Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    Carolyn told me about a trip she made to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. She traveled with a tour, but she went alone. On the flight home, she told me she said to herself, “I can do anything.”    As Carol and I were flying home from a bucket […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    As I write this, a month has already passed since Carol and I spent those two weeks in Iceland. I’m still trying to process it all. The trip originally fell into the category of impulse or pipe dream. From the moment we read that Iceland had opened up to vaccinated […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    I once interviewed a museum renovation architect. (And if you think these blogs can be narcoleptic, you should have read that piece!) During the course of my interview, he mentioned a phenomenon of museum-going that I’d certainly experienced, but never realized there was a name for it: museum fatigue. Basically, […]

Photo credit: Carol Madigan    Today marked our first week in the camper. Thanks to Carol’s housekeeping skills, the van still looked as pristine as the day we picked it up. No partially made bed, strewn laundry, empty potato chip bags and wine bottles lying around like a homeless encampment, mad searches for cell phones […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    If I were back to the mindset of letting Iceland come to us, rather than vice versa, today was going to be a perfect day for it. Black beaches, calving icebergs and thick fingers of glaciers from Iceland’s great ice cap reaching out ominously to the very edge of the […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    The “plan” (as rare as that term was to be employed on this trip) was for a short hitch over coastal mountains to the little fishing village of Seyðisfjörður. We’d walk around a bit, and if the campground looked good, and there was a decent cafe, we’d stay the night. […]

   By our fourth day in the camper, Carol and I had developed a transition routine from driving to camping out that mimicked the precision of synchronized swimming. Within minutes of pulling into the campground, I would have Happy Hour fully underway, complete with a red and a white opened and paired with a charcuterie […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    We thought our first sightseeing site of the day would be the famous sod church, known as Víðimýrarkirkja. But when we turned right out of our campsite and back onto the Ring Road, we immediately discovered we’d spent the night hard by a stunning gorge and island we had no […]

No stop signs Speed limit Nobody’s gonna slow me down                                   –AC/DC    The thing about a highway to Hell is that you normally don’t know you’re on it until it’s too late.    Our second day on the Ring Road dawned with clear skies and great confidence. I was feeling more comfortable behind the […]

“Fellowship of the Ring Road”    The reasoning behind Carol’s and my decision to rent a camper van was a Plan B idea for having a place to sleep, in the event we arrived in a remote village lacking available hotel accommodations. We’d both camped in our distant pasts, but recent impulses to rent a […]