Page 24 - 2000 ICELAND

church which is at the highest point in the city. Finally, a Lutheran church in
Iceland which has the ship model hanging prominently from the ceiling

(every church we saw in Sweden and Denmark on an earlier trip contained
the ship). This church was more ornate than the capital city version and it is

much smaller as well. It had a wonderful pipe organ display as well, but that
too was on a more modest scale.

We walked the pedestrian mall and did some shopping. Icelanders here

were friendly and most spoke some English, since they deal with many

tourists from Europe and English really is the lingua franca of today’s tourist
world. Their familiarity with English is certainly not due to the fact that very

many Americans vacation here; actually, the opposite is true—very few US
citizens visit Iceland. However, the UK sends its share as does Australia, but

the majority of visitors are from France and Germany. They probably
wondered what to do with us!

Speaking of Germany, there was another group from GJ Travel Service on

the same route as ours. This was a group of 26 Germans. The trips were

arranged so we crossed paths intermittently but not at every stop. Later,
there will be more to come on this subject.

Leaving Akureyri, we drove around the south end of the bay and went up

the other side to Húsavík for the whale-watching trip. Kay and I had had quite
enough boat travel at Drangey, thank you very much, plus we have whale-

watched in several other places, so we opted not to join the others.
Instead, we stayed in this fishing village and explore it on foot.

First we stopped for lunch at a seaside pub where we had a delicious lamb

soup with vegetables. We next walked to the highest point we could find in

this village to get some good views and pictures of the harbor and the
houses below. We found a wonderful high hill empty of buildings. We

started walking along a path and suddenly found ourselves the targets of
some very energetic dive-bombing birds with actual strikes (luckily we had

on our hats).