Iceland – Land of Fire and Ice
July 20-August 1, 2004
"Iceland. That's an out-of-the-way destination. Why did you decide to go there?" Art and I have been asked this question more than once. Here's how it came to pass.
Walking the World is a travel company that offers walking trips for people "50 and better". I found their website five years ago, noted the destinations, and bookmarked the page. The trips were a little pricier than we could afford at that time, but I was drawn to the idea of adventure travel for people who are, shall we say, past their physical prime.
The next time out to the Walking the World website I noticed a book for sale. "Take the 500 Mile Challenge", a paper-backed, spiral-bound journal, was written by company owner Ward Luthi. The book's premise is that, starting simply, a person over 50 can walk 500 miles in a year. Ward's book tells how, offers pointers and encouragement for a 52-week program, and includes blank spaces for journal entries for each day.
I bought the book. We'd returned recently from a walking holiday in Western Ireland for which I'd been woefully unprepared. I hadn't trained appropriately for the distances involved (9 to 14 miles), I'd been unwilling to spend the money on adequate shoes, and I'd been handicapped by the 50 or so extra pounds I carried on my mid-sized frame. My husband Art told me that, unless I was able to walk faster or stop less frequently to rest, he wouldn't go on another walking trip with me.
I started on page 1 of Ward's book. I kept a daily journal of my thoughts, feelings and observations as I followed the schedule he laid out in "Take the 500 Mile Challenge." I also sent an email to Ward, thanking him for making this little book available just at the time I needed it.
Ward wrote back. Would I be willing, he asked, to send him my journal each week? He would be publishing an online newsletter, and including parts of my journal in each issue would be a good piece of content, perhaps encouraging others to take up the 500 Mile Challenge along with me.
I was glad to share my thoughts with Ward each week. After 36 weeks of following the schedule in "Challenge", I had logged 500 miles of walking. In the journal were notes about walks I took in my own neighborhood, in other parts of Washington State, in Hawaii and in China.
As it happened, Ward's online newsletter didn't get published until I'd already completed the Challenge. But then he began to publish my journal, a few weeks of it in each issue of the newsletter.
Four years later, our children had all left home and our finances were in a condition to afford a Walking the World trip. I studied the offerings on the website again. Iceland looked good. It's not a common destination, it has good weather in the summer, and it's not a place Art and I would be likely to go on our own. However, it was the most expensive trip offered by Walking the World. I sent Ward an email. "We're considering joining one of your trips to Iceland this year. How much of a discount can you offer in return for my ‘Challenge’ journal?” Ward wrote back. For Art and me, he would give a $400 discount per person. Pretty good! We signed up for the Iceland trip running from July 20 to July 31, 2004.
It’s much easier to prepare for a tour than for independent travel. No research into lodging is needed, no phone calls or emails, no cars to rent or train tickets to buy, no itinerary to flesh out. All we needed to do was read the recommended packing list to purchase what we didn’t have yet, and make our plane reservations.
We’ve been on several walking vacations, so we had most of the gear on the list – trekking poles, waterproof raingear, hiking boots and socks, fleece jackets, daypacks for lunches and a change of clothes. The list included frequent reminders that it rains a lot in Iceland, and that we would be hiking in it. We decided to make a quick trip to REI for waterproof daypack covers.
As usual, we bought more than we planned to - REI is to clothing and travel gear what Costco is to groceries. At the checkout counter, we laid down two daypack covers, two Camelpak water holders (not the kind you carry on your back, which I already had one of, but the kind that rides inside your daypack), and new rubber tips for our trekking poles.
Surprisingly, the airline reservations were more difficult. The only airline that flies to Iceland is – you guessed it – Iceland Air. One flight leaves each day at 6:30 p.m. from Boston, New York, Baltimore and Minneapolis. All four flights arrive at Keflavik International Airport between 6:20 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. the next morning. In summer, the high season, the airfare is nearly $1100 per person.
We checked into using frequent flyer miles and we learned that Iceland has no airline partners. That left using our credit card miles. In the last few years, putting as many expenses as possible on our Miles One VISA, we’d accumulated 105,000 miles. That would be enough for one round-trip ticket from Seattle to Europe (65,000 miles) and one from Seattle to Minneapolis (35,000 miles). We’d only have to pay for one $8l8 round trip from Minneapolis to Keflivik.
I called the travel agency affiliated with Miles One. The young woman was very pleasant. I explained what I needed. She asked me to please hold and went away for over five minutes. She came back and said the only way we could get to Iceland was to purchase a round-the-world fare, and that was 135,000 miles. I said, “It says that Europe is only 65,000 miles.” The young woman said she was very sorry, but her supervisor had told her that Iceland is not in Europe!
