Farewell to Iceland…

It has been a fascinating three weeks, but now it’s time to move on to the next part of our adventure.  The “Grand Tour” Sweater is coming along nicely—the body is done to the point of attaching the sleeves, which are both underway:

There were several nice pictures that we did not include in our daily blog posts. Here are some of them.

Late in our trip we finally saw some mountain ptarmigans up close. The male of this pair is just beginning to loose his white plumage, which starts on his head. The female has already essentially changed to her summer/nesting plumage – her wings may not lose all their white feathers – you can see the white wingtips in these pictures.  Note the striking red “eyebrows” on the male. Colorado also has ptarmigans, but they are called short-tailed ptarmigans and can sometimes be seen high up in mountains, well above timberline.  We got such good pics because the male was VERY much  more interested in the female than he was afraid of us.

Some birds are very common, like this striking black and white and grey Wagtail. IF you think you are seeing robins in Iceland, but they don’t look quite right, you are looking at Icelandic’s version of a robin—a Redwing. Both robins and these birds are thrushes and behave in almost the same manner. Later, in Norway and/or Sweden we should get pictures of a coal-black version, known in Swedish as koltrast.

Gulls of many kinds are all along the coast. Easily the most elegant are these Black-backed Gulls, the largest species in Iceland.

Icelanders used several different ways to stack strips of turf to cover the wooden and/or stone frameworks they built. The goal was to create thick  stable layers that would shed water for years and years.  Here are a couple of variants.

Speaking of frameworks…here’s what’s left of a bridge after a volcanic eruption caused melting under a glacier, which flooded the flat sandur with lots of water and big blocks of glacial ice, ie., icebergs.  They’ve made a sort of monument out of it:

Icelanders converted to Christianity about the year 1000. As time passed, several major religious centers developed and remain. This is Skalholt in southern Iceland, not far from Thingvellir.

And, since you can’t have too many Puffin pictures, here are some more.  Puffins really like to have their pictures taken, as a result most pictures show them looking at the photographer. This one got distracted a couple of times. They keep turning their heads from side to side, allowing one to get really nice portraits.

One can get to wondering who came out to see whom – people to watch puffins or puffins to watch people. All this watching is facilitated because puffins live at tops of cliffs and dig burrows into the turf overlying the rocks. They hop up on top of the turf to pull out grass to line their burrows, putting them “eye-to-eye” with all those other two-legged critters and their cameras.