Shockingly, we got to our gate almost three hours early, so I have a chance to jot down some random thoughts about the trip.

Iceland is amazingly beautiful. Meredith really did keep talking about “Iceland 360” – that whatever you were looking at, odds were excellent that if you turned around, the new view would be grand as well. To cram lava fields, volcanoes, waterfalls everywhere, glaciers, many different kinds of mountains, fjords, seascapes, rivers and streams, rolling hills, cute towns and villages, and more into a country the size of Maine makes for a remarkable trip.

Roads here can be very bad. You can read that the roads are bad. You can understand that the roads will be bad. But it can still be a shock when you drive on, some days, dozens of miles of unpaved roads. Experience is quite the teacher. To be fair, the paved roads were all excellent. Some unpaved roads were excellent. Some were not. Almost no roads had guardrails. I suspect that to put guardrails everywhere they are needed would bankrupt the country.

Sheep are everywhere. Somehow, there are fences along almost all the roads. I think it is to keep the sheep from getting into the verdant fields of grass and keep them pinned to the side of the road. The car and I had three close encounters of the sheep kind in two weeks.

I never had a bad interaction with an Icelander. They seem a laid-back and helpful people, and everyone spoke at least some English. Which is good, because I’ve not quite managed “pakka per fyrir” (thank you) yet.

Long hours of daylight are a blessing, but confusing. I kept being surprised that it was 11:00 pm when the sun “told” me it was 8:00.

Iceland tries hard to protect the environment, and rightly so. It does have some amusing aspects, though. On many trails, there was a clothesline-style rope (thin) strung at shin height to remind people not to walk off the trail and to keep the fragile plant life in good health. But, since many of the trails involved heights, it also gave the illusion that these were the safety barriers to keep you from falling. At shin height. Where you can trip. My best guess is that it was the safety railing for the secret people (elves).

I know we are a product of our cultures, but I can’t get used to the sight of cold herring for breakfast. I went for ham and cheese (early on) or toast (later on). I get a pass on cultural eating because I tried preserved shark.

I ended up driving about 2,800 miles in fifteen days. That’s a lot. But, if you want to see sights all around the country, you have to drive to see them. I wouldn’t want all vacations to involve about four hours in the car every day, but it worked for this one. I wouldn’t have wanted to cut anything out from what we did (although the three-hour canyon detour was rough).

We didn’t get to do everything we wanted to do. The next Iceland trip needs to include whale watching, getting onto a glacier, going into the central highlands, riding an Icelandic pony, doing more Reykjavik exploration, seeing an active eruption (if one was going on), taking more scenic hikes, exploring the Eastfjords more, and other things. There is much to do here!

Icelandic ponies are handsome horses. They are larger that what we thought ponies generally were, but shorter than normal horses. They really do have a funny trot that you can see (they raise their legs higher than normal, I think, and they curl their front legs up on each stride). They have long, beautiful manes and tails.

We only ever saw two or three boats out on the ocean. That seemed odd for an island country. The harbors always had boats and ships in them. Maybe they only went out after we went to bed.

We never saw any crops growing. All the fields were grass, which we saw being harvested all over the country. Either wheat does not grow in Iceland, or the marauding bands of sheep get it all.

I love all the hot water. Not only does it make for bubbling pools in the ground, but it allowed me to take long, guilt-free showers. The cold water was great too – we had great, clean, cold tap water everywhere we went. Restaurants and cafes had it out just for the taking. That is not always the case in Europe, so we appreciated that.

I’m sure I’ll think of many other things over the next few weeks. It was a full and wonderful time in Iceland.