- WRITING IN PROGRESS -
Eleven years ago, Jane and I went on a four-day bender to Iceland, our first international trip as a traveling couple. I was just starting to dive deeper into the world of landscape photography, and Iceland beckoned as a sort of Holy Grail of outdoors travel, a land of otherworldly vistas and mythic proportions. I believe that was (roughly) the first trip that I shot RAW (I remember tinkering away at the post-processing like an amateur during the sleepless, jetlagged nights of that trip - and it shows in the final photos!), the first time we rented a car together, the first time my now-fabled GPS coordinates made their appearance (at that time, on a handwritten sheet!). Short as it was, that half-week clearly left a big impression in my travel habits and in a lot of the creative work I’ve done since 2015. And as we pondered where we could bring Jordan on a big spring trip, and his first international outing, Iceland kept looming large on the horizon. For me, as Jordan crosses three and I cross thirty-five, it’s become deeply important to start showing him the type of travel that made me and his mom fall in love with the world. As I’ve written elsewhere, our family’s recent-year travels have tended to gravitate toward the toddler’s interests (locomotion, water parks, hotels, and playgrounds), while I’ve gone off on solo trips to pursue photography and adventure. This trip represents our first attempt to marry those two sides - an eight-day-long deep dive into the regions of Iceland that we zoomed through in 2015. I’ve purchased a new camera system to celebrate the occasion (the A7RV), but on the itinerary are just as many playgrounds, jump pads, hot springs, and hotels as there are photo spots and hikes. Free from the tyranny of exhaustively exploring an entirely new place, Jane and I are excited to show Jordan a more relaxed, family-friendly side of the wild country that caught our eye all those years ago. Passports in hand (“My passport, my passport!” Jordan squeals through airport security), we board our short red-eye flight across the Atlantic.
Five hours (and exactly zero minutes of collective sleep later), we deplane to a familiar sight: dark blue dawn, and a bizarrely bright, geometrically clean airport in Keflavík. Jordan was decently well-behaved and polite on the flight, but it was always a fool’s errand to ask him to sleep on a plane surrounded by a sea of in-flight entertainment screens, when he normally sleeps in a pitch-dark bedroom with a white noise machine. On the flight, we become acquainted with Happy Monkey smoothies, which will become a staple drink throughout our road trip (Jordan gets a kids’ snack box, while the rest of us peasants have to pay for any beverage besides water, coffee, or tea). The little man, running on zero sleep since 16 hours prior, gleefully races his way through the airport terminal, through a winding maze of oddly positioned duty-free shops (this too we remember from our first arrival here), and all the way through customs, where we are escorted to the front of the line (our first glimpse of what will be an extremely family-friendly experience throughout our time in the country). At baggage claim, Jordan literally celebrates when we find his stroller on the oversize-item carousel; we pop it open and he climbs in faster than we’ve ever seen him do before. Luggage acquired, we head out and pick up a massive car seat at the rental car counter. Then, it’s out of the terminal, into the howling wind and sleet at the tip of the Reykjanes Peninsula. We slog through two parking lots, through near-gale-force winds. Jane looks at me regretfully. Jordan says “I’m coldy” from his stroller, which has become a miniature wind tunnel. Just like 11 years ago, momentary doubt creeps into my mind. But this is good ol’ Iceland, and now we have enough experience to know that the worst weather we’ve seen in years will probably be gone in a few minutes. We locate our rental car (a truly fugly-brown Hyundai Tucson, which Jordan names Beamer partway through our trip, after a character in one of his comic books). A few minutes later, we pull out of the airport parking lot. It’s just a few-minute drive to our hostel in the outskirts of Keflavík, by far the easiest post-red-eye stretch I’ve ever planned for myself. We pull into the deserted hostel parking lot, across the street from an elementary school playground. The kindly hostel clerk tells us that our room is already set up (it’s just past 7 AM) and that we can have breakfast before we tuck in. All is right in the world.
After a welcome first breakfast in Iceland (toast, milk and cereals, hot coffee, egg salad, cold cuts, and skyr! Oh my god it is so much better than the stateside version), we head to our room. Jordan does another celebratory dance when he sees his already set-up crib (with Winnie the Pooh bedding) beside our big king bed. Devices plugged in and pajamas on, we pass out for the rest of the morning. In the early afternoon, I manage to drag everyone out for a grocery run in “downtown” Keflavík. We introduce Jordan to the wonders of Bónus, which he will refer to as the “piggy store” for the rest of the week. In the store, we let Jordan push around a toddler-sized shopping cart before deciding he’s causing a bit too much of a ruckus for Scandinavian sensibilities. Trip vittles acquired (juice boxes, Kókómjólk boxes, Pringles and other snacks, fruit, and a couple microwaveable dinners), we head to a nearby park to grab hot dogs and eat a rather windy lunch. Jordan has an emotional meltdown when one of his Pringles falls onto the ground and gets chipped. Recognizing that the poor sod is running off a few hours of sleep and probably entirely disregulated, I pick him up and obey his command to bring him back to the “Iceland hotel".
