Brendan Doms

When I originally booked my flight to Iceland with Delta, I knew they had routed me from Detroit to Richmond, Virginia, and only from there on to New York. Why the stop in Richmond was necessary, I have no idea, but there's really no way to point out to the airline that sending me far to the south on a third plane flight would actually cost them more money, so I had little choice but to click "purchase." And when I started traveling a few days ago, it was in Richmond where the journey really began.

Of course, it would be that particular Friday night in June when JFK International would come under a maelstrom of icy rain falling in sheets out of the sky. The FAA called for an airport "ground stop," meaning that no planes with a destination of JFK were allowed to leave their home ports. I was delayed.

Eventually the delay grew, and the time for our departure came and went. There were no updates. The waiting in uncertainty is a horrible feeling, but a familiar one to anyone who has dealt with it before. Then I refreshed the status page on my phone - it was getting me up to date information much faster than the signs at the terminal - and it said the one word no traveler wants to see: "Canceled."

This meant I would miss the flight from New York to Iceland (its departure due to the storm had been delayed by only twenty minutes) and since flights to Iceland occur only once every 24 hours, my vacation would be cut short by a full day. What's worse, I would miss the camping trip, so it wouldn't be until Sunday or Monday that I would manage to rendezvous with the group. I was distraught; Delta was offering meal vouchers.

Luckily, a savvy passenger discovered that another much larger plane (and the last to leave the Richmond terminal that night) was about to depart for New York. A flock of passengers immediately swarmed its gate. The staff actually managed to calm everyone down, organize a line, and squeeze every last person from the canceled flight onto the plane. I was counting the minutes until touchdown, knowing that I could still make my flight if the plane's engines would just work a little harder, spin a little faster.

In a cliche mad-dash across JFK's B terminal, I eventually arrived at the gate sweaty, but quite relieved to find that the flight to Iceland had been further delayed, with boarding not even begun yet. Despite the stress and uncertainty - and the fear of being stuck in Virginia for a night - I had made it back onto my original itinerary.

Obviously, the bag I checked never followed me from Richmond, and I had to spend so much time talking to Delta agents about it once we touched down that I missed the one-bus-per-flight into town. But these seemed minor trials after what I had come through. Mix a cab and some cold, hard Icelandic Kroner, and I was in downtown Reykjavik just a couple hours behind schedule.

I met with the group, napped, and promptly got seated in the back of a fourteen person van for a four hour ride to our first camping site at the foot of a glacier. Once again, I had found that mysterious and magnificent feeling when traveling: I had arrived.

The first picture I took in Iceland shows just how barren a place it can be.

It is also a land of surprising beauty.

The land is shaped by volcanoes, and their ash covers nearly everything.

The Grimsovtn volcano erupted over two weeks ago and is still producing steam. Here one of the others in the group stops to photograph it.