The motivation for my trip to Iceland is to compete with my over-50 soccer team, Concord United, in two matches against senior teams from Iceland.  Our first match was this evening and ended in a 1-1 tie.  Teams here take some liberties with age and I was surprised to be marking a 42 year old Icelandic giant.  Even so, I did my job well and deprived him of any productive trips down the pitch despite his 15 year advantage.

I spent the morning on an organized walking tour of the capital with a small group of my teammates and captured many new sights.

During my last visit to Iceland I had to rush around the Snæfellsnes peninsula because I was running short on time.  Today, I revisited all of my favorite locations giving myself plenty of time to explore. These types of images do not lend themselves to viewing in small format.  Clicking on them should bring up a larger, higher resolution version.  I had originally planned a third night of camping but opted to travel on to Reykjavik when it began to rain.

I shot mostly landscapes today but I couldn’t resist these little ducklings.

It is important to have a full tank of gas and carry your own food and water in the Westfjords as you can drive for hours before encountering any services. So provisioned, I set out to explore, beginning with the western most point of the the country, the cliffs at Látrabjarg.  On the way I stopped frequently, as photo opportunities popped up at every turn including some rather unlikely subjects.

Most of the roads in this area are made of gravel.  Frequent rock slides and ever enlarging potholes make constant work for maintenance crews.  Because the roads are very narrow, you simply have to queue up and wait until the work is completed before driving on.

Látrabjarg is home to hundreds of thousands of cliff dwelling birds (it has the largest colony in all of Europe) including the ever so cute puffin.  I arrived at noon when most birds are off at sea fishing but I did manage to find some nice subjects to shoot. I followed posted advice to lay flat on my belly when taking photographs from the cliff edge. Extremely high wind gusts have carried many a visitor over the edge (check out the person in the photo below for a sense of scale and to gauge the probability of surviving a fall). Had it not started to rain, I could have spent hours here.

The beach at Rauðasandur (red sands) is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen and not a single footprint on it. Aside from being extremely remote, I would venture to guess that few humans would find the water temperature to their liking. The seals, however, seemed to like it just fine.

By late afternoon I was ready to make my way towards Grundarfjörður on the Snæfellsnes peninsula. I plan to camp there near Kirkjufell Mountain which I hope to photograph tomorrow morning. In total I spent another 6 hours driving today and welcomed all the stops I made to take photographs along the way.

I have never been able to sleep on a red-eye and such was the case last night. My excitement at being back in Iceland, however, was enough to keep me awake as I made the 6 hour drive to Dynjandi located in the Westfjords, the only region of the country that I did not reach on my prior visit. Fewer than 15% of visitors to Iceland ever set foot in the Westfjords and a surprisingly large number of Icelanders have never been here either.  It is by far the most pristine and some would say the most authentic experience of the country since the massive increase in tourism over the past few years.

Dynjandi is a series of waterfalls with a cumulative drop of 330 feet. The way the water fans out so uniformly makes it one of the most photogenic I have captured.

I made few stops en route to Dynjandi but paused for the ones shown below. A loyal follower of this blog requested more photos of bridges so I was on the lookout for good examples. I would say that 90% of the bridges in the country are one-lane affairs.

When the sun finally set at about 10:30PM, sleep came easily. I pitched my tent at the base of the falls where the thundering sound of falling water ushered in the best night’s sleep I have had in some time.

Jeanine spent the weekend in Stony Brook visiting Maya who is interning at the Brookhaven National Labs. Her visit was timed to overlap with the BNL Atom Smashing Fun Day during which members of the public get a behind-the-scenes tour of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and learn about the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle.

I bid farewell to Costa Rica departing my hotel at3:30 amm, flew to Miami and then Boston where Jeanine met me for a short time. She delivered a replacement camera I ordered earlier in the week and we caught up on the prior 10 days before I boarded a red-eye for Iceland where I will spend the next week.