Akureyri is Iceland’s second-biggest city and I’ve never found anything particularly interesting about it before. Well, I still haven’t!

For such a busy campsite, it was surprisingly quiet overnight. I started my day with hunting for fuel and food (turns out, despite Google Maps, I could have got fuel at the supermarket instead of driving halfway across town) and then parked at the swimming pool, which is free and pretty close to town.

The church, the main attraction in Akureyri, had a funeral in it. At 10.15, the doors were already closed and the sign said it would be open again at 2.15. Big funeral, I guess.

So I walked down into town, had a croissant and orange juice at the bookshop cafe, wandered up the Main Street, out to the harbour and realised there really isn’t much to see or do in Akureyri. Google Maps suggested walking a couple of hundred metres to a pink lamppost so I did that. And that was about it. I went back to my van for lunch, then walked back down to wait for the funeral to finish, which gave me plenty of time to look at what people were wearing to it. Mostly just the conventional stuff but there was one woman with a pale pink shirt worn like a beach cover-up over her black bodycon dress and trainers, one woman in a lime-green dress with an orange linen beach-style shirt over it and the queen of funerals was the woman wearing three-quarter length jeans under a hot pink knee-length dress under a bright red knee-length cardigan. They were still pouring out at 2.20 so I went back down to look at the bookshop, where I knew it was overpoweringly hot to get out of the cold wind.

The church was nice and interesting and I could not have done other than wait but was it worth the wait? Well, I enjoyed some of the stained glass, and it turns out the windows behind the altar actually didn’t come from Coventry Cathedral as we have all always believed.

Then I went off to the Forest Lagoon, which is very nice but you do gradually realise it’s just the world’s most expensive swim-up bar. It’s just packed with people sitting at the little tables along the fjordside edge drinking Aperol Spritzes. The Forest Lagoon has its own signature cocktail – greenish-blue in its alcoholic variety and radioactive blue in non-alcoholic, which is an entire can of 7Up mixed with blue slushie. It loses its novelty very quickly.

When I’d finished at the Forest Lagoon, I drove up the mountain and through the tunnel and appeared at Systragil, a smaller, quieter campsite in the woods where I stayed the night before my birthday two years ago. It’s still a bit busy (three toilets are not enough; and one of those is new in the last two years) but at least your neighbours aren’t literally on top of you and it’s all green and surrounded by mountains.