At the beginning of last month I had the good fortune to spend eight days in Iceland, with about five of those days on the ground doing whatever I wanted. Whatever I wanted turned out to be quite a bit, to the point that my bank account is crying for mercy. Every time I look its way I think I hear my wallet weeping.
And me, silly girl that I am came completely unprepared, I blame part of this on the fact that I tumbled off a commercial flight from Munich, Germany crammed myself onto a bus and went home for a grand total of five hours. Just five. I didn't even bother changing out of my uniform, except for the knee high navy blue stockings and the ugly navy blue heels that make me feel like the 80's have come back to devour me alive. I had a few hours of quality time with my slippers, changed out the luggage and then and the heavens opened and the rain poured down and it was off to JFK... again. You know you're loaded down and looking pathetic when people help you onto the bus and then strike up a conversation with you - this does not happen in New York! It breaks the cardinal rule of how to interact with people in NYC and yet there seems to be something about my uniform that says "Talk to me!" Argh. The fact that I resembled a drowned rat probably wasn't working in my favor either: my umbrella, as it happens, is seeing Germany without me.
Anyhow, I've completely digressed from the fact that when I packed for Iceland I somehow forgot that "ICE" is an important part of the name of said country so I should probably pack accordingly and one hoodie, a wool jacket and a pashmina does not accordingly make. I ended up having to buy a hat and gloves as my fingers were still thawing out from certain locales and it was getting in the way of me being a photo-ho. It does no one any good when your fingers are so thoroughly frozen that you can't focus the camera as your fingers simply will not work. They started out just shaking, and when it progressed to me having to will them to move (I believe pep talks were an important facet at one point) I realized something simply must be done. So there I was forking over the credit card (can you hear it weeping? I can) for a lovely wool hat and a pair of plain black gloves, so as to keep my poor abused appendages all nice and toasty. It wasn't until I got home and took a good long look at my bank account that I realized buying a hat and gloves cost me 60 dollars. Just.. Holy CRAP! On the upside, the appendages were all nice and toasty and no more pep talks were called for.
I keep telling myself that the memories mean more then the money, but that fact is sometimes hard to remember when the credit card bills arrive in the mail and you find yourself weeping along with your bank account.
All of that blather was leading up to the fact that I have gotten around to posting some of my Iceland images (I took well over a thousand but have since weeded through them in order to preserve the sanity of those who may view them) and as I normally go from start to finish with a trip, which makes sense when I generally have only 19 hours to pack in as much as humanly possible, this time I had 5 days, so I'm going to start from the end - with the part of the trip that knocked me on my ass and slapped me silly. Seriously, this part of the trip made me its bitch.
I am a geek and this became incredibly apparent as I was in the throes of geek ecstasy whilst I stood beneath the cliffs of Almannagjá and gazed upon the ruin of Hrafnagjá. And yes, I know that makes no sense to anybody but me. I shall explain.
This, dear reader, is Almannagjá. And it's not a cliff, it's the edge of a continent - the American Continent to be precise. It's the edge of a tectonic plate and it is moving. It's not just a pile of rocks or a pretty cliff face to gaze upon, if you are reading this from the comfort of your home in North America somewhere, you are sitting on this thing RIGHT NOW. That just blows my mind and makes me want to count the tweety birds.
Now, my throes of geeky passion has led a few people to inquire what exactly a tectonic plate is when I've been waxing lyrical about the wonders of standing below this cliff and pondering the immensity of it all, so I'm going to give a brief rundown: All of us are sitting on a tectonic plate. Right here, right now, you are on one. Imagine the earth as pieces of styrofoam floating on water. That's pretty much what this is, pieces of rock floating on a sea of melted rock and metal. Now pieces of styrofoam aren't going to sit all nice and pretty and joined together on water (especially if the water is moving), they're going to move around a bit, one is going to go under the other, they're going to pull apart. The earth does this all the time, it's just so big and massive and old that we really don't realize it's going on until the earth pulls the rug out from under us and suddenly there are earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanoes going off all over the place. Iceland just happens to straddle the Mid-Atlantic ridge where two plates - the American and the Eurasian are slowly but surely moving away from each other, sometimes causing all kinds of havoc as they do so.
That brings us to the fact that if you have one tectonic plate, you must have another and this is where Hrafnagjá comes in.
This is Hrafnagjá and it is the Eurasian Tectonic plate. A bit more run down and older looking, more subtle. It doesn't have the immensity of Almannagjá, but it is a continent and like it's American neighbor it is moving - slowly but surely a good 3 mm per year (that doesn't sound like much, but geologic time doesn't span decades the way human time does). As a result of this movement and the steady grind of time, the American plate and the Eurasian plate are miles away from each other and separated by a cold, deep lake in the middle of the rift valley they've managed to create with their ceaseless movement.
This was the part of the Icelandic tour that just knocked my socks off and left me begging for more. In the space of a day I went from Europe to America. Now, I do this quite a bit but there's a big, huge, MASSIVE difference from sashaying onto a plane in America and pulling your tired and weary carcass out of it in Europe. You know you're on a different continent, you've done the time, you've arrived, everything is different. But this had an immediacy and an awareness that being in a plane doesn't give you. Slumbering your way through a flight (or working in my case) and popping a blind to see where you are over the Atlantic doesn't hit you in the face the way this does, you have left a continent, you are no longer standing on a massive slab of earth floating over magma, you've left it and you are on a completely different slab of earth, moving away and taking you with it. There is no confusion about where you are. You can say on one side of the valley: I am in Europe and 10 minutes later you find yourself hiking up a hill to the top of a tectonic plate, looking down at a rift valley and you are in North America. There's Europe in the distance, a hop, skip and a leap away, but you're not there, you're someplace else.
Did I stand there looking up at this massive wall of rock with my mouth hanging open and my brain beating itself against my skull? Why yes, yes I did.
I think I just gave myself chills... I need to go lay down.
As always: my photos can be found on
Flickr. So please, look and enjoy and join me in the geekgasm.
