Iceland is an island about the size of Kentucky formed by volcanoes, much like Hawai'i. The volcanic activity, which continues periodically today, occurs because the earth's crust is so thin where the European and North American tectonic plates meet along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This confluence is appropriate as the European, Icelandic Viking Leifur Eiríksson (son of Eirik the Red) discovered North America (Vinland). The stark, stunning features of this sparsely populated land are readily apparent in these images. We drove around the island counterclockwise, about 900 miles, on the Ring Road (Route 1), staying at six farm guesthouses or country hotels along the way, together with two nights in Reykjavík, the most northern national capital in the world where nearly two-thirds of Icelanders live today. Iceland has a temperate climate due to the gulf stream, and during July averaged about 55 degrees F. Also, in mid-July, the sun is up about 21 hours a day, and it never gets dark at all -- in Húsavík, I took pictures of whales at 11 pm by existing light!

Many thanks to Magnús Teitsson for kindly offering to provide me with proper Icelandic spellings for all of the captions. His generosity was remarkable and has allowed a great improvement! I met Magnús on the Internet Chess Club (ICC) as we both watched "the robot" Grandmaster Hannes Hlífar Stefánsson whip eight players in a row to win the 2002 Iceland chess championship (Magnús's handle on the ICC is "Murmur"). (Any remaining spelling errors, however, are mine alone). (Many curses to Bill Gates, though, for making it so difficult to insert Icelandic letters in Word on an English keyboard, which is why Magnús was horrified at the feeble transliterations to English in the original version of these pages -- there must be a better way!)