UP IN THE AIR AND RACHEL MADDOW

      What? This is a Greenland/ Arctic calendar blog. What does either of the above have to do with that?
Those of you who know me may have heard my take on Rachel Maddow. If you want the facts ma’am, and only the facts, don’t listen to Rachel. She’s a story teller, and will start in left field and hit all the bases before reaching home. (I happen to like her stories, if not the interminable commercials.) Those of you who know me are also aware that my stories often have that same issue - but no commercials. This is one such blog post!

A calendar has to have a “Theme”. The images all have to work together as a group, and even if I occasionally sneak in an outlier, Rick is there to keep me on message. However, this is a blog! So I can tell stories  and show pix that go all over the place with no restrictions. You, of course, have no obligation to read them!  You can just sit and look at the pretty pictures of the calendar. But, then again, you might enjoy a story now and then.  Rachel alert!!

Aerial shots are really fun. While in Botswana I had the rare privilege of shooting out of a helicopter with the doors off. What a thrill! And several of those images made it into the 2014 calendar.  Another place to capture aerial images is from an airplane. Now if you are adventuresome, and have money to burn, you can rent a plane and fly around taking pictures. Or you can just fly commercially  and take pictures from the window seat, which is what I do. Some calendars have actually had some of these pix included. For example, the Cover of the 2013 calendar is a window seat aerial photo of the coast of the Big Island.

On this latest trip I didn’t get to ride in a helicopter, but I did have a window seat flying into Iceland, where the adventure officially began.

I left LAX in the afternoon and arrived in Reykjavic  at 6 the  following morning. I had a chance to use my iPhone and grab some shots. Here are my first glimpses of Iceland.
     

We flew from Reykjavic to Kangalussaq, Greenland where the National Geographic Explorer was docked. I was able to wangle a window seat and got these images of the Greenland Icecap, where land meets the sea, and the braided runoffs between the Icecap and the sea.

I love the textures in the ice.

Ice and fog over the sea.

Silt in the runoff.