From Iceland - Letters From Arcadia

Greetings from Arcadia,

For the last time, at least for this spectacular year exploring Arcadia, I’m writing to you about a faraway and fantastical place that I was privileged enough to see up close – Iceland.

It’s not easy to sign off on a year that has been filled from top to bottom with adventures beyond my wildest dreams. But I can’t bring myself to regret either the travel itself, nor its ending. It’s simply part of the journey to accept with gratitude the time I’ve been given to explore outside my boundaries, and to make peace with being an ‘indoor cat’ once again. That’s not to say that I’ve no plans to travel in the future. On the contrary, my travels have only confirmed the vastness of places to explore, and I also plan to revisit some of the areas that captivated me the most during this year abroad. I want to see more, do more, and be a lifelong traveler, but the realities of home life will make it more of an annual or semi-annual holiday instead of a full time occupation.

Back to Iceland, which is a country so breathtakingly beautiful that it’s at the top of many, many bucket lists, and rightly so. I picked it as a likely destination for a place to meet my Mom, who has never traveled internationally. There are direct flights to Reykjavik from Detroit, and the country is very safe, English-speaking, with endless opportunities for both sightseeing and for more activity-based travel. It seemed like to perfect place to end my travels for this year and to bring my Mom in on the world of adventure waiting just beyond the borders of the U.S. In ten days time, we drove Highway 1, which circles the entire country, and clocked over 1,000 miles on our little hatchback. I have to thank my Mom for being flexible, since I had been a bit preoccupied by my other travels, I hadn’t had the time or energy to put much planning into this trip. A few days before we were set to leave, I basically laid out for her that other than a car and places to lay our head at night, I didn’t have much of a plan. I asked her if she would be okay with ‘winging it,’ and to her credit, she agreed that we could be spontaneous and take Iceland one day at a time. It ended up being a great way to see this country, not to have a set plan.

I could give you a play by play, but really, Iceland is all about the scenery, and since we were lucky enough to have a relatively smooth trip with no major problems or incidents, there’s nothing much to say except “look at this…it doesn’t even look real.” Which is something we did say, over and over again while driving the country of Iceland. This place is as diverse, majestic, wild, and unbelievably beautiful as they said it would be. There’s a reason that amateur and professional photographers the world over flock to this country in droves; it’s nearly impossible to drive any distance in this country without wildly pulling over to the shoulder and frantically rolling down the window to take pictures of one incredible landscape after another. Iceland demands to be seen with both eyes wide open and a zest for adventure in the land of fire and ice.