Let’s rewind to 2020. We are in lockdown. I’m watching youtube travel videos and stumble upon Flying-the-Nest camping in Iceland. How pretty! Everything is green and the temperature is mild. Fast forward to May 2021. Iceland is one of the first places to open back up for travel. The travel planning starts and I realize Iceland is expensive. I book the camping in Iceland tour for August and hope for the best.

My naive self thought Iceland in August would be dry and mild. However, the weather was mostly in the 50s and raining the week I was supposed to be there. I’m from the Pacific Northwest and have experienced camping in the rain enough to prefer not to. Thankfully, my grandmother chose the week before to get COVID so I cancelled my trip, left my travel nurse job in New York City a week early and flew to her home to help take care of her. Thanks to the vaccines and modern medicine she improved over the next few weeks before returning more or less to her precovid baseline.

Fast forward to December 2021. Intrepid travel thankfully let me switch my trip to the “Northern Lights Escape” and I just had to pay the difference in tour price. Hotels cost more than campsites- surprise 🙂

First day in Reykjavik. My overnight flight on Icelandair wasn’t too bad. I tried to beat the jet lag by hanging out at the Blue Lagoon for a few hours. I took a short nap on the bus into the city and tried to gather my energy. Thankfully, Night Shift nursing is great practice for surviving while sleep deprived. I had an Icelandic hotdog for lunch and otherwise just wandered the streets in Reykjavik.

This was my third tour with Intrepid. We had a local guide and a small group of tourists, and we traveled in a van around the south coast. It was a lot of driving and the daylight was very minimal, but between the folk stories from the guide, local Icelandic music and time spent chatting with the other tourists, the drives went quickly. 

We all really wanted to see the northern lights but the first few nights it was cloudy. I hadn’t realized that the clouds block your view of my the northern lights but it’s just like stars. You need clear skies plus electrical activity to see the northern lights. So we continued with the road trip

Skogafoss waterfall, Reynisfjara/ black sand beach, and Dyrholaey. Not pictured- sneaker waves trying to pull people out to sea.

We drove through lava beds left over from the 1783 eruption that caused the mini ice age. This night we lucked out and the northern lights danced across the sky. The experience was even more magical than I expected. I absolutely recommend everyone try to see the lights at least once.

On our final day in the countryside we visited the largest glacier in Europe, Vatnajokull. This was what I had been looking forward to the most. We were going to hike over the glacier. Sadly, the weather wasn’t safe for hiking so we visited an ice cave instead. This was the most touristy activity of the whole trip. Yes, it was amazing to walk inside a glacier but the lines and lines of tourists really took away from the experience. It was sad. The glacier had retreated so much in just the past year that we had to walk 30 minutes to get to the glacier when before the trucks could reach it. Climate change and its effects were glaring me in the face. Yes, the gushing river was interesting, but seeing how quickly the ice was melting was just sobering. Glad I got to visit but it was hard to take selfies when I was feeling such profound emotions about the state of our planet.

The trip ended back in Reykjavik. The group meshed really well and it was sad saying goodbye. Group tours are special in that you meet new people, then spend all day, every day together for a week, and by the end it feels like you’ve known each other for months or years. But then everyone goes separate ways. I picked up some Christmas presents and enjoyed the Christmas lights before flying back home.