Finding The Adventure…In Iceland

A lot of people think that travel is a means of escape, a way to run away from your problems or your ordinary boring life, the rut you’ve found yourself in, and in some ways I suppose it is. But it is also so much more.

Travel is excitement, an adventure of the world and of yourself. Travel is a way of life.

When I was younger I had no desire to travel, no want or need to see any part of the world other than the safe places I knew and loved…why would I want to go anywhere else I would often ask myself? But somewhere along the way all of that changed. I can’t pin point exactly when or what it was that instilled in me this absolute aching to explore the world and see what else there is out there, but I do know that these days it’s pretty much all I ever think about.

Once, on a school trip to Iceland back in 2005, I was lying on the top of a hill with all my friends in the dead of night, looking up at the black night’s sky, waiting for the Northern Lights to appear. We were being your typical teenagers, pretty raucous and not really paying attention, and then all of a sudden, there they were, these swirling cloudy coloured shapes, moving across the sky; whites, reds, greens, blues and purples…I’d never seen anything like it. It was as if the sky was alive and had a mind of its own. I remember feeling, really for the first time in my life, completely in awe of my surroundings, and totally unaware of anything else except this beautiful act of nature up above me. So I just lay there, long after everyone else had given up and gone to bed. I lay there and for that moment I felt free. Free from the confines and expectations of everyday life, and from then on I’ve been chasing that feeling, the freedom that comes with finding the adventure in life.

Iceland was it. That trip was the start of this nomadic lifestyle I’ve been leading for the past two years. It sparked something in me that I didn’t know was there, a desire to get outside my own little box of comfort and familiarity and experience things that were wildly unknown. It was just a school trip – we visited Reykjavik, the Blue Lagoon, the Strokkur geyser, saw icebergs, jumped on a spongy field of lava moss, walked under and around the enormous waterfalls that are Gullfoss and Seljalandsfoss, and of course went out of our way to view the Aurora Borealis – but it was so much more. It turned me into who I am, and for that reason, Iceland will always be a special place for me. I’d like to go back someday, to revisit the place where it all began.