Monday, August 9, 2010

Our Iceland Saga: Land and Sea Scapes

Iceland is an island located northwest of England, sandwiched between the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. The island is roughly the size of the state of Kentucky (USA) and just slightly over 300,000 people live there - half of whom live in the capital city, Reykjavik.

My husband and I spent 9 days there this summer, and over the next 2 weeks I'll show some of our best pictures and tell you about our adventures.

Despite its name, the Iceland landscape is so much more than ice. There are black sand beaches.


Cliffs and rock towers divide the land from the ocean.




Ruins help illustrate the scale of Mother Nature's efforts.




Of course, you never know when an otherwise desolate, wild landscape will be domesticated by Icelandic sheep.




There are peaceful, green plateaus dotted with lakes and pseudo craters.




Snow-covered mountain tops peak out over clouds...


and are warmed by the sun.


And there is still more! Tomorrow, the waterfalls. :)

3 comments:

Karin said...

What beautiful pictures!

I just finished reading a book about the Vikings on my summer holiday. The chapter on Iceland said that Iceland was initially wooded!

It also said that the male settlers came from Norway, but they didn't bring many female colonist with them. That recent DNA samples across the population show that the 65% of the female DNA comes from the British Isles! Fascinating. We're left to infer that girls in Norway in the 900s didn't fancy going to Iceland, so the men nipped down to Britain to steal brides.

Summerset said...

Welcome back! Wow! That landscape is amazing.

Lori said...

I bet it was a wonderful vacation, the photos are beautiful and I can't wait to see the rest.