We woke up leisurely in the morning. We planned a very light day as we wanted to relax in this village and just travel a short distance around, without much driving. We took a quick morning walk to take a look around our house and the locality.

We saw snow caps on the mountains here in Northern Iceland, for the first time on our trip. It was very cloudy, a lot of mountains were covered with clouds and we couldn’t get the complete view of the surroundings.

We started our journey to Akureyri in the afternoon. For once, we felt we had a lot of space in our car, without any luggage. Since we planned to stay there for one more night, we didn’t have to carry our luggage in the car.

We found grass covered houses (Icelandic Turf houses) on the way. These used to be the traditional Icelandic houses till 1960s. The thick turf walls and roof were designed to keep the cold out, making the turf houses well-insulated, which was essential during the long cold winters of Iceland.

We reached Akureyri city center, parked our car there, and went around to observe the city and the life there. Our first visit was to a church, which was built on the top of a small hill, providing views of the entire city.

There was a huge building called tourist information center which also included an auditorium for concerts.

There was a big street with a lot of restaurants and shops around. We strolled across this street.

Valdis is a famous ice-cream brand in Iceland. The shop looked cute, but the prices were high. It was quite a chilly day and we had to wear a couple of sweaters to keep ourselves warm.

Yes, our coordinates in Akureyri were 66.0715° N, 18.6537° W and the shop was named perfectly for winter clothes.

And we found some random shops with catchy titles on the way 😀

After spending a couple of hours in Akureyri, we started our journey back to our village Ólafsfjörður.

On the way, we stopped at a beach which looked beautiful. I forgot to mention about something that changed in the north, the ocean also changed Atlantic Ocean -> Arctic Ocean 🙂 That could also be one of the reasons for chilly winds there.

There was a small piece of land in the water and that attracted us to this place. I just kept jumping and running to reach that place 🙂

It was a pebble beach without much sand, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. I had been to snow mountains and beaches separately and for once I got a chance to see both at one place, which felt thrilling.

It felt amazing being at that place and it was one more private beach for us :P.

There were a lot of these packages (below) across Iceland and they looked like a grass roll covered with sheets of plastic to protect them against rains and wind. We saw a lot of these rolls continuously throughout our drive from the first day, but we never saw people anywhere in the farm.

We came back and went around the village to the beach near our house.

We came back home and played a board game after dinner. Before sleeping, we went outside to take a look at the weather outside and then the miracle happened.

We could spot green flashes of light in the black sky and we almost shouted aloud and ran outside in excitement to catch a glimpse of northern lights (Aurora Borealis). We drove our car for 5 mins to a place outside of the village, near the lake where there were no lights, to take a good view of the northern lights. It was cloudy and whenever the cloud moved aside, we could see the green flashes of light moving and it was an amazing treat to watch. I again missed my SLR at this point and couldn’t capture the lights clearly using my mobile 😦

We enjoyed the view for around 30 mins and thought of going to another end of the village, crossing the tunnel, to check if the sky was clear there, so that the northern lights can be completely seen throughout the sky. But after crossing the tunnel we couldn’t see anything. It was more cloudy there, than it was in the town and the sky looked dark. We weren’t sure as to when the lights started appearing in the sky before we spotted them.

We were very happy for spotting our first northern lights, and hoped to see a larger stretch of lights in the coming days and prayed for clearer skies 🙂

An amazing and unexpected ending to the day!! I couldn’t sleep for sometime after seeing those lights. I was simply amazed by the beauty of nature 😛