We traveled a bit over 400km today from Reykjavik (the capital of Iceland) to Akureyri (the capitol of North Iceland, at least according to the tourism office). It took more than 8 hours with breaks but no real sight-seeing (unless you count comparing gas station shops), and it was hard to get good photos through the window of the bus.

Here are a few snapshots from the trip.

When we reached Akureyri, our tour director told us that there wouldn’t be a Northern Lights expedition tonight because the conditions weren’t expected to be good. You could hear a sigh of relief go through the bus!

We’ll be in Akureyri for three nights, but we won’t have much time to explore the town. We took a very short walk after dinner; stores were already mostly closed by 7pm!

Our tour leaders spent dinner studying aurora and cloud cover projections and decided our best bet was to drive south to the little hamlet of Vogar and observe the sky from the Kálfatjarnarkirkja church parking lot.

It worked! We could see a faint aurora almost as soon as we got off the bus; it got brighter but then clouds moved in…and it started to drizzle, so we all got back on the bus to wait it out.

Five minutes later, we got off the bus and had a brighter aurora to enjoy.

I need to spend some time practicing with my tripod, phone, mount, and camera before the next session – I took some terrific closeup pictures of the parking lot before I wised up!