Our Last Trip Before the Great Pestilence of 2020

It was epic. We brought crampons and a flying robot.

Not to make light of our situation, but you gotta laugh. And reminisce. As you would-be galavanters sharpen your pencils and prepare your world maps to plot out your next destination once you’re free, let me take the liberty of telling you where you need to go. And that place is Iceland.

Don’t feel like you have to go in winter, on the literally shortest day of the year. Just cuz we did it, and we are extreme middle-aged travelers. The summer is nicer, with 22 hours of daylight and temperate weather and roads you can actually drive on. But there will be the incessant mosquitos.

Iceland in winter is exactly like another planet. Even though we did our research, we didn’t quite know what to expect, and the spectacle of sunrise at 10:30AM and sunset at 3:20PM is different in person than in the guidebooks or YouTube videos. We half expected to see three moons and a blue sun. Couple that with ice boulders, lava fields peeking up out of the snow and 100-mile-an-hour winds, and no, you aren’t mentally prepared.

We stayed in Reykjavik, rented a four-wheel drive SUV, and tooled around the southern part of the country. Later, we food toured and otherwise explored the city, a model of high living standards and practicing democracy.

We’ll be doing several posts about this amazing trip, with lots of photos and maybe a video from our flying robot. Stay tuned!


Gear


Planning