After a 10-minute cab ride, 50-minute bus ride, 6-hour flight to JFK, mad dash through customs, and 3 1/2-hour flight to Austin, I got home at 1:30 in the morning on Friday. Today’s a day for laundry and unpacking and not spending any money oh god. Here’s some random thoughts and observations on the trip that never got into a blogpost. I made a critical miscalculation in my desire to see the Northern Lights: there was no, way, in, hell I…
I went downstairs for breakfast. I went back to my room and put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. I left again for lunch. I met this dog. The weather was quintessentially Icelandic—sometimes snowing, sometimes sunny, sometimes both. Snow in the sunlight. I'll miss you, #Iceland. A post shared by Kevin Miller (@happywaffle) on Apr 19, 2017 at 7:37am PDT I literally cried laughing at this. https://storify.com/vjzuylen/please-stop-roasting-my-goddamned-shoes I dozed. And then, almost as a dare to myself to brave the…
The end of my crazy Rescue 911 day was remarkably mundane: watching “Black Mirror” in the back of my camper while sipping hot chocolate with a wee nip of whiskey. For the final time, I went through my settling-in routine: suitcases shoved to one side, couch folded down to a bed, curtains drawn, dish cloth draped over the skylight, myself zipped into the sleeping bag, heater turned off. The next morning, everything in reverse order. My neck and back were in open…
Coming down out of the Westfjords on Sunday afternoon, with sunlight on my face and dust on the road, I’d had a subconscious feeling of being home free. Oh, Iceland was not done with me yet, my friends. The weather was mild and dry when I left the campsite in Stykkishólmur on Monday morning. I drove west on the Snaefellsness peninsula, taking a detour through Berserkjahraun, a seemingly endless field of lava rocks in weird formations. It began to…
I’ve told this story many times: when I was six years old, I told my mom that I only ever wanted to live in a place that snow was exciting. It was the smartest thing that young Kevin ever said. I wonder if Icelandic kids feel that way about warm weather? A little note about my sleeping arrangement. My sleeping bag, combined with long underwear and fuzzy socks, is generally quite comfortable in the back of the camper. But there’s…
I was wide awake at 6:45 on Saturday morning, and my big tour stop for the day didn’t open until 11. And so, like the kids in “The Cat in the Hat,” I sat for several hours, supremely bored in the back of my camper. If you had told me my day would end with a rap concert, I would not have believed you. Finally 11:00 arrived, and I drove down the street to the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft. This was a…
After taking a six-hour-long shower, gorging myself on the free breakfast, and bidding a teary goodbye to the comfortable bed, I checked out of the Hotel Kea and drove Björk northward through Akureyi. Along the way I saw something I hadn’t seen since all the way back at Reykjavik: stoplights. As an adorable bonus, all of the red lights were heart-shaped. The snowbound peril began again almost immediately as I left the city and headed up the western side of…
A fresh layer of snow had fallen during the night, and would continue to fall all morning. It’s funny how surprising this is for me; I had mentally prepared myself for the possibility of rain or ice on this trip, but steady snowfall in mid-April didn’t seem likely. How wrong I was. But the show must go on! And so I gently slid Björk in a counterclockwise loop around Lake Myvatn, stopping first at a group of “pseudo-craters” that are the product of giant…
I’ve got a bit of a ranty Marc Maron-style opening today. Please feel free to skip down to the pretty pictures. I TOTALLY get why people travel with other people. Someone to share your experiences and memories with, split the bills, yadda yadda. I’ve done it myself. That! being! said! Among other things, I do NOT envy the picture-taking process: Person A poses in front of the waterfall/volcano/glacier/crashed-plane-on-beach. Person B lines up the picture, takes an impossibly long time composing the image, and…
I was right to worry. The snow at the Höfn campground had melted overnight (which is not what I’d have expected, but, that’s Iceland for you). As I left town and drove to higher elevation, though, it reappeared. The first vehicle I passed was a snowplow, which would seem to be a good omen, but turned out to be a bad one. The road, it turned out, was only cleared in one lane—the southbound lane. And so, crazy as it…