Five minutes of change

After we passed the crater, we made a turn onto the Snaefellsness Peninsula.

Long in name and natural beauty. You say it something like sny fettle s ness. The scenery was just as unimaginable as that pronunciation.

The twisty roads were something like Highway 1 in California through Big Sur, but the coast was a different kind of rock. Sometimes the Atlantic stretched beneath the pass, sometimes it was a field of lava rock, green with lichen.

A lava field is a unique site. The flow of hot lava doesn't just spread out in a straight line. It leaves boulders that look like they're solid, but made up of hundreds of smaller rocks. In some,  grasses and shrubs are starting to reclaim the land amidst the field of boulders.

Here the field sat at the base of a sheer volcanic mountain, most of it looking like a pile of gravel that could collapse at any minute. A few minutes later, we'd be driving past pasture land with sheep and horses grazing. Then the ocean would return.

We heard that if you don't like the weather in Iceland, wait five minutes. We've experienced that, especially here with the sun, rain, fog and overcast skies. Out here, if you don't like the scenery, you just have to drive five miles.