I wasn’t going to do this, but here I am again – in Iceland! I was planning to do it next year, but a cancellation opened up a spot on this year’s trip with Creative Adventures and I thought, why wait, so I took the spot.
We arrived yesterday and had time to settle in last night. It was great to meet everyone, it turned out that I have already met four of the other seven people in the group on previous trips, which makes the whole thing so much easier for a socially handicapped person like me!
We ate a quick breakfast and headed out to the black lava fields that I’ve learned to love. It’s a wilderness where you have to be able to get by yourself (even if we had 4G coverage in the most unexpected places!), but our 4×4 cars handled the small roads just beautifully. That is, until we discovered that last week’s torrential rains had done a number on some of the roads. One creek had become too deep for fording without a snorkel, and in another place the road was completely washed away. The black lava sand is treacherous, it can become quicksand when wet so drive with care!
But weather-wise, we got lucky. Almost no wind and just a few odd drops of rain, it feels almost too gentle to be Iceland!
On my previous photography trips, I’ve noticed how I get more and more tired towards the end of the week and start to lose inspiration to shoot. It leads to me just walking about with the camera in hand, without a tripod, and not really thinking so much about what I’m shooting. But today I was doing exactly the same thing, and this is only the first day! But it’s not that I’m already tired, it’s more a question of me having a different attitude than before. I just think that this is a very cool place for walking around, so even if the pictures fail… at least I got to explore the Icelandic back country, and it’s all good!