Back in our room, Jordan gets re-regulated via Kókómjólk, Pringles, a banana, and plenty of time jumping on the big bed with Mama. We turn on the TV to look for cartoons, but are disappointed and watch a NHK program on Japanese cats instead. Around dusk (read: between 6-9 PM), the winds have abated (kinda) and we walk across the street to play in the elementary school playground. Jordan enjoys chasing Mama around the playground structures, playing “Little Pig and Big Bad Wolf,” and pretending to be a train engine running along the playground fence. Jane heads inside to heat up our microwaveable meals in the hostel kitchen, while I stay out to shoot some of the surrounding landscape. After a pleasant pasta dinner and bit more tomfoolery in the hostel common room (Jordan pretending to arrest me and put me in “time out jail” until I apologize for various things I did or did not do), we head to bed. Jordan pops up in his crib around midnight, crying and unable to get back to sleep despite Jane’s best efforts to encourage him. I tell Jane that I’ll stay awake with him a bit, as I’m feeling quite jetlagged and restless myself. What follows is one of my favorite memories as a father thus far: I grab Jordan a glass of milk from the hostel cafeteria, and the two of us stay up chatting about the day, about jetlag, and about various characters from Thomas the Tank Engine while sharing a midnight banana snack. I tell him that we’ll be heading out on our road trip tomorrow, and he says he wants me to sit with him in the back of the car. I ask him what makes him feel better when he is upset, and he says “when you and Mama give me a big huggie.” I give him a big hug and (after a second round of teeth-brushing) we all climb into bed together. He finally falls asleep wedged firmly between me and Jane on the big bed - a first for all of us. I fall asleep a few minutes later, a tiny hand draped across the side of my face.
We start our Monday morning slowly with breakfast in the hostel cafeteria. Jordan’s being a little riot (peeling eggs he won’t eat, generally messing with his food, asking randomly to use the bathroom when he doesn’t have to). Someone sets off the hostel smoke alarm by putting a rice cake in the toaster (lol). I load the car (the first of six times this week) and eventually we set off, bound for the snowy mountain pass from the Reykjanes peninsula leading to Hveragerði and the South Coast. Thanks to Jordan’s new obsession with being nice to me, it’s Jane who’s driving this big stretch for the second time in 11 years. Along the way, as we near Hafnarfjörður, Jordan starts acting up. He has a nasty habit of saying that his tummy hurts whenever he wants to exit the car (along with making hand motions and facial expressions indicating he’s about pee himself or poop himself or vomit all over himself, or maybe a combination of the above). I know what he’s up to (“I want to go back to Iceland hotel,” he starts saying, referring to the hostel and presumably its immediate surroundings as the entire country of Iceland), but we are obliged to stop anyways. So it is we wind up leaving the car in a rainstorm and pacing through a (quite lovely and hygge, I might add) home and garden store located off a strip mall in the suburbs. Jordan refuses to go to the washroom. Parenting happens. At length, we get back in the car and continue on our way, past snowy vistas along an icy highway. Just as I remember it from 11 years ago, the land suddenly changes as we descend off the plateau, the road switchbacking steeply from a land of stark white into a vast plain of green moss, golden grass, and black sand; the South Coast appears before us like we have entered another planet. It’s drizzly here; we make a pit stop in Hveragerði to bathroom for Jordan (for real this time) and briefly browse a little shopping area attached to a cafe and a Bónus. In the parking lot, there is a play structure shaped like a train engine, but it is covered in rainwater and much too cold for any toddler antics. We move on southeast now through the town of Selfoss, me behind the wheel now (for the remainder of the trip). Jane reads to Jordan from his latest obsession - the graphic novel series Hilo, about a kid robot from a different planet. They also play pretend astronaut games (Jordan being obsessed ever since watching NASA’s Artemis II launch and splashdown in the past two weeks), with Jordan filling his pretend spaceship with Christinas (after astronaut Christina Koch) and Beamers (after a cute robot character from his comic book).
Another hour on, we stop for a picnic lunch in the town of Hvolsvöllur. Jordan is disappointed to see that the local bouncepad is still uninflated and covered with rainwater, but after eating his healthy road trip lunch (of sour cream & onion Pringles), he enjoys running down the nearby rainbow track and gazing up at the nearby statue entitled Afrekshugur - Spirit of Achievement, created by one of Iceland’s most renowned sculptors and a symbol of the nation’s perseverance and ambition. “Why are her nipples out?” asks Jordan, whom we have been teaching accurate names for body anatomy, to mixed effect. He’ll proceed to talk about the Nipple Statue for several days. A little further east (and a few more iterations of the astronaut game later), we reach Seljalandsfoss.
