Today we had an outing with several people from work. Ten of us piled into an “excursion vehicle” and headed up into the highlands for a trip to an ice cave. On the way we stopped at Barnafoss, which I’d never been to although I had heard it was beautiful. This description fails completely to describe it.

The waterfall emerges from the hillside without a visible source. Apparently, the lavafield is so porous that water just runs through it, but underneath, there’s a layer of basalt so this underground river emerges here. Amazing.

It joins up with a real river that churns through a narrow gorge crisscrossed by land bridges.See that blue in the water? It’s really that blue, maybe even bluer in real life. Rob said that he thought it was like a giant bath of Bombay Blue Sapphire; it’s that blue.

Legend has it that two children were playing on one of these land bridges and fell in. Their mother had that bridge destroyed so no other children would drown there.

Next up was the glacial cave at Langjökull. For those of you who don’t know, and that would include me before today, a glacial cave is a cave that is inside a glacier, while an ice cave is merely a cave with ice in it. So today, not only did we drive over a glacier, we walked inside it.

Our guide had brought at shovel with him and made mini-steps up into the cave, which we needed since we were walking on snow covered ice. When we finished looking around, we walked back down to a safe location and sat down in our snow suits for a ride down what must be the world’s largest natural outdoor slide.

The SF Site Featured Review: Shimmer, Autumn 2005

If I had seen Shimmer in a store, I would have snatched it up right away, because I am a book snob, and, to my shame, am too easily seduced by gorgeous cover art. However, had I indeed picked up a copy in a fit of unmitigated passion for its prettiness, I would not have been disappointed; this is an excellent magazine with high editorial standards, a tight, sure vision of what it seeks to accomplish, and a degree of success with that goal that’s decidedly gratifying.