10-Night France, Iceland, and Norway Cruise - Day 10 Akureyri, Iceland
Akureyri
For Akureyri (ah-koo-ray-ree) we booked a small group tour through Saga, who provides a variety of single or multi-day excursions throughout Iceland. They had good ratings and I thought it might be nice to take in some more of the natural beauty of Iceland. I wasn’t exactly sure where we were going. I knew a lake and a waterfall were involved though. Sign me up! We had an 8:45 AM meeting time for a 9:00 tour. We waited until 9:15 and then the tour guide got word that the final family we were waiting for wasn’t coming. So it was us, Larry and Janee from our cruise meet group (they were also with us in Cherbourg), one other family and one single guy, who turned out to be a former crew member onboard who was done with his contract as an actor on the main stage theatre. He was a nice kid and we chatted with him throughout the day.
Anyway, on our drizzly and windy morning, we made a thirty minute drive to the first stop, which was Goðafoss, “waterfall of the gods.” It was stunning. It’s hard to compare waterfalls so I can’t tell you which one was better, Gulfoss (“golden waterfall”) or Goðafoss. Both were great. We drove about another thirty minutes while our guide told us not only information about the area (most of our stops were on and around Lake Mývatn (pronounced mee-vaht-n) but some fun myths and stories as well. He was a really cool guy and we really enjoyed his tales, it brought a lot to the day. The next stop was Skútustaðagígar, which is a series of hills and craters caused by something volcanic, but I don’t remember the specific details (I hope that’s not on the test). I think it’s similar to Kerið crater in which small volcanoes collapse in on themselves.
Our next stop of the morning was Dimmuborgir which is a crazy landscape that was created by, you guessed it, volcanic activity (the name means "dark cities" or "dark castles/fortresses” in Icelandic, which is pretty cool, actually). Our guide challenged us to look for troll faces in the rock formations. Also at this location it was possible to have one foot in Europe and one foot in North America as this is where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet (just like in Reykjavik).
Next we drove to a totally surreal landscape at Námafjall Hverir. Not only did it look completely other-worldly, but it was quite smelly from all the sulfur. The area is full of sulfur and was once a sulfur mine, but due to all the geothermal activity, there were bubbling pits of mud and fumaroles. Our guide told us that it was imperative to stick to the pathways as the water and boiling mud was literally scalding. He stayed in the van. We made our way back there pretty quickly as well!
We left there and went to our final stop, a strange little museum called Fuglasafn Sigurgeirs. It was a taxidermy bird museum with every species of bird that lives in Iceland in it. It was founded by the family of a little boy who died that loved birds. There was a small cafe there. I had an amazing mushroom soup, Emmaline had waffles and hot chocolate (which she declared to be the best hot chocolate she had ever had) and Roger had an espresso and a cinnamon roll. Then it was time to go back to the ship as we had an early all aboard time of 4 PM.
We arrived back around 3 PM (driving through town and their heart shaped stop lights, photo courtesy of someone in my FB cruise group because I didn't get one). We got back onboard and since it was our coldest, windiest, and wettest day onboard, Emmaline and her friends decided to go to the pool and to ride the AquaDuck. Roger and I declined to go and instead had some snacks while we watched an insanely huge line of people try to get back onboard (apparently it took upwards of 45 minutes to get through the line). This was the only port that meticulously checked both our ship card and photo ID and it caused massive backups and we ended up leaving quite late as a result.
This wasn’t the first nor the last of the growing pains for the Dream in Europe. Usually, Disney brings over the Magic, a much smaller ship. I don’t know if anyone was prepared for the mass of people that comes with the Dream. One of the other problems that we encountered was issues in Cabanas and other parts of the ship on the colder days, which was pretty much all of them. Normally the people are spread about the open areas of the ship and especially the pools. Even if they aren’t swimming, they are sunning and watching the Funnel Vision movies. But since everything was cold and drizzly much of the time, that wasn’t happening so indoor activities had the tendency to be busy and Cabanas was nearly impossible to find a table for breakfast and lunch due to people not being able to eat outside. We never experienced those issues on the Wonder in Alaska and the weather was similarly dreary. I don’t know why that is.
After our snack we returned the room where I made some notes for my trip report and then we started on the photo scavenger hunt for the day before I went off for the second of four drawing classes I would attend onboard. The day’s drawing was Minnie (which is basically, draw Mickey and add a bow and eyelashes) and while I was there Roger worked some more on our scavenger hunt (artwork and paintings). We all returned to the room and Roger and I sat on the verandah and watched the sail away down the fjord while Emmaline showered after returning cold and shivery from the pool deck.
Dinner for the night was in Enchanted Garden where we marveled at how quickly the trip was going as we were there for our final rotation which seemed crazy. We returned to the room after dinner. I don’t know what we did. Just hung out and relaxed. I probably worked on my trip report, Emmaline probably went to Vibe and Roger probably just relaxed.
The show for the evening was The Rollerboys. Some dudes that sing while rollerskating. It was a cool sounding concept. I thought it was a cappella (it wasn’t), I thought they might do tricks (they didn’t), I thought they might sing on key (sometimes they did, though not always). We left after 20 minutes. We really tried to hang in there, but it was really loud and basically like watching some random dudes do karaoke while on roller-skates to pop songs I didn’t need to hear and we were just done.
We got ready for bed and Emmaline surprised us by returning to the room earlier than normal. She was tired. We all were so we went to bed around 10 PM.
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