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 on manual settings and in RAW format (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 airport 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, me essentially dragging all of our luggage, a car-seat, and our sleeping carcasses along. Jane looks at me regretfully. Jordan says “I’m coldy [sic]” from his stroller, which has become a miniature wind tunnel. For Jordan to complain about being cold, he must actually be on the verge of frostbite. 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 or hours - and it is. 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 drive 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 prepared (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, crashing into the aisles and other patrons and so forth. 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 nearing the heights of dysregulation, 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.
Around midnight, Jordan pops up in his crib, crying inconsolably 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. Jordan feels better as soon as he realizes that he’ll be able to stay awake for a bit; it’s a special occasion. I grab us each 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 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). Another guest 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 stint of 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). Although it is sometimes hard to tell the real thing from fake tummy pain, I do this for a living and I know what the little fucker is 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). Alas, we are obliged to stop anyways. So it is that we wind up leaving the car in a rainstorm and pacing through a (quite lovely and hygge-inducing, I might add) home and garden store located in a strip mall in the suburbs, just off the highway. 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 increasingly icy road. Just as I remember from eleven 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 soJordan can bathroom (for real this time) and briefly browse the adjacent little shopping area, a souvenir shop attached to a café 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 weeklong 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 with astronauts since watching NASA’s Artemis II launch and splashdown in the past two weeks). Jordan staffs his pretend spaceship with “so many” 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 bounce-pad is still uninflated and covered with rainwater, but after eating his healthy road trip lunch (solely 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 anatomical names for body parts, with mixed and generally hilarious results. 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 eleven 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 designated 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 bother me nearly as much as I thought it would as I heard about it over the years. The country and its vast, uninhabited highlands, after all, are still ample enough to get totally lost in the wilderness. And these major attractions are still stunning. I set us up for our first family tripod selfie of the trip - a repeat of my selfie with Jane that graces this page, three posts down. As I pack up 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 feel 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. Mostly, he’s dropping pebbles in the nearby stream. It occurs to me that you could show a toddler the most fantastical, awe-inspiring place in the world, and they would be content as long as they could roll around on the ground and throw some rocks around. On the way back to the car, he asks me to carry him and rewards me all along the trail with 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.
In the morning, after a delicious hotel breakfast buffet (during which Jordan discovers the joy of baked beans), we pack the car and head back out on the road. We’ll be back this way tomorrow afternoon, staying another night in Vík, but for today we’re heading out toward the mountains, glaciers, and glacial lagoons of southeastern Iceland. This is the weird part about traveling in Iceland on a time limit and a budget: because we have a three-year-old and not enough time to circle the entire Ring Road, this early stretch of the trip is, by definition, and out-and-back. In this way, it’s not dissimilar from the itinerary we ran in 2015 - just much slowed down, with less driving time every day, plenty of play spots for Jordan, and a lightened itinerary that gives us a little more freedom to ramble according to the whims of the toddler, rather than try to hit every scenic spot. Leaving Vík is a familiar feeling; the stretch that I drove at dawn eleven years ago feels largely unchanged, as we pass our old accommodations at the Hotel Katla and pass into a massive plain of glacial streams and dark moonscapes. Heading east, we enter Eldraun, a vast, 300-year old lava flow - the largest in the world. This enormous swath of the South Coast is covered in wooly fringe moss, which gives the landscape its fragile, delicate green colour. We stop by a picnic area with an overlook of the lava flow, and a little fenced-in walking path for tourists to clamber over the undulating volcanic rocks. Jordan takes his mom by the hand and drags her off along the walking path. They soon become the bottleneck holding back a crowd of fifteen or so incredibly polite, incredibly patient Thai tourists, who watch bemusedly as Jordan does his best to clamber over what he calls the “astronaut rocks,” while I snap a photo of them with the long lens. They give him a big clap and a cheer when he finally arrives back at the parking lot. Further down the road, we pass by the roundabout in Kirkjubæjarklaustur and decide to check out the basalt stone formations at Kirkjugólf (“church floor”), which we skipped in the interest of time 2015. This is definitely a toddler spot: a short walk over a few tiny streams crossed by wooden plank bridges. More astronaut rocks. We get ourselves caught in a downpour on the way back to the car, but Jordan doesn’t seem to mind. He does ask when we’ll be going back to the hotel. We tell him soon and drive on; he seems satisfied with this answer for now. Slowly, he’s getting the hang of the road trip concept.
