wow Iceland ... just wow

The view from my window this morning

You may notice that the sun is not yet up, so this qualifies as a pre-drawn arising from slothfulness for me. Tony begs to differ because he reckons I can't claim being a morning person if the sun doesn't rise until 10:45. I counter this argument with - that's just splitting hairs and I was up before the sun, so pish to technicalities. Turns out, as a morning person I am both erudite and eloquent. After breakfast, at which I was in attendance albeit after everyone else had moved on with the day, we ventured off to see some scenery. By the end of the day we'd run out of superlatives and were just gawping, slack-jawed at the most unusual and amazing vista we have ever seen. What we have seen of Iceland in the day & a half that we've been here has just taken our collective breath away.

Today we saw dawn and dusk. 

For the dawn part of the day we drove along the frosty roads and kept having to pull over to try to capture what we were seeing, until we realised that there was a photo everywhere and capturing it all was hopeless, although we gave it a good try. Here are a few of the millionty photos from today.

sunrise

It was like God was practising with his oil paints, the colours evolving at his whim, from one glorious moment to another. We enjoyed this skyward entertainment as we drove along, periodically the cry would go up "stop! look at the colours now!" and we'd all jump out of the car armed to the teeth with cameras and iphones, until we realised there was no capturing it all - not everything can be documented - and also the sun was not exactly rising fast, Tony says it was the slowest reveal in history. 

Our first non-sunrise stop was in response to "ooo look at that little church!" cue MGM doing a swift turn on icy road to find our way to this ...

My iphone geolocation tell me this was taken at Rangárþing eystra

We can't get our head or tongues around Icelandic so we are coming up with our own shorthand, sort of like what we did with Pig in the Dolomites. It's very disrespectful I know but it does help us have a conversation about/plan where to go next. I think we'd call this place Ranga.

Our first official destination was Selfoss, (we call it Sloggo), I'm sure you'd know these heavily photographed waterfalls. There is a hike to the top where the photography ops are said to be amazing but not even Tony the Intrepid was going to take that on in the -2°.

we drove to the lighthouse at Mýrdalshreppur to get this view of the black sand beach

The area was treacherous with black ice threatening to bring down unsuspecting tourists in a fit of ice-Tourette's, no matter how cautious we were with our small steps placed carefully in the white stuff whilst avoiding seemingly safe areas (that's how the black ice gets you).

And then there were others who threw caution to the wind because, well they're invincible. 

Yes she's standing right on the edge of that cliff, posing for a photograph. A strong gust of wind, a misplaced footfall and that's the most expensive photo of her life. Even to myself I sound old, I can't help it. Life is too precious to lose it for no better reason than vanity.

okay then, my old lady rant is over ... moving right along to more scenery

This pic is for my cherubs who like to see our faces

The sun was now beginning its slow farewell so we headed on to Vik. Once there we could see another of those lovely little churches high on the hill. This one is iconic in the world of tourism photos. Serendipitously we had arrived here at a perfect photo op time of day so we raced the sunset, hang on ... who am I kidding we strolled at a leisurely pace because that sun wasn't going anywhere fast, to the top of the hill. What we didn't realise is that the tour guides know all about this perfect sunset vantage point and just us I had lined up my shot in drove a fully loaded bus arrived and parked right in front of the church. Cue expletives not to be repeated here (this is a family blog you know) and a cropped version of the photo.

we could have stayed for hours to watch this sunset but we settled on a few thousand photos and headed for home, completely and utterly photographically sated.