Hey pals! Dropping my spare thoughts on Iceland below, for the handful of folk who still come here for updates on my (obviously rarer in general and supremely rare lately) travels. I've had a hectic month - in just about all aspects of life,
including getting back out to San Francisco for a visit with my
excellent brother - so this post is photo-light, as I've only really played with the video footage cut together below. Once I clear another project off my slate in the coming weeks, hopefully that'll change as well. The future! Who cares!
After the jump: a few more videos and thinking out loud!
Partly that was the (still ongoing!) process of unwinding the part of my brain that has spent the past 16 months more or less sheltering in place and thinking of my actions in terms of my being a risk factor for others. While the science is strongly suggestive of positive things, my understanding is we haven't gotten the full green light that vaccinated folk can't spread the virus, but since Iceland is in a pretty strong place on the front of vaccinations and testing/tracing and limiting community spread (weirdly, it was great to see how another country is handling this even in the hopefully-last stages) I think the root cause was that I really, really, really had put my life on pause this past year, and had to convince myself it was okay to unpause. In that respect, it helped a lot that this trip was designed to be physically distanced (initially the plan was literally "camp the whole time, only go inside to stock up on groceries") and also physically active (something I need to build better habits about after a winter/pandemic combo helped me get back to grad school anxietydepressionyear weight again).
I'm glad I did, obviously! In a lot of ways, this trip was complicated: I was re-remembering how I like to travel, often by screwing up and bonking my head against some bad decisions (going too fast, economizing in the wrong places) and sometimes simply by missing my favorite bits of travel (sitting in shared spaces, drinking coffee or snacking while chatting with strangers or just reading a book and taking in the world around me) which still didn't feel on-menu. (This is why, incidentally, Iceland felt okay when almost everywhere else I'd like to visit or revisit is on pause; the appeal here was almost entirely the remote outdoors.)
But I was also re-remembering how I like to travel when things went right: making last-minute decisions that panned out (ride a horse, take the last ferry to that cool-looking island before a gale-force wind advisory cancels the rest of the ferries for the day), letting myself flex with the reality of the moment (realizing that a sky that never goes dark is extra hard in a tent even with an eye mask and adding a couple of indoor "lights out" nights to the itinerary) and even the dumb basic thing of speaking a couple of Icelandic phrases to make an effort and feel that open doors.
The nature of the trip (and the fact that, at least among my fellow camping/hiking travelers there was a friendly-but-uncertain vibe, none of us entirely sure who was comfortable with what) meant that this wasn't a deep dive into Icelandic culture, notwithstanding a couple of Reykjavik days at the end, or my time reading Independent People, sort of the totemic Icelandic novel of the 20th century. It was much more a trip about landscape, which: is quite a thing! As you can possibly tell from the photographs and their captions! As a camping trip, it sort of threw me for a loop; I grew up on national and MN state parks, which usually meant woods and water, where here, on top of the usual European divergence (campsites in or near town, set up almost like a hostel's common area with a bunch of pitches nearby) there was Iceland's incredible dearth of forestry, thanks to both the rocky volcanic soil and the high-speed winds that pummel the island. That wasn't bad, but it took adjusting to; the attractions are geological more than ecological. Though I should say, I was incredibly smitten (predictably) with the geothermal culture; as with Japan and Hungary, it turns out that any place with centuries of culture around hot springs tends to know how to relax, and there remains very little that's more wonderful than soaking in a hot pool in the far north on a cold day with fog or rain to remind you how nice that warmth is. (Being vaguely linked to Scandinavia, there's also some good sauna culture, though I've always preferred the waters to the saunas, m'self.)
It was a great time to be in Iceland - it was still on the earlier side of Americans coming over, and especially once I got to the north and east parts of the country, there were stretches where I had entire parks entirely to myself. It was brisk (evenings in the high 30s, days in the high 40s) but unusually clear, meaning I really could go for these marathon 18 hour days with only occasional drizzle to slow me down. (And when it WAS gross, it was atmospheric - sort of a younger cousin to the brooding intensity of the Scottish Highlands, still and always first in my heart.)
It was also a time of change; masking mandates changed literally overnight while I was there, meaning the second half of the trip was an immersion in something of a return to pre-pandemic conditions. This was great too, honestly - shaking off the mindset I described earlier was made a lot easier by the instinctive "follow the rules of the place you are" vibes that are such a joyful part of traveling for me, and I returned to Chicago very much primed for outings with friends that might have felt like a big swing a few weeks earlier.
In any case, I was glad for the breath (and am rediscovering my appetite for a non-camping-adventures trip where I just go relax at a cabin or in a small Roman flat or whatever, but that's another issue) and incredibly grateful to be in a position where I could bop off and have this reset. As I say, life has been a bit frenetic since my return, and as the world starts to reopen here in Chicago, there's a lot of "okay, how do we do all things better" sifting to do, but for now I'm hanging on to gratitude and trying to preserve the reconnection I found this past year with slowness and reflection. More on that, perhaps, SOMEDAY!
Next up (eventually): some photos and additional thoughts on this trip, followed by some SF meanderings. I'm pretty much traveled out for the moment aside from seeing my NY friends once or twice this fall, though I am hoping against hope for a year-end long-haul trip. We'll see. In the interim, let's keep aiming to get America's herd immunity act together and rapidly start flooding the world with vaccine doses - the only moral, ethical, and self-interested choice there is! C'mon you lunatics!
