Thorbergssetur at the Hali farm in Sudursveit was a guide book recommendation for supper after visiting Diamond Beach. There was a recorded voice playing from a rock near the parking lot. Inside is a restaurant, gift shop and museum dedicated to the author Thorbergur Thordarson, the voice coming from the rock.

We ordered supper, then I walked through the museum while we waited. The museum depicted the author’s farm life and his writing life. He grew up in a farm house where the cattle lived below the family, and his first jobs were on boats and painting houses in rainy Reykjavik. Thordarson set the Icelandic literature world on fire with his Letter to Lara where he talked of social injustice and the church. This book cost him his job as a teacher. He had a secret love affair and love child. He believed in monsters and science. Quite an interesting person, and the food was superb.

Petra’s Stone and Mineral Collection in the town of Stoovarfjorour is a very thorough collection of mostly east Icelandic specimens collected by one nature-loving woman, Petra Sveinsdottir. She was born in 1922 and lived into 2012. She began her collection in earnest while in her twenties. People told her she should stick to her farm and house chores, but she always found time to go hiking, sometimes carrying heavy rocks back home. She enlisted the help of her children, friends and grandchildren. If pieces were too heavy to pick up, she would roll them to the nearest path to be collected by vehicle later. After the death of her husband in 1974, she opened her home for guests to enjoy her collection. The grounds are beautifully landscaped. Her grandchildren continue her legacy.

The East Iceland Heritage Museum in Egilsstadir has displays to show Icelandic life and the import and management of the reindeer herds. They had a mock-up home, many antiques, and displays of the history of reindeer in Iceland. Just as we were finishing, the lights went out and an alarm started to sound. The young woman at the desk was trying frantically to contact her boss before the alarm got louder; she must have succeeded as a car came screeching into the parking lot as we drove away. We found out at supper time that most of the town lost electricity for awhile. Fortunately for us, the pizza joint did not.

Sigurgeir’s Bird Museum on the shore of Myvatn Lake helped us identify some of the birds we had been seeing. Swans for one; the swans here are Whooping Swans which are smaller than the Trumpeter Swans we see at home and lack the long, curved neck we are used to seeing. The museum incorporated water in the building design and had another building which housed the original motor boat that was brought to the lake to provide transportation in the 1920s.