I hung up and called Miles One. I gave the woman who answered my historically effective pitch. “I have a problem, and I’m wondering if you can help me.” She listened to my story. Then she said, “You know, I’m sure Iceland is in Europe.” (No kidding!). Let me call the travel agency and talk to them, then transfer you to them when we’ve worked it out.” She put me on hold for ten minutes.
When she came back, we had a brief conference call with the travel agency. It was decided between Miles One and the travel agency that Iceland was, indeed, in Europe, and that 65,000 of our miles would be enough.
With supplies and plane tickets taken care of, we turned our attention to learning about Iceland. The book I ordered from Amazon.com was Iceland: Land of the Sagas, with text by David Roberts and photographs by Jon Krakauer. For several weeks I read aloud to Art in the evenings, in bed, just before we turned out the light. The impressive color photographs revealed a wild and varied, frequently isolated landscape illuminated by the sun of the far north. In the accompanying text, the geology and history and culture of Iceland are framed in the context of the sagas.
Iceland was first settled in the ninth century by Norwegian explorers and Irish monks. The region flourished for over 300 years and produced the first constitutional democracy in Europe. During this settlement period, a tradition of oral storytelling initiated and sustained the sagas, quasi-historical tales of early heroic Icelanders. Murder and vengeance are common themes. The sagas were written down later by monastic monks, but many of the manuscripts were lost in the ensuing centuries. Every modern Icelander is familiar with the sagas.
Iceland:Land of the Sagas left me with the impression of a remote, rural, out-of-the-way place with forbidding weather and geography. The packing list from Walking the World reinforced that view. Other than our two nights in Reykjavik, the capital, a cosmopolitan city of about 95,000, we would be staying in “tiny villages” with limited services. We might be hiking in the rain for days, and the weather could be cold or moderate.
So, we packed plenty of fleece and outerwear. Art and I agreed that if we knew for sure the weather would be mild and dry, we’d need only half of what we packed, bulk-wise. As it was, on our departure day, each of us towed a bulging medium-sized suitcase and shouldered a daypack straining at every seam. One of the pieces, a wheeled suitcase with a daypack zippered and strapped to it, had been purchased two weeks before on Ebay, and I hoped it was sturdy enough for this trip. Of the ten nights we’d be in Iceland, we’d be staying in eight different lodgings. The maiden trip for our new piece of luggage would consist of four flights plus eight rounds of unloading from and loading into a travel van.
Our journey on day one was a 3.5-hour flight to Minneapolis, a 4-hour layover, and a 6-hour flight over Canada and the North Atlantic Ocean to Keflavik International Airport in southwest Iceland. Total travel time on this day was 15 hours, from the time we left home at 8 a.m. until we landed in Iceland – but the time difference, seven hours, meant we arrived at 6:30 a.m. the following day.
We had a long, sleep-deprived first day. Our group’s first official gathering was that evening at a welcome dinner in Reykjavik. We all met in the restaurant’s cozy downstairs bar. The twelve of us ordered drinks and settled into deep leather chairs and couches arranged loosely in a circle.
Kathleen, our American guide, began the introductions. She is a social services consultant in Maine and guides a few trips each year for Walking the World. Our Icelandic guide, Brjann, is a bassoonist with the Reykjavik Symphony; when that group takes a two-month summer break from performance, Brjann guides ecologically-oriented travel groups.
Of the rest of us, three are retired – Ingrid and Andrea from the government and Don from advertising. The other seven are still working – Russ in the legal profession, Diane as a writer, Faith in education, Charlotte in publishing, Carolyn as a business owner, Art in the electrical industry and me in information technology. We hail from Virginia, California, Alaska, New York, South Dakota and Washington.
Everyone says they’ve walked in preparation for this trip, but almost everyone apologizes for not walking more. I walk for exercise almost every day, so I guess I won’t be the slowest on the trail, which was the case on our last group walk, in the UK in 2002.
I’d say Art and I are probably the least traveled members of this group. We do seem to be visiting less common places – Iceland, Nicaragua and China, for example – before we experience the European Continent. We’ve decided we can do that by bus when we’re older and no longer interested in exploring more remote places.
Kathleen tells us that each Walking the World group creates a journal of their collective experience. One group member is responsible for each day’s writing. Ten days, ten group members. I think that is a good idea, but several of the others groan, including Art. Kathleen passes around a signup sheet for each day. By the time it gets to me, only Days 1 and 3 are left. I take Day 3. That leaves Art to be the first scribe. On our previous travels, I’ve been the writer and Art the photographer. This will be a good opportunity for him. I am profoundly grateful that we are not each also responsible for taking the photographs each day – that would have done me in.
What follows is the daily journals of the members of our Walking the World group in Iceland, Land of Fire and Ice, July 21 to 31, 2004. My own comments are included in italics.