Iceland 2016

By the time I went to Iceland in 2016, traveling on my own with an escorted tour was no longer particularly unusual for me. This was somewhere around my eighth trip, and this time I was traveling with Trafalgar.

I chose Iceland because I wanted to go somewhere completely different. What fascinated me was how much could exist on one island—volcanoes and lava fields, glaciers and icebergs, waterfalls, geothermal areas, black beaches, green farmland, and landscapes that seemed to change completely from one part of the country to another.

Most of the trip followed the outer edges of the island. Once we left Reykjavík, towns became fewer and the landscape increasingly became the reason for being there. One day could look remarkably different from the one before it.

That variety is what I remember most. Iceland didn't feel like one landscape. It felt like several different worlds somehow contained within the same shoreline.