Heading east from Klaustur, we pass more lava flows, basalt cliffs, and clifftop rivulets adjoining small hamlets and farm settlements. The road turns north and then east, arriving at Lómagnúpur, standing like a tall sentry at the gateway to Iceland’s glaciated southeast region; beyond it lies Skeiðarársandur, massive glacial outwash plain: miles upon miles of black sand criss-crossed by rivers and streams. Empty and elemental. The mountain and the plain make just as much of an impression as they did eleven years ago, although we’re here this time under blue skies and strikingly clear weather, so things seem a little more terrestial than they once did. Adding to this is the fact that, eleven years on, there’s a little gravel parking lot just past Lómagnúpur and before the massive road bridge spanning the plain, so we park the car nicely here instead of pulling over by the roadside. Jordan goes clambering down a slope, eager to explore despite the wind gusts. We take a family photo together at the base of the mountain. Jordan digs into his snack bag of salt-and-pepper flavored ring chips from Bónus as we continue on. We try to point out the distant ice cap to him (a seemingly infinite sheet of blue, retreating into the distant mountains), but I’m not sure his brain fully processes the scale of what he’s witnessing. We drive past the entrance of Skaftafell National Park, where Jane and I once hiked up a muddy and icy trail to an overlook of Svartifoss.
Our last major stop of the morning (before a midday lunch and an early hotel check-in), is the gravel trail leading to the glacial lagoon at Svínafellsjökull, one of the outlet glaciers that flows from the largest ice cap in Europe. The surrounding mountains form a cirque, which we hike into a little ways - just enough to see the ridges of blue ice in the distance. I break out the long lens to photograph some of the distant landscapes. Jordan takes his sweet time on the trail; as a three-year-old with barely a concept of time, he enjoys stuffing his jacket pockets with pebbles, or tossing stones into the nearby streams, far more than he cares about the view or the destination. When he’s in one of these moods, he would rather sit on the ground than walk or be carried. I start telling him that I’m going to head off without him (“Daddy wait!”), and much to my shame, he turns my phrase around on me in the weeks following our trip (“Daddy I’m leaaaaving without youuuu!") He tells me that I have to act “sad, or scared” when he says this to me. Fair being fair, I dutifully do it every time, while making a mental note that I really have to be thoughtful about parenting techniques moving forward.
Back at the car, we make the short hop back to the highway and to the nearby gas station and restaurant at Freysnes, where Jane and I got burgers (and our trip magnet) in 2015. Jordan’s having a full-on meltdown now, refusing to enter the building unless he’s wearing his jacket (?). You can’t fight or reason or parent your way out of the genuine, short-circuiting toddler meltdown. His entire brain is basically two neuronal synapses running on not enough sleep, and freshly out of serotonin and dopamine. We prop him up in a high chair and ply him with a Happy Monkey smoothie and a plate of chicken nuggets/fries, while Jane and I share a bowl of lamb soup and a loaf of bread. He eventually eats and calms down - until I accidentally eat the last few fries and clean our table while he’s in the washroom. Oops. Brave boy. He’s ultimately okay, and we climb back in the car for a short ride further along the Ring Road to our hotel for the night, the Fosshotel Glacier Lagoon. This is another posh, seemingly out-of-place establishment that sprang up between our last trip and the current one: a black, futuristic looking building located just off the road toward the region’s massive glaciers. From our window (and from the hotel parking lot), we can see a waterfall in a nearby ravine. Jordan is upset that our current hotel is not our previous hotel (he’s upset by everything this afternoon, really), but he calms down when Jane offers to take him to the hot tub downstairs in the hotel spa. We all don our swimwear and go for an outdoor soak while overlooking the crashing waves on the Atlantic coast. To our east, a rainbow forms between drifts of sun, cloud, and rain mist. We retire to our room to rest for the afternoon, eat a simple dinner (leftover pizza, bread rolls, fruit, and other snacks from our grocery stash), and relax. We turn on the TV and locate the CBeebies station; Jordan laughs himself silly at a British children’s cartoon involving a floating blimp that keeps going up and down, sending its passengers crashing back and forth.
For most of the afternoon, I debate whether I will head back out for photographs of the glacial lagoons to the east (the entire conceit of staying overnight in this place rather than driving back same-day to Vík; Jane and Jordan are clearly all tuckered out and planning to have an early night. Finally, I decide to head out with a few hours before sundown. Although the weather is morose, I’m glad I went out, as the experience is ultimately memorable, and the next morning would prove to be a total bust. I catch brief glimpses of good light as I make the drive toward Fjallsárlón, a particularly memorable location from our previous trip. Sadly, by the time I climb out of the car and make my way up the gravel track to get a good look at the sprawling, icy vista below me, the light has vanished behind a curtain of rainclouds and behind the tall mountains to the west. A storm is blowing in from the east. I do some work with the 70-200mm before sprinting back to the car under increasingly heavy rain. On the way back to the hotel, taking advantage of a brief pause in the squalls, I check out another turnoff for Kvíárjökull, where the dramatic weather and glowing, late-day light nicely complements the mountain scenery. Then, it’s back to the Fosshotel just minutes ahead of a genuine Iceland rain, wind, and hailstorm. I dry off my gear and climb out of my wet hiking clothes; Jordan’s already asleep, and Jane is working on her laptop in the dark. I sit outside in the hotel’s second floor lounge, having some post-dinner snacks while unwinding after a nice day of travel.
