After Eskifjörður we sailed north and then west round the coast of Iceland to Akureyri, the second city of the country. At that latitude we were almost grazing the arctic circle and there was continuous daylight - not actually 'midnight sun' (the sun did just sink below the horizon) but perpetual daylight nevertheless.
I had visited Akureyri before, but had no free time after a trip out into the countryside, so I decided this time to spend the day by myself in the city, and the weather was kind to us - it was sunny, warm and mostly clear.
First, I walked through the city centre to the botanic gardens, up a steep hill overlooking the fjord, passing wide roadside verges and hillsides full of wild flowers. I spent a couple of hours looking round the gardens . . . which included seeing a blackbird father feeding a newly fledged chick (image centre-top in the collage below), plus adult and juvenile redwings (the other three bird images). In 2010, a website about birds stated that Iceland was the only European country with no breeding blackbirds . . . nine years of global warming later, and this is demonstrably no longer the case.
I walked back into the centre to get some lunch and then spent a while in the municipal art gallery, followed by visiting the very striking Lutheran church, the Akureyrarkirkja.
The walk back to the ship in the afternoon provided beautiful clear views of the fjord:
And the weather held - just - while we sailed away in the early evening:
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