Posts Tagged ‘photography’
Fresh What
Here we go again! A fresh new edition of everyone’s favorite image-guessing game. It’s simple to play. All you need to do is guess what is depicted in the image below.
Do you trust your first impression, or ponder the possibilities? Can you hold off long enough to wait for the answer to come to you, or will you look for the solution right away?
You are in charge, but it is strongly recommended you come up with some kind of guess for yourself before clicking on the image to find out what this could possibly be. Guess your best, and enjoy the mental exercise! What are you looking at?
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Iceland Arrival
We booked our airline tickets more than a year in advance of our chosen dates. We flew to Detroit to catch a plane to Reykjavik. That doubled my challenge of getting through security checkpoints without major complications. Cyndie and the Wilkuses enjoy TSA precheck privileges, so they went off and left me to fend with the standard security.
Yes, I forgot things in my pockets and had to double back and make a second go of it. Rookie traveler.
We flew overnight with a plan to sleep on the plane and be ready and raring to go upon arrival. That only sort of worked. We were all a bit bleary-eyed as we navigated our way through the airport and to the car rental office.
The process wasn’t exactly smooth, but it ultimately played out flawlessly. The agent mentioned car doors getting wrecked, and I asked how often that happens.
“At least one per week,” was her reply.
That triggered our establishing a mantra of Doors/Diesel/Dings to remind us of important details about our vehicle. Mike did the lion’s share of the driving and did a great service of parking in a direction that kept the wind pushing our doors closed instead of ripping them open.
We packed all our gear in and headed for the first scheduled stop on the itinerary Cyndie created: a bakery for coffee and pastries. Next, we found a grocery store and loaded up on lunch fixings. From there, we headed east along the south coast for our first waterfall, Seljalandsfoss.
The only way I knew that name is by looking it up just now on a copy of our itinerary. I was helpless against the local language and didn’t even try to cope with pronouncing the collections of letters forming words. If I heard someone else speak, I could try to mimic the sounds I was hearing, but the results were rarely pretty.
The waterfall, however, was gorgeous.
This beauty offers the feature of being able to walk behind to see the falls from underneath. We put on our rain pants and jackets and joined the conga line of tourists snapping photos and getting doused.
What did I do? I took a photo looking straight up, of course.
It’s a little disorienting.
It was official. We had arrived for the first adventure of our visit to Iceland. We learned how to pay for parking at each attraction. We made use of our rain pants right away. The rest of that first day included another waterfall, a lighthouse, a black beach, and, ultimately, a modern hotel on the Ring Road in the village of Vik.
After dinner at the hotel, sleep came easy.
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Iceland Trip
We are home from our great adventure of 10 days exploring portions of Iceland with our great friends, Mike and Barb Wilkus. Iceland is a very special place on this planet, and we are grateful that we were able to experience it in surprisingly nice weather and successfully achieve everything we planned without a glitch.
I found more trees than I expected!
But there was plenty of landscape without.
We hiked to a lot of waterfalls.
We saw a fascinating amount of varying geology that provided dramatically more vivid evidence of the earth’s history than where we live in Wisconsin.
We soaked in a number of geothermally heated pools and hot tubs, of which there are few photos out of respect for other bathers’ privacy and desires to avoid getting our cameras wet. We were able to experience the awesome spectacle of a glacier in real life, even as it was melting away beneath our feet. And finally, the good weather provided multiple nights of viewing the Aurora Borealis displays, which was a primary objective for Cyndie.
That was a special bonus.
There are many more photos (taken by all 4 of us) and stories that I hope to present soon. The planning for this trip began almost two years ago and included consultations with a travel agent and advice from one of my Brainstorms internet community members with first-hand knowledge. (Many thanks, JH!)
I cannot take any credit for preparations as ALL of the work was done by the other three. They collaborated to arrange our flights, rent a vehicle, plot a route, book rooms in different hotels and an Airbnb on a farm, and even make reservations for meals at some restaurants. They even packed necessary bags to facilitate grocery shopping so we could make our own meals at times and picnic in the car for lunch on a few different days.
Despite my distaste for traveling, particularly by airplane, the fact that Barb and Mike are such wonderful friends and Iceland is a place of such spectacular things to see and experience made it easy for me to truly enjoy this adventure.
