To be honest, my first impresion of Iceland as I was travelling back from the airport in Keflavik to Gudrun's house in Reykjavik 35 miles away was not a good one. Barren and bleak are two words that come to mind. It was dawn when I arrived, but that didn't matter. It was stormy out. Rainy, cool, very overcast. The landscape I saw as we drove was nothing but flat rocky terrain with nothing living in it. No trees, grass or shrubs, just brownish-black volcanic rock. It took me a while to get accustomed to it and appreciate it for what it was: An obvious indication of an island that is still being formed by the actions of the earth's crust.

Not all of Iceland is covered in ugly rocks that remind one of the surface of the moon. Many of the places I saw were covered by lush grass that stretched as far as the eye could see. Crystal clear streams and springs, waterfalls and hot springs are also not uncommon there. Additionally, the rocky land, cliffs and fjords have a rugged beauty all their own. I've been to some of the mountains in the United States and they never looked anything like this. I guess it looked as if some of the cliffs were made yesterday. Cracked and craggy, rough and sharp. They were not worn down by the elements into smoother contours. This seems to be a young Island in geologic terms, but what do I know, I'm just a computer scientist. <g>

Iceland was created by the volcanic action of the north atlantic in which, I believe, the crust is splitting apart giving way to volcanoes that formed the island, much like Hawaii and many Pacific islands. But Iceland was also carved by the giant glaciers of the ice age. Like a god's knife cutting into the earth, the glaciers made the great fjords and high cliffs that are particularly visible on the north side of the island. A fjord is where the water seems to cut into the land in a sort of V shape. Usually the land side of a fjord is steep like the side of a mountain and the water is deep, not shallow. So deep that in one fjord, the Allied forces in World War II were able to hide their ships and submarines from the Germans before attacking in Europe.

So the Earth's heat under the ground causing volcanoes to blow their tops every few years, but there is also another form of geothermal activity: hot springs. Mineral water smeling like sulfur bubbles out of the ground at the boiling point and is used by the Icelanders to make their electricty, heat their homes and provide hot water for showers and baths and swimming pools.

One thing that took some getting used to was the scale of the maps of Iceland. Since Iceland is so small (about the size of the state of Kentucky), it really doesn't take that long to drive anywhere. Highway 1, which goes all the way around Iceland, can be circumnavigated in two days of driving. So when we drove from Reykjavik to Vik on the south side of the island, about 1/5 of the way around the island, I thought it might take several hours, since that is what I was accustomed to. But in reality, it would take about an hour and a half to two hours driving non-stop. We stopped a lot along the way to see different things, bu tit still only took us three hours.

The weather in Iceland can be called miserable by some. Again, it's an aspect that takes some time to adjust to. For the most part, it was overcast the whole time I was there. But we did have a day and a half of partly-cloudy type weather where I got to see the blue sky. One thing that I noticed about the weather in Iceland is that it's always changing so very rapidly. From day to day and sometimes from hour to hour, the weather can change. Drive over the mountains and a sunny day can turn into an overcast, rainy and stormy day. The weather is very unpredictable. Gudrun told me that Icelanders don't plan for vacations because the weather can't be counted upon, so they take their vacations when the weather permits them to and they are relaxed about weather than can turn from good to bad in a matter of an hour. That's how things are.

The clouds are also different there. It's hard to explain, but the clouds seemed more varied and somehow... closer. I suppose the main difference is that where I live in Virginia, when one looks at the sky,t he clouds will mostly be the same or similar and seem to be very high in the sky. But in Iceland, they were often a combination of different types of clouds, long, low white blankets of clouds along with dark thundercloud-like forms, for example. So although the weather could be classified as bad a third of the time I was there, it was very interesting to see how different it was from what I grew up with in the U.S.

The temperature there was pretty fair. About 50s in the day and 40s at night. It was autumn there, and the real cold had not hit yet. As you can see in many of the pictures I took, the grass and small shrubs (there are not many trees in iceland) were turning from green to various shades of orange and reddish-brown. Sure, it can't be compared to the magnificent colors of the trees in North America, but there's so much more to Iceland than the plant life.