In preparation for a new book project featuring this series, I’m padding the resume with more non-presentational nakedness.
Our final nude, just off the road. Elisabeth had planned to wade to the little island, but eerie water features just below the surface dissuaded her from so grandiose an adventure.
When we finally reached Akureyri, we unanimously decided to abjure our explorer wiles and get the hell into an air bnb with a proper shower and abundant heating. The following day, our glorious host drove us up to a hiking trail above the town.
Sad but true, I believe the culprit was so vast an array of incredible landscapes, thoroughly inundated with baby totin’ tourists who might have pushed us into the waterfall. That said, the true glory of this experience was the utter lack of safety precautions around this environment. Allowing the idiots among us to teeter just over the drop.
Along luxurious drive up the coast, an abrupt turning of the weather. Things got awfully cold once we crossed the southern threshold and moved through the great glaciers up towards the highlands.
I suppose I’ll have to move on to day 4 at some point, but all in good time..
Sunday morning mentation; the raw, unbridled beauty of the natural landscape, or the supple alabaster curves of an American expat? You decide.
We’d visited this gorgeous site the afternoon before, but it was lichened thoroughly with fellow tourists, disgorged by the busload onto the volcanic sand. Rather than attempt an international incident, we decided to return early the following morning to properly augment the landscape.
On the Saturday of Nov 24, 1973 a United States Navy airplane was forced to land on Sólheimasandur’s black sandy beach in the south of Iceland. The crew survived the landing and the airplane’s remains are still standing at the crash site. While the dream shot would have had our intrepid model astride the plane itself, there were a few too many fellow tourists on hand to accomplish that. The shot below is a few hundred feet from the site, where the terrain dipped slightly. Enough to obscure an efficient view of our antics.
The first stop for exposure came moments after we left the milky vapors of the Blue Lagoon; still simmering, we marveled at the mossy tufa stretched along the narrow ring road. There were few places to turn off that didn’t involve negotiating a rather steep shoulder. Our car being what it was, we bided our time until fortune favored this halcyon spot
