Today’s walking seemed to fall into two parts: everything before the glacier walk, and that spectacular experience itself, so I’ve divided the pictures up between two pages.

Breakfasts seem to be not notable here in Iceland. Today’s was dis­ting­uished by a delightfully generous sup­ply of pickled herring, and a waffle-iron with a good bowl of batter.

Once breakfast was over, though, we got all our things together and piled into the bus once more, first stop Sel­ja­lands­foss, but you’re not going to get any photos of it here, because it was raining when we pulled up to it in the bus, and I didn’t want to risk getting my camera wet. Mark does have some nice shots of it, though, that he took with the water­proof camera. It’s a high waterfall with enough space behind the falling stream that you can walk behind it, and everybody does.

As I recall, the rain had pretty much stopped by the time we got back to the bus, and we had relatively nice (and totally rainless) weather for the rest of the day.

Skógafoss. Those white dots are birds. (Big image, small.)

(Big image, small.) (Big image, small.)

The next stop was Skó­ga­foss and then the town of Skógar (Woods). The falls is a plain curtain, very high, and there were loads of tourists. I really like the square cropping to the left; the two other shots give some idea of the setting.

Several of the group climbed up the hill that you see at the right edge of the left shot below, but Mark and I stayed at the ground level. Are we getting sedentary?

(Big image, small.)

(Big image, small.)

(Big image, small.)

(Big image, small.)

(Big image, small.)

After the falls, we went to the town of Skó­gar, where there’s a folk mu­se­um with a lot of ar­ti­facts, and also some tra­di­tion­al turf houses, to show how Ice­land­ers lived in the coun­try­side up till maybe a hun­dred years ago. The five pic­tures at the right were taken in one of the houses, with a­vail­able light. First one, you can see Jerye and Margie, and I guess that’s Diane with her back to us; sec­ond, Jerye ducks into another room, while John gets ready to climb the stairs to the upper level. Up there, I took the last three pictures in the front bedroom. I liked the spool for winding wool in the fourth picture. In the last, John is ducking down to get into the stairway. I don't think the radio on the shelf at the left is an artifact.

Next, off to Vík, a little town just about as far south as you can get in Iceland, lat­i­tude less than 63°30′ ! We had lunch there: it was hearty but perhaps un­imagi­na­tive: cau­li­flower soup, chic­ken breast, and baked potato. Before I get on to other topics than food, though, let me say that much later in the day, we stopped for a snack in Kirk­ju­bæ­jar­klaus­tur, where we had coffee and I had a piece of superb apple pie. Not like American, surely, but unusually good. Why were the pastries at breakfast so boring, when the Icelanders certainly have it in them to do a wonderful job in that de­part­ment?

In Vík, we had a fine walk along the beach. To get to the beach, though, we walked past fields of Lupine, with black volcanic cliffs to our right, and ominous sea rocks sticking up out of the ocean directly ahead of us, as you see to the left.

The beach itself was very enjoyable: first time I had gotten down to walk along the ocean since we got here. I looked for shells up along the high-tide line, but found none at all. It was here that Mark took a sample of black sand—when I was in Iceland before, I had seen black sand on the Snæfellsnes peninsula, in the north-west, and had wanted to take a load home to use in my aquarium. Walking on the sand here, I was reminded of that desire, even though this sand was not as coarse, as I recall.

Grim sea, grim sky, grim rocks     (big image, small).

Empty beach (big, small). Beach with walkers (big, small).

The ocean restores. Now we hit the road again, east­ward.