Brendan Doms

We spent Saturday hiking to the Skaftafell waterfall, which was an extraordinary sight. There I tasted glacial waters for the first time: a pure, crisp, cold experience. It was a short trip, serving as a good warm-up for what was to come.

The group explores the Skaftafell waterfall.

We then proceeded to Jökulsárlón, which literally means "glacial lagoon." It is a bay of water with icebergs from the glacier floating everywhere. They were an uncanny blue color, giving the whole area a surrealistic atmosphere. And when a chunk of one of the icebergs suddenly crashed into the water I jumped at the sound.

Ice floats in the lagoon, while the glacier looms in the background.

After that we stopped at the last remnants of the collapsed Skeiðará bridge. It was destroyed when during a "glacial run," which is like an avalanche or mudslide, except for water and ice from a glacier. A monument to the bridge is simply two massive steel ibeams left where they fell in the rubble, showing just how destructive water can be.

People bounce on the surprisingly flexible steel of the collapsed bridge.

Then we went on a detour to an unnamed piece of land that seemed to burst from the coast. Its sides were mostly sheer cliff-face, with a few caves and winding ledges. We found a thin trail and used it to ascend, a feat which often required the use of both hands and no small amount of mental fortitude when there was actually a small gap we had to jump over. The top had the ruins of an old viking house set into the ground, but the inaccessible hilltop had been long deserted. It would be ideal for sheep or goats to graze there, but I can understand why humans left the remote and rough terrain.

A lone figure jumps in silhouetted salute from the peak of the unnamed, sheer hill we climbed.

Our final attraction for the day was an abandoned crashed plane, once belonging to the United States Navy. I don't really know the story behind it, except that they left it where it fell in a deserted section of the Icelandic southern coast, and it remains mostly intact. The propellers and wings are gone, along with the front of the cockpit, leaving only a skeleton reminder of a past age.

The downed plane sits in its barren grave, a patient ghost abandoned amidst a desert of ash along the coast.

We then settled down to camp at the base of a massive waterfall, where we would begin the massively long and anticipated hike the next day.

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.

I'm opening up my travel blog again as I plan to spend the next ten days in Iceland. It's a vacation of volcanic proportions. I'll update this space with more posts and pictures when I can.

I'll be spending most of my time in the capital and largest city, Reykjavik. I'll be there visiting Monica, who has a blog on her time spent abroad already. She's in Iceland because the University of Michigan has a really cool program for its architects to do international study. And if you hadn't heard, it's architecture graduate program was ranked number one this year, maybe in part because they help their students travel to awesome places.

As for what's happening in country, there are already some planned excursions into the wilderness, including a camping trip that leaves just a few hours after I touch down from a two-layover, eighteen-hour trip to get there. No rest for the weary.

That first venture is out to the Þórsmörk volcano. I'm choosing to interpret the name as Icelandic for "Thor's Smoke" - they're certainly close enough when pronounced out loud. And how epic is that? Iceland is full of references to Scandinavia and Norse mythology, because despite their island nature, that's where their cultural heritage is ultimately from.

There's going to be lots of fish. Penguins. People wearing nothing but wool. Thousand year-old caves. Hot rivers and even a gap between continents.

I can't wait.

As you might have noticed, I just uploaded what is close to 80 new pictures. This represents the last update I’m planning on making to this blog. So, take your time to look around, but until I do some more worldly traveling there won’t be more happening here.

Until next time friends: bon voyage to wherever life may take you.

London’s West End.

The Shakespeare Globe Theatre.

St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

B@1. The best cocktail bar in London.

Buckingham Palace. Surprisingly not that nice looking from the outside.

Inside the Jameson distillery.