If there’s a long hallway, I’m at the end of it

Greetings from Iceland, which is a bit cooler than The Sandbox, for sure! However, panicking led to overpacking for my eight-day tour around the island. I brought my Minsk overpants for a “glacier hike” that was maybe five minutes and my heavy parka, which has served for excellent filler space in the giant roller bag that  I loaded up. No real regrets on the latter, though, because I couldn’t fit everything in the carry-on anyway and would have still had to take the larger bag.

The “hike” was a bit of a letdown; he only other glacier hikes I’ve done, I’ve gone in from the top and been left by a helicopter. This one was from the bottom, and the longest part of the hike was the trek from the bus to the bottom of the glacier. We then walked by a well-beaten trail of glacier, but the kind of glacier that’s completely brown and looks like cold dirt rather than snow that’s buried in dirt. When we got to the white part – or at least the part with way more snow than dirt – we were only there maybe 5-10 minutes and never took any trails or anything before doubling back. I wasn’t disappointed, per say, but others in my tour group were. Today I discovered the tour company refunded us $30 for the hike, which was nice of them.

Overall, the tour was excellent, but I knew going in it was a “highlight hitter” tour and wouldn’t be anything in-depth. Every place we stopped, I could have spent six hours just getting lost. The landscape is so harsh, different and beautiful that I wanted to just hike and wander. There are lush fields and acres upon acres of barren wasteland that run into each other. At one point, we looked like we were on the surface of Mars and five minutes later saw sheep grazing on green grass.

The lava fields were beautiful to me, all covered in moss with tiny flowers. So were the craters of the volcanos. At one point, we drove through the crater of an extinct volcano and found gorgeous lakes. Oh, and waterfalls – they are everywhere, and each one is just phenomenal. I could watch a waterfall all day.

But if you ask me the name of any particular one I saw, I have not a clue. Icelandic is a tough language to grasp and most of the names are extremely long. My takeaways were that “Vik” is the shortest city name in Iceland and “—foss” means waterfall. So it might have been Snellenfoss or something similar, mostly with letters that do not appear in English.

The black sand beaches were fantastic. One had black powdery sand and another had sand plus “diamonds” – huge chunks of glacier ice that pooled in a lake that, from the air, looked like ice cube soup. (I saw drone footage.) Occasionally, a chunk would calve off and float to the Atlantic, where it would then get washed up on the shore, getting beaten regularly by waves in the most mesmerizing fashion.

The fire and ice contrast is stark. I’ve seen glaciers and I’ve seen steam spewing out of the earth, along with boiling hot water and liquid clay. It’s pretty powerful.

So far, the vacation’s been quite nice, but this leg of it is almost over. Tonight I head out to my next destination. Since the flight I had to take coming here stopped in Vienna, I figured I’d stop there on the way back, too. Honestly, as enjoyable as Iceland has been, being in a different lodging every night has gotten old and I am ready to park it at an AirBnB for a couple consecutive days and do laundry.

Somehow on the tour I got a private room. I signed up to share, so this was a pleasant surprise. There was another single woman on the tour – half my age – but I guess she must have paid double occupancy, because I did not.

The rooms have definitely varied, but there’s been one consistent for me. If there’s a long hallway, my room is the furthest one down it. Oh man, it puts the “lug” in luggage – to be that far and still have to trek down one last road before pulling in for the evening.