A day of ice — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

We saw the fire at the beginning of the trip, so now we get to see the counterpart. When we got up, there was a cool cloud formation over the two glaciers in the guesthouse’s backyard -

We took our time before heading out to the glacier lagoons, giving the sky (hopefully) time to clear. We hit the jackpot!

There are two glacier lagoons, with Jokulsarlon being the larger of the two. Along the shore, my attention was caught by a beautiful bird -

This is a male Eider duck. For those of you who might have heard about eiderdown, this is a very long but fascinating article about the harvest of said down: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/19/eiderdown-harvesting-iceland-eider-duck (I guess I found it so interesting because we’ve visited the places mentioned.)

It’s the females that provide the down -

But I digress…

The variety of icebergs, in both color and shape, was fascinating.

We learned that the bright blue color is indicative of an iceberg that has recently flipped, and the part that had been under the water had not yet been melted by the sun, which reduces the “blueness”.

I was so fascinated by the various shapes and colors…

… that I found it very hard to stop taking pictures (I know… shocker!).

Steve actually took this picture, as the sun suddenly hit this berg, while I was on a bathroom break.

It was also very neat to see the submerged parts of the icebergs, in the crystal clear water -

We then moved down to Diamond Beach. This is where icebergs end up after having been tossed around in the ocean for a bit, before being stranded back on the beach.