ICY

Whether through conscious intent or just a continued fancy, Roy and I have taken driving trips in the last three foreign countries we've spent any significant amount of time in. My suspicion is that I'm either collecting foreign road experiences, or I just feel a certain mix of adventure and localness in hitting the open road. Tangentially, there may be something to be said about my being from Los Angeles and the fact that I seek insight into a place and its people by sharing the road with them, but I don't know what it is, so I'm not saying it here.

In Iceland, on our last full day in the country, we took a drive eastward, toward Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Iceland. We were headed for Skaftafell, formerly its own national park before it was absorbed by the larger Vatnajökull National Park, on the southwest corner of Vatnajökull. It's a 4 hour drive from Reykjavik, and while most people who make the trek tend to spend at least a couple of days in the park or along the eastern coast of Iceland, we were short on days and figured the drive itself would be a worthwhile part of the trip.

And so we went.

It snowed the night before we left. The roads were fine, but everything to the side of it got a gorgeous fresh coat.

Some of these vistas were silly.

Snow fields give way to the sea.

As we got further east, the snow gave way to the idyllic fields and farmland we'd gotten a glimpse of on our earlier tour of the south shore. In fact, the first leg of the trip was the exact route we'd taken on the bus.

Little house on the prairie?

Tractor on the road. And I shit you not, as we pulled past, there was a farmer with his boy just going for a drive in it.

Don't know why they discontinued these in the States but it's a SHAM.

Clear skies everywhere.

Until the clouds rolled in out of nowhere. This tended to happen a lot. Weather reports in Iceland, as we were told, are for shit until within a couple of hours.

We spotted a few of these guys throughout the drive. They've been trying to get the ash out of the rivers, but they're not having much luck. This means once the winter ends and the snow melts, the rivers will likely flood into the farms. Living next to a volcano sucks, I guess.

Roy took this one, but he used my camera so I'm stealing it so you can have an intermission between all the landscape/scenery shots. You're welcome.

And we're back. With some Middle Earth shit.

Those last two were from the drive back. Pictures of Skaftafell next time to conclude the Iceland posts.