This is my mom's story, not mine. This is a story of her dream, and of how she spent a whole impossible year planning her dream through, going through flights, looking through maps, reading through stories and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. This is the story of my mom's dream coming true and of the country she dreamt about - a place so beautiful it was almost not perceivable, with its glaciers high, and its people rare to encounter, and oceans around it endless.
This is also a story about how she took aboard her three children to see the country of her dream, and how her three children (me included) were being overly emotional, and always hungry, often arguing, sometimes trying to run of the edges of cliffs, rarely quiet, and immensely, unconditionally happy.
So, Iceland and our 10 days of trying not to get too soaked by the rain, not to get too far off the road looking for volcanoes, and not to miss a single hot spring or bowl of meat soup. Too many stories to tell, too many photos to show. Off we go.
Well done, mom.
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| Well done for taking us where North America and Eurasia meet, crushing into each other and drifting apart with these huge tectonic plates they stand on. |
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| Well done for letting my brother do a million and more of selfies, always breath-taking, but not just always safe enough. Like the time he climbed here - or the other one, when he got on the top of an iceberg floating next to a glacier, and got his leg stuck in a crevice there. |
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| Well done for showing us the colourful side of Iceland at Gullfoss, and for figuring out that while "gull" is for "gold" - legend says that there is the whole pot of it under the waterfall, - the "-foss" is always for "waterfall", which helped us in not missing a single one of them on our way. |
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Well done for never being afraid to ask, be it direction, or additional blanket, or where to have the best ice-cream in the neighbourhood.
The guesthouse essentials in Iceland are, as you can see: a place to sleep, a place to eat an ice-cream, and a place to ride a horse. Fair enough. |
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| Well done for being ok with my travel buddy - for those, who don't know him yet, his name is Gosig Mus and he is from Ikea, - and my endless photos of Gosig going places, like this one, in the geothermal zone on the south of Iceland, just behind the original Geysir, the one after which all the other geysirs were named. |
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| Well done for always finding us a lunch, even if it is to be cooked it a hot spring and make us local stars for 15 minutes. The eggs were tasty and perfectly cooked too. |
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| Well done for driving us on a car in places that were giving you a heart attack, and driving anyway. With the maximum speed allowed being 90 km/h, we were doing 50, slow yet determined, and definitely hated by every single vehicle on the island. |
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| Well done for not missing this -foss, the only one in Iceland that you can actually make a full circle around. |
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| Well done for taking Iceland fully and unconditionally, with whatever was it that it was bringing. One day we had waterfalls, and the other we had cliffs on both sides of the road, and then we had nothing at times - like this endless moss covering endless lava fields, going on and on and on. And so we stopped, and so we breathed, and so we kept going. |
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| Well done for enjoying out petty little fights with my brother for the only pair of glasses per two of us. However, I have to admit, being a winner didn't always mean I would see things, especially next to Skogafoss and all of the water dust that flies half a kilometre away from where it actually is. |
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| Well done for letting Gosig Mus to have a photo with the first glacier on our way. The glacier was so magnificent that, just as it stayed out of focus, its beauty to some extent stayed out of our comprehension. |
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| Well done for dropping our car's speed to around 35 at this point. A huge truck got stuck behind us and started beeping us away, which was embarrassing and funny both and made us feel pretty badass. |
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| Well done for priceless pieces of information concerning Icelandic sheep and how they always go in three in August: mom and her two lambs. Icelandic communism: here is a common road, and here are common glaciers, and here are common sheep, and please 15 euro for a pair of mutton steaks. |
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| Well done for finding a road to the ocean and black Icelandic beaches. We run from these waves and we run from this ocean, but run or not, it's always right behind the corner, and our shoes are always wet anyway. |
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| Well done for enjoying little moments and little things. Just an elf house found while being lost in the fields. Moving on. |
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| Well done for giving us our choices (sometimes). You can see glacier going down to the valley, or you can choose to see the dragons hunting each other in the sky. The choice is always yours, obviously, my mom - and Iceland - are pretty democratic. |
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| Well done for organising the best meals on Earth: stopping on a gas station, buying two bowls of meat soup, asking for a free refill, and, before leaving, buying on a counter a package of mutton and disposable grill. |
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| Well done for making days when not much was happening ever more beautiful. |
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| Well done for loving small towns - you find the most amazing things in those, be it a town on the ocean's shore, or next to a glacier, or grouped around a gas station, which is encompassing the choices Icelandic little towns have. Going around the town takes us 15 minutes. On the outskirts we find the a souvenir shop, museum, a huge dog to play to and a couple of whale's skeletons, all of it - belonging to an old Icelander, who right at that moment was busy carving Icelandic runes on bones, and woods, and whatnot else. |
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| Well done for taking us to the most surreal place of our lives, where one of the glaciers commits suicide by sliding into lagoon, and melting slowly, and crushing, colouring shores in blues, drifting into the ocean. A very special way to die. |
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| Well done for finding my brother a waterfall where Prometheus was filmed. |
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| Well done for taking 15 kilometres more to let us see the fjords. Famous fjords ended up being an over sized bay, good for making the road way longer, for watching wales, for seeing fish farms slowly drifting past us. Fjords, see you next time in Norway. |
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Well done for not being afraid to walk on a giant volcano that has erupted just 30 years ago.
It often feels there like Iceland tries hard to minimise its losts - in case it all will blow again, and so it will, covering the ground with lava, thick and deadly black, - but Icelanders just don't care, or don't learn their lessons.
It will blow and erupt and crush, and they will wait again, until it will dry, and will clean it up a bit, and put paths there, and will bring tourists to the place, like us and our mom, more and more after every eruption to follow. Impossible, majestic, omnipotent people. |
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| Well done for teaching us to see beautiful in small things. |
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| Well done for having a heated argument with me when I was saying those should have come from sheep. They didn't, that's just how Iceland does flowers. |
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Well done for taking us to beautiful Akureyri. I learnt few things about Iceland there:
- They hate Christmas Trees for ruining the landscape;
- A Post stamp costs more than a postcard;
- The main church of the city is closed on Sunday. |
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Well done for the sense of wonder.
Icelanders should have it as well - why else would they draw Gagarin on their walls? |
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Well done for taking us on a photo hunt for whales. We did see many of them, and that was beautiful.
I just have to add that whales have priceless expressions of serenity and not caring on their faces. |
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| Well done for having the best places for short breaks. |
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Thanks for being an inspiration, and someone to hold on to.
I'm sure that even this totally supportless tree from the middle of nothingness of Iceland could not have wished for a better support.
Well done for being very special, one-in-a-kind mom. |
