July 7, 2005.
The first item on the agenda this morning was to ring Karl and wish him a happy 26th Birthday.
Today Margaret and Mum attempted to walk over Kaldbakur which at 998m is the highest mountain in the West Fjords. Matthew, Pabbi and I left Auðkúla at a leisurely pace and headed into to �safjörður for a poke round whilst the other two did their walk.
These two photos are of the entrance sign to Auðkúla and a look back towards Auðkúla and it’s fjord as we drove up over the mountains (number 1 and 2 on the map).
Pabbi showed us sights and memories of �safjörður and after a visit to the grocery store for some lunch supplies we made the drive back to Þingeyri to have lunch. I forgot to mark it on the map where we had lunch but if you look at the map we had lunch at the end of the fjord that Þingeyri is on. We left the road where it crosses the new bridge and drove down the road that my parents used to have to drive on to go to �safjörður. After eating lunch in the car at the end of the fjord as it had started to drizzle we headed up to the spot where we would be picking Mum and Margaret up from their walk, on the way though we pulled into have a look at some fish drying huts (number 4 on the map).
Once Mum and Margaret had arrived we headed into Þingeyri proper and started to drive and walk around. It was really quite sad to see Þingeyri as it is very run down compared to the photos of when my parents lived there in the late 70’s. There were buildings boarded up everywhere, rust was growing over the town and as a whole the village was a quiet place. The village had a population of around 450 when my parents lived there but like many other fishing villages of the West Fjords had largely declined and is now around 360.
We passed the building where Mum used to live, we visited the church where my parents were married, we went past the places where my parents used to work, we stopped by the house across the road from where my parents used to live to see if anyone was home. No-one was though, which was a bummer because the daughter of the family who live there was who I was named after. Well not Helen but my middle name Þura. The last stop was of course to stop by the house where my parents used to live.
As we visited places and ran into people, it was quite funny to watch the exchanges that would occur as Pabbi would recognise people who were children when he last saw them and adults now and they would take a little while before it would click as to who he was.
After we had spent our afternoon exploring and talking we left Þingeyri and drove to the youth hostel where we would be staying the night (Korpudalur, number 6 on the map).
It was quite serendipitous to visit Þingeyri on the day which Karl was born 26 years before and on that note I leave you with this image of the town which I took from a hill just above the town.
