturday morning.

Saturday was such a glorious sunny day, no gloves, hat, scarf or thermals required...I felt so light.   To make most of the sunshine Patricia, Bjarki and I spent the afternoon geocaching.

It even got to a warm 16°.  I know family and friends in Australia will think 16° is cold but I have certainly become acclimatised and now feel 16° is pretty dam warm.

We revisited a cache location that we had unsuccessfully tried a few weeks back when there was still much snow around.

 

 The cache is located 3/4 of the way up this hill and it is steeper than it looks...100m elevation.

Patricia taking a photo

 
  of the Bóla waterfalls.

the last time we were here some of the waterfalls were frozen solid.

 When you turn around the view is amazing and very different from when we were here before.

 

Bjarki having a little recovery session

before making the trek back down to the car.

The next cache was much easier to get and took us no time at all

 it was just a little beyond the bridge to the right,

access was via this old road which is no longer used much...except maybe by farmers and geocachers.

And across the river another isolated house that the hermit in me would love to live in.

 A quaint little church and graveyard, where an ancestor of Bjarki's was a priest....so he is considering hiding a cache close by...I've forgotten where this is exactly.

We were going to try and visit the little island of Hrisey as there is a cache there but when we arrived at the port we had just missed the ferry and there was not another for two hours...so this trip will be made another day. We then drove to Dalvik...when you are out with a couple of food scientists lunch cannot be missed, so we stopped at the kaffi hús situated in the cultural/library building in Dalvik.  After lunch we had a quick look around the building and admired an exhibition of screen prints by Erró and a small antique box exhibition...I coveted quite a few of those!  There was also a shelf of old books for sale at 100 kronas (abt 75c AUS) and the very first book Bjarki pulled out had been translated from English to Icelandic by his great grandfather in 1909...what a great find!  I purchased 3 simply for the decorative covers.

 Whilst the bindings are very librarish, they are good examples for workshops plus the top one has a hand made decorative paper cover perhaps of ink marbelling...not quite sure.  

Across the road from the library was this place...the word Pub is not one I expected to see in Iceland.

On the drive I spotted this...a lighthouse on a small bit of land/rock in the middle of a fjord.

 To get to the next cache we had to drive through 3 tunnels

that pass through the mountains...in this pic above you can just see a little black rectangle, which is the entrance/exit of one.

 The scenery which ever way you look, is always spectacular.

  On the way to the next cache we stopped and admired a pretty little town called Ólafsfjörður

Of course as we moved further north it is cooler and the snow still heavy in parts.

The last cache we were doing for the day was in Siglufjörður, it was a multi cache consisting of 3 locations and we found them all quite quickly.  At the beginning of the day Bjarki had the sense to book our favourite restaurant Hannes Boy Café as we have turned up previously and it's been totally booked out. I have raved about the place before and so we rounded off a great day with a superb meal.

Carpaccio

 Seafood Bisque

Saltfish

 lambfillet

 Chocolate mousse

warm chocolate cake

view of Siglufjörður from the restaurant window

So eventually we headed for home, the map below will give you some idea of our route for the day.

We left Sauðárkrókur on Hway 75, down to Varmahlið and across to Hway 1 and then on to Hway 82, here you can see Dalvik (a red dot) and where we didn't go Hrísey (yellow dot).  Then through to Olafsfjörður and Siglufjörður and the route home took us pass Hofsós.  All in all a fabulous day with a fabulous couple.