The sand looked cool. That was my first mistake. It was mid-July at Reynisfjara, the famous black sand beach outside Vík, and the sky had gone that particular shade of silver-blue that makes Iceland feel like a painting someone hasn’t quite finished. I’d kicked off my sneakers near the basalt columns and took one barefoot … Read more
It was somewhere between Vík and Höfn, standing in a farmhouse kitchen at 7 AM with a mug of coffee I hadn’t asked for but desperately needed, watching the host’s daughter chase a very opinionated hen across the yard, that I understood what I’d been missing on my first Iceland trip. Back then, I’d driven … Read more
The moment I realized I’d made a catastrophic car rental mistake in Iceland, I was standing at a gravel pullout somewhere near Vík, watching a rental company employee photograph every single scratch on my bumper while I mentally calculated how much of my trip budget was about to evaporate. I’d skipped the gravel protection insurance … Read more
I’ll never forget the moment I lifted my drone above Kirkjufell for the first time. The mountain looked dramatic enough from the ground — that iconic arrowhead shape rising out of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula like something from a fantasy novel — but from the air, with the twin waterfalls threading silver through the green foreground … Read more
It was 11:47 PM in July, and I was standing at the base of Skógafoss waterfall with absolutely no business being awake. The sky was the color of a ripe peach, the falls were thundering, and a family of four was eating sandwiches on the rocks beside me like it was perfectly normal to have … Read more
I stood at the edge of Skógafoss waterfall in June—technically summer in Iceland—watching my face get systematically sandblasted by what felt like a horizontal hurricane. The waterfall itself was magnificent: 60 meters of glacial meltwater thundering down dark basalt cliffs, the kind of sight that makes you understand why Iceland appears in every travel magazine … Read more
The GPS on my iPhone read 47 kilometers to the next town. The battery icon flashed red: 8%. I was somewhere between Egilsstaðir and Mývatn in northeast Iceland, on a stretch of Route 1 that felt less like a road and more like the edge of the world. Fog so thick I could barely see … Read more
The Dacia Duster That Survived 1,300 Kilometres of Icelandic Gravel I spent an embarrassing amount of time on car rental sites before the Ring Road trip — we’re talking three browsers open, a spreadsheet, and a growing suspicion that every company was quoting me a different base price just to watch me suffer. What finally … Read more
I booked this trip at 11pm on a Tuesday after a meeting where someone used the phrase “synergize our deliverables” for the third time in an hour — my corporate brain needed an escape hatch, fast, and something about typing…
When I left my job without another one lined up, everyone thought I was having a breakdown. I was. But I was also buying a one-way ticket to Reykjavík, and it turned out those two things were connected — because sometimes the only cure for a life that has stopped making sense is standing in … Read more
