Iceland Prologue: A Failure To Communicate

OK, I admit it - I've done a horrible job of chronicling the days and weeks leading up to what is an extremely exciting and amazing trip for me. It's not that I haven't felt the same anticipation and feeling of significance that preceded my big preemptive midlife crisis last year. If anything, I'm escalating the stakes as this is my first international trip. OK, so I spent a month in Canada in the summer after graduating from High School and took a couple day trips to Tijuana (Fake Mexico), but those don't really count. For this trip I'm crossing an ocean, several time zones, and combating claustrophobia and a slight fear of flying to get to a harsh land of fiercely patriotic and culturally proud people that eat fermented shark, drink Viking beer and Black Death schnapps, and party like it's 1999 every single weekend.

The problem has been that life has gotten in the way, and there really hasn't been a lot of noteworthy events leading up to this trip. First off, I hadn't really expected to be taking this particular trip so soon - I honestly thought it'd be a year or two away if I ever took it. But when my meticulously planned cross-country train trip began to fall apart I had to decide whether to just move that trip back a few months, or do something completely different and save that trip for a time when I can do it exactly how I want to. Getting my way won out and I had to come up with something new. I decided to take a trip I had been dreaming of for easily 10 years and decided it was now or never for Iceland. The process of getting a passport was slow but simple and problem free. I quickly found a cheap flight that costs less than a trip to California. I booked a really cool looking apartment that, while not cheap - because NOTHING in Iceland is cheap - is very reasonable and located smack in the center of the capital, Reykjavik. The biggest hurdle I've had to deal with is figuring out how to get everything I want to take to fit into a carry-on sized backpack because I refuse to pay for or deal with the hassle that check-in has become. The solution, by the way, is a large compression bag to squish it all down and accept the fact that you're going to have to do laundry while you're gone.

After all the planning that went into my postponed trip (which was necessary because everything revolved around train stations and public transportation) I didn't want to put that much work into yet another vacation. This time around I'm just going to let things happen. I've got a hotel in Reykjavik, and beyond that I don't have anything set in stone. I have a long list of things I'd like to see, but I'm not going to plan any of it out. I'm going to have days where I do absolutely nothing but sit around a coffee shop and people watch. I'd like to take a few days and drive around the Ring Road that loops around the country. Domestic air travel is so cheap (cheaper than renting a car) that I can book a flight the night before and fly to the island of Grimsey (the only part of Iceland that is actually above the Arctic Circle) the next morning for about $50. This trip isn't so much about how many odd, off-beat, out of the way things I can find. Instead I want to relax, take in the abundance of natural beauty, and try my best to really experience another country and culture and not be the kind of tourist that tries to find the closest thing to home away from home. I want to see and do as much of the touristy stuff as I do the kind of things the natives do. I can't, nor should I, entirely avoid or ignore the fact that I am a tourist, but I can avoid the negative sides of it.

There is one obvious question that I haven't touched yet, but the one that I get asked the most when talking about this trip – why Iceland? It all started with a seemingly innocent and random fact that I read somewhere about 10 years ago. The little fact was that the average temperature of Iceland in the summer was only about 55F. For someone who hates being hot and lives in a place where the summers are stiflingly humid and the temperatures often break 100F this sounded amazing. Ever since then I've had a minor obsession with Iceland. It even features prominently in my book (which incidentally I have finished the first draft of recently). That's another reason the trip is so timely, because I'm now in the editing phase of my book and there's still time to visit the country and put that first hand knowledge into the story. That kind of knowledge isn't absolutely necessary for a work of fiction, after all Jules Verne put the secret passageway of A Journey to the Center of the Earth in the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull and never set foot in the country. Incidentally that volcano is covered by a giant glacier, but that doesn't seem to have hurt Verne's legacy in the slightest, but why pass up the opportunity to be a more informed writer? In feeding my obsession with Iceland I have learned a lot about it's amazing and unique geology and culture. Having read the Icelandic Sagas and researched Norse mythology I learned about a country full of glaciers, volcanoes, black beaches, arctic desserts, aurora borealis, and waterfalls that I just had to see. And so I am.

I leave this Friday for New York and then a red-eye flight to Reykjavik that will have me landing at about 7am local (2am Eastern) and over the following two weeks I hope to be able to share pictures, stories, and even videos (courtesy of one of my new toys for this trip) of all that Iceland has to offer. Icelanders are a quirky people and although I might not have quite as many oddities to report on as I did for my roadtrip, I don't think there's going to be any shortage of things worth sharing, so stay tuned.