Sunday, July 16, 2023

Today’s port was Isafjordur, Iceland. Per Wiki, “Ísafjörður experiences high winds and very few clear days throughout all the year”… well suck it Wiki, because our day was freaking epic and gorgeous.

I honestly kind of squealed when I saw this view from the ship the morning we arrived.

You can’t really see too much out of a tender boat when you’re in one, but I haven’t ever seen a cooler view of a tender boat from the outside before.

We landed on shore a bit before our planned activity, so had time to wander around town. I don’t know if they differentiate the two sections as locals, but the area we landed in is the kind of small peninsula here, then you walk around this sort of inner bay to find more of it. The initial exploration in that peninsula was a ghost town. It felt like all of the locals saw the ship coming, scampered inside, closed their curtains and turned off the lights. Who can blame them, really?

A ghost town, but a lovely, colorful ghost town. With a friendly cat. Sadly, the local yarn shop was closed.

That inner bay was really cool on its own with a miniature statue of Scott! Seriously why does he look like a toy in this photo? I was only maybe 20 feet away from him when I took it.

And what’s cooler than a tiny Scott? How about several (young) Lion’s Mane Jellyfish within easy view, which I learned later are “…the largest jellyfish in the world and in fact in the Guinness book of records as the longest invertebrate in the world…”! We were staring at a bucket-list creature and didn’t even know it.

Finally we were ready for our previously scheduled activity: an ATV tour with a local company! Once again we scored leaving the ship excursion options behind.

We paid around $385 for the both of us. There’s an option to pay less if you share an ATV but we know ourselves and knew it would be worth it for each of us to have our own bike. We were the only ones in our group of maybe 10 people that chose this though; everyone else rode as couples. I think I had ridden as a passenger on an ATV once in my 20s, but have never driven one. Scott said he has never driven one either. But these were super easy – fully automatic and the guide took a few minutes with each of us individually to make sure we understood what we were doing. We rode through the town then up to two different lookout points and then to a waterfall. I found myself wishing that we had a GoPro. It was so fun! Highly recommended. If you’re going to this town book this tour!

Afterwards we found our way over to a local brewery: Dokkan Brugghus. Their website is only in Icelandic, but you can visit this site for some information, including the fact that Dokkan Brugghus “is the Westfjords first and only brewery”. It was a great space with both indoor and outdoor seating. In addition to their taps they had food, but we just grabbed beers before heading back to our floating all-you-can-eat buffet that we had already paid for.