There were only a few instances where I was reminded of the famous photo of many teams of mountain climbers waiting in a queue on the approach to the summit of Mount Everest. It was a rare instance when we were able to experience uncluttered views of waterfalls, volcano craters, geysers, or beaches. Early morning proved to be the secret to being the first car in the parking areas.
We didn’t have to deal with much in the way of precipitation in our locations, but high winds were a common occurrence. It made cool days into bitterly cold ones, threatened to hyper-extend door hinges in a moment of inattention, and even challenged our abilities to remain standing a few times. Made it feel like we were on an adventure, it did.
That was a fabulous trip, and I am lucky to have been included. I plan to write more about our experiences in the days ahead.
Thanks for returning to read after so many repeated days of tree trunks. I hugged our mother tree on our walk with Asher yesterday morning.
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Webs Spectacle
On our walk Friday morning, emerging from the woods with Asher on our way to feed the horses, we witnessed a spectacle I don’t remember ever seeing before. Spider webs. Lots of them. Admittedly, spider webs in the morning are not that special. I posted a picture of a dewy web just a few days ago.
Two things made this display of webs stand out more than ever: the location and the incredible number of them.
Like so many times before, I immediately decided that the glorious display couldn’t be adequately captured in a photo. Thankfully, Cyndie does not share my perception and fearlessly points her phone camera at any and all attractions that catch her eye.
She graciously shared them with me.
I tried zooming in on one of the images to provide a better view.
We have often been greeted by a vast number of funnel webs in the grass on our morning walks but these webs were completely different. These were the classic orb webs standing vertically above the grass in the back pasture.
They show up as white-ish smudges in the image and there are at least 14 visible in that shot. It really was a spectacle to see with our eyes. The low angle of the morning sunshine illuminated the webs so that they stood out dramatically as we stepped into the open from the woods.
It’s nice to see webs in the grass instead of strung invisibly across the trails in the woods. It is a regular occurrence that whoever is leading on our morning walks will offer many utterances of “you’re welcome” when breaking imperceptible strands of webs across our faces, saving the other person from such a fate.
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Wet Web
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Early morning dew drops cling to a spider web on a gate in the southwest corner of the back pasture. We frequently emerge from the woods at this spot on morning walks with Asher. He almost always tries to choose the fork to the right on the trail that follows the fence line all the way to the road. Each time I remind him that we are on our way to the barn to feed the horses. The fork to the left follows the fence line around the back pasture and leads to the barn.
When we come around the corner where the barn becomes visible, I try to greet the horses in a normal voice (not shouting), just to let them know it’s us. I don’t want to startle them first thing in the day. It’s very rewarding to tend to them when they remain very mellow throughout our arrival and subsequent activity.
We had a busy day of appointments yesterday. I started with a follow-up visit to the Physical Therapist for my shoulder and leg issues. Cyndie had a dentist appointment (or so she thought; it’s today, actually), followed by a doctor’s visit for an infection. Cyndie pulled a leech off her toe over the weekend and it didn’t end well.
That meant I was the one to take Asher to the vet for his out-of-control itching problem. The big guy weighed in at 85.5 pounds. His temperature was normal. Anti-itch meds were prescribed. He also got shots for vaccines and a blood draw for analysis. We are also giving him over-the-counter Benadryl doses. He was pretty wiped out last night and appeared to sleep soundly for a change.
The vet wants us to bathe him once a week. That’s a battle we have chosen to avoid until now. Asher has not been cooperative in past attempts to get him wet. It’s time for us to develop a routine that works.
I suppose we could leave him out all night so dew droplets condense all over him.
Or, maybe not.
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Guessing Again
It’s back! A fresh edition of everyone’s favorite image-guessing game. It’s simple to play. All you need to do is guess what is depicted in the image below.
Do you trust your first impression, or ponder the possibilities? Can you hold off long enough to wait for the answer to come to you, or will you look for the solution right away?
You are in charge, but it is strongly recommended you come up with some kind of guess for yourself before clicking on the image to find out what this could possibly be. Guess your best, and enjoy the mental exercise! What are you looking at?
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Relative Something 