Seljalandsfoss looks much the same as we left it 11 years ago, although it’s taken us over a day and a half to get here this time (whereas Jane and I blasted here straight from the airport parking lot, like a pair of maniacs - how exactly do young people do it?). The other main difference is that we park a little further away this time, in a much larger parking lot that has several booths for pay-by-plate parking via credit card; the upper lot, where Jane and I once sat and ate breakfast in our mid-twenties while admiring the waterfall, is now the spot for tour bus drop-offs and pickups, and the former road to the parking lot has been converted into a turnaround spot. For the record, I totally support the Icelandic development strategy here; as I wrote all those years ago, it was rather inevitable that Iceland would have to reckon with its booming tourism industry. Providing additional infrastructure to direct the throngs of visitors, protect the fragile landscape, and generate a bit of revenue seems like a worthy tradeoff. Perhaps it’s because I’m traveling with a three-year-old this time, but the development and commercialization of Iceland’s bigger attractions doesn’t upset me nearly as much as I thought it would. The country and its vast, uninhabited highlands, after all, are still ample enough to get totally lost in the wilderness. I set us up for our first family tripod selfie of the trip - a repeat of my picture with Jane that graces this page, three posts down. As I break down the tripod, Jane and Jordan wander off toward the falls. I break out the telezoom lens, and Jane breaks out the plastic rain poncho; both actions feel oddly symbolic, somehow. Eventually I catch up to them, Jordan wandering his way all over the trails and clearly enjoying the Icelandic landscape even more than I hoped he would. On the way back to the car, he asks me to pick him up and gives me repeated kisses on the cheek (!). The trip is really off to a good start.
Further up the road, we pull off onto a short gravel road leading to a horse farm and a large open field with the crash-landed wreckage of an American Douglas DC-3. Unlike the plane wreckage we visited in Sólheimasandur, this one is just a short walk from the pavement. Jordan circles the derelict plane and asks if the nearby horses were scared when the it came down next to their home. He’s eager to poke and prod the wreckage, and we have to prevent him from practically climbing all over the rusty thing. Down the hill, Jordan saunters off to say “heigh” to the horses. The Icelandic horses are as photogenic as ever with their windswept emo hair, their stocky, pony-like statue, and their impressive fur coats. I capture one of my favorite shots of the entire trip: Jordan tentatively offering the horses a single stalk of hay. Back in the car, we head back toward the Ring Road and further east. Jane and Jordan attempt to get restarted on Hilo, but soon fall asleep one after another - the skipped naptimes finally catching up to our poor baby and his mother. For the second trip in 11 years, I drive toward Skógafoss in a totally quiet car, save for the snores coming from the backseat. After tentatively poking around the nearby museum and investigating the waterfall’s parking situation, I choose not to wake the sleeping pair (we’ll be headed back this way in three days). The drive continues toward our evening’s destination in Vík í Mýrdal (Vík), with a brief stop atop the promontory of Dyrhólaey, which Jane and I skipped previously due to flooded road conditions. This time, the road continues past a lagoon and up a series of steep switchbacks to the top of the headland, where we are greeted by a lighthouse and sweeping, panoramic views of the South Coast and the inland glaciers and mountains. Jordan, barely rousable from his nap, refuses to get out of the car, so Jane and I take turns sallying forth into the wind to take in the views.
In the seaside village of Vík, where Jane and I ate dinner but more or less swept through without stopping in 2015, Jordan is near the end of his rope after a long day of exploring and sitting patiently in the car seat. We make one last stop for takeout dinner at Black Crust Pizzeria (pretty tasty but holy shit - $60 USD for two medium-sized pizzas). Nearby, we check into Hotel Kría, a posh, modern hotel just off the main strip, which was built several years after we last passed through here. Jordan again celebrates when he sees his crib setup, and we dig into our pizzas as well as our bags of groceries and munchies. He and Jane spend the evening making toddler friends in the hotel’s game room, while I wander off to photograph on my own. In the car, I head back into town and up to the cemetery overlooking the town’s picturesque, red-steepled church. Sunset is pretty muted, on account of sweeping clouds and the mountains boxing in the village to the west. Nevertheless, I enjoy my hour of solitude poking around the cemetery and the nearby outfields; I shoot the distant sea stacks of Reynisdrangar with my long lens before the rain moves in for good. After fueling up the car, I head back to catch Jordan’s bath and bedtime. From our hotel room window, we play an Icelandic version of “Sneak-a-Peek” (I Spy). Jordan spots the red-steepled church (“Does A-Ma live there?” he asks, associating his grandmother with all things Christian), a yellow fire hydrant, a blue campervan, a baby waterfall (in the cliffs across from the nearby campsites), and a mountain with two ears (towering high above the village to the north). Jordan elects to sleep in the big bed again; I try to catch some rest, balanced precariously on the edge of the bed beside two loudly snoring humans.
