Day 6 (June 25, 2025)

We woke up fairly early on Saltvik Farm, as we had a bit of an agenda for the day today. Saltvik offered a nice breakfast, which we went to, but were surprised to find that the people at breakfast were completely silent. There are only seven rooms there, and not all of them were full last night. There were about four small tables in the room where they served breakfast, so we weren’t exactly spread out, but nobody was talking. It was kind of odd, and the situation you think of when you say “you could hear a pin drop.” But we pushed through (quietly) and started to make our way back into Húsavík.

We had a 9:30 whale and puffin watching tour booked today, which we had really been looking forward to. I didn’t really know what to expect to be honest, I assumed whales were always doing stuff like you see on TV, where they’re jumping out of the water and things like that.

I was wrong.

We suited up into these kind of silly (but I’m sure very useful) Michelin man style jacket/overall onesies, which were not super comfortable, but kept us dry and warm. And before I knew it, we were out to sea!

Our first stop on the tour was Lundey, which is Icelandic for puffin. And sure enough, it was an island full of puffins. They were sitting on the ridges, flying all over the place, and just in general keeping busy. Apparently as many as 200,000 puffins make their way to puffin island every summer, although I’m not sure if that’s all at the same time. There were too many to count, so they could have all been there at the same time, I don’t know. We learned a few puffin facts, like that puffins are lifelong mates with one other puffin, except if they can’t find their mated puffin during mating season, then they’ll mate with someone else. Sounds like more of a partnership of convenience but I’m no relationship expert. However, if they do find their original puffin mate, they’ll ditch the new mate and go back with the original, which is a weird kind of loyalty, but loyalty nonetheless I suppose.

We then continued further out, on the lookout for whales. According to our guide, we were a very lucky group. We saw at least four different whales on our tour, and while my expectation of flying whales wasn’t exactly met, it was still quite a sight to see.

We stopped for a quick lunch right by the harbor in Húsavík, then got on our way, headed towards Akureyri, the first place on the trip where we’re staying for more than one night. Along the way, we were feeling like a little soak in a hot spring, and Sofie had heard of a secret hot spring that overlooked the water by Akureyri, so we sought it out. Honestly, it was a bit disappointing. The water itself was lukewarm at most, and it wasn’t really deep enough to enjoy for any substantial period of time. We were just sitting on small scrabbly rocks, which wasn’t very comfortable. So we moved on to nearby Forest Lagoon, one of the many business hot springs in Iceland. Forest Lagoon was alright, they actually had tables and benches in the water where you could sit down for a bit while staying mostly submerged. That was a nice touch that no other hot spring we’ve been to so far has had. But eventually we got a little bored of just sitting in water, and hotel check-in had opened, so we went on our way to the actual city of Akureyri.

Akureyri is the largest town in Iceland that isn’t Reykjavik or adjacent to Reykjavik. The population is around 20,000 people, which is quite small compared to Reykjavik and the region around it, but it is indeed the largest town in Iceland that isn’t in the Reykjavik area. For perspective, Reykjavik’s population is around 138,000 people. We are staying at Hotel Akureyri, which is just as you come into town from the south. It honestly looks pretty new on the inside, the rooms seemingly have been recently renovated, and there are parts of the hotel that are actively under construction. Funny enough, this is only the second place we’ve stayed in Iceland that has had a TV in the room (first was Reykjavik Lights), and this TV looks really nice. But we weren’t able to use it, because the screen had been broken before we arrived. Which is not a huge deal for us, I just think it’s funny.

We got into our room and pretty quickly entered lounge mode so we could watch the Eurovision movie from 2020. It was fun watching the scenes that were filmed in Húsavík, as we recognized a number of locations that we had been to just hours prior. We had a fair amount of fun with the movie too!

After hanging out for a while, we went to go get dinner at a popular and more upscale restaurant in Akureyri called Rub23, which was a short walk from our hotel. They were primarily a seafood restaurant, and in particular focused on sushi made from fish local to Iceland. Sofie loves sushi almost as much as she loves her cat (and me, I guess), so we thought this would be a good fit for dinner. It was one of the better meals we’ve had in Iceland, but again, the standard is quite low. We ended up getting a roll made with Icelandic snowcrab, a salmon maki, something called a sushi pizza, and a roll with barbecue chicken. The bbq chicken roll ended up being the favorite overall, but even that wasn’t all that exceptional. It was also by far the most expensive meal we’ve had in a country where food is more expensive in general. I’m not eager to speak ill of the food in Iceland, I just really feel like people set our expectations high, and we have been very disappointed, and I wanted to try to keep others from having the same experience if I can.

We opted to go to a grocery store to get a little bit to snack on for the evening, as we didn’t feel totally full from the dinner we paid a lot for. Another odd thing about Iceland is the hours stores keep. There are coffee shops that open as late as 11am. There are grocery stores that close as early as 7pm. It’s chaos.

Because of that, our only grocery option was Kronan, which we had been to another one of their stores in Vik, but didn’t think much of it. I actually now think Kronan is the best of the three in Iceland, and anybody who knows me knows the high standard I have for grocery stores and the stringent evaluation process I put grocery stores through. We ended up finding some of the same brand of skyr (Icelandic yogurt) that we had purchased from Netto the day before, and got one of those in vanilla and one in salted caramel. The salted caramel Kea skyr you can find in the grocery stores here is so good, and I’ve now eaten it two days in a row with no regrets.

The wild thing about this particular Kronan is that it had takeaway options from some of the local restaurants. So after leaving Rub23 in disappointment, we found ourselves looking at takeout versions of some of the same dishes we had eaten right before. We should have just bought it at the Kronan. Now we’re back in the bed in the hotel. Sofie has already been asleep for a while and I’m not far behind her.