Astronaut At The Beach

Madame Le Chef and I went to Ocean beach on November 11 of this year. It was a mild day.  On walking down to the sand we saw a wonderful sight in the distance.

Since I only had my iPhone, I could not zoom in on this charming couple.

Madam Le Chef, always prepared, had brought an actual camera and she recorded the astronaut

The couple seemed to be a mom and her son. They were engaged in a photo shoot. In that magic time before adolescence crashes in, kids are happy to wear a spacesuit to the beach.

It was not a good day for surfing but boogie boarding was possible.

Although it was not yet 4 PM, the sun was low in the South and the shadows where long.

It was a beautiful day.

June 13, 2017: A Cloudy Day in Iceland Part 2

After the glacier, we headed to the seacoast town of Vik.

After lunch we headed down to a black sand beach.

There is a shallow cave that the waves have hollowed out in the basalt of the hill.

The basalt columns almost seem man made.

Turns out they are great for posing on.

After the photographic opportunities had been exhausted, we got on the bus and headed for another waterfall named Seljalandsfuss.

It was possible to walk behind the waterfall but it would mean that you would get wet from the windblown spray. The temperature was in the forties and, unlike the well prepared Madame Le Chef, the bureau chief did not have a down jacket. I elected to remain dry and Madame joined me in that. We watched our hardy comrades emerge at a distance..

It was interesting that the powerful waterfall ended in a modest sized stream.

Like many bodies of water and fountains in shopping malls, tourists had thrown coins in its crytal clear water.

To the sun

We're in August which in San Francisco is known as 'Fogust". We recently had to drive up to Marin County just to see the sun. The sun appeared just past the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. We went to Point Reyes Station for lunch. Here's a picture of blue sky over a rather dirty Studebaker Lark.

We decided to visit Point Reyes Nation Seashore. We reentered the grey but not the fog. We went to South beach which has some amenities.

There were six people in the parking lot but the beach was deserted.

There were signs of previous visitors.

Eventually we had some aerial visitors.

June 13, 2017: A Cloudy Day in Iceland Part 1

We went on another, even longer, bus tour to the South East coast of Iceland. As the title of this post indicates, it was quite cloudy and there was steam coming out of the ground.

There were farms huddled below ominous looking hills.

We were never far from water.

Our first stop was at a waterfall called Skogafoss.

Various hardy souls wanted the view from the top of the falls.

The view from the bottom was fine with us.

 The next stop was the glacier Solheimajokull.

It's grey because the ice is covered with grey and black volcanic ash. A different tour group had crampons, ice axes and a dispensation to walk on the ice.

 Our group heeded this sign.

We were fine with that.

June 11, 2017: A sunny day in Iceland

We took a daylong bus tour. The first stop was at Thingvellir National Park where you can walk through the rift valley between the North American tectonic plate and the Eurasian plate. They are moving away from each other.

We went from there to see Gullfost waterfall.

 It's possible to get pretty close to it.

There are no forests in Iceland, which was deforested in the Middle Ages. Their absence adds to the starkness of the landscape.

Next we went to the town of Geysir where there is an ancient geyser of that name which is the source of the English word.

The tour guide took risqué delight in mentioning that the old guy was not spurting regularly anymore but that job had been taken over by another geyser named Strokkur.

Here is that geyser in action.

Iceland, June 2017

The first day that Madam Le Chef and I were in Reykjavik, capital and only city in Iceland, we were supposed to join a tour by a church, Hallgrimskirkja. When we asked directions everyone said that we would see it. They were right. It's one of the tallest buildings in Iceland and it's on the tallest hill in Reykjavik.

You can see it from everywhere.

We revisited it the next day and took the elevator to the top. This is the view from the top looking North.

The weather in Iceland is very changeable.

On our last night in Reykjavik, we discovered that an artist had made an iron frame so that you could get just the right angle on the church. I'm convinced that he/she chose the view because it made the church look like a tall squid.