Past/Present/Future

A week from today -- March 20 -- this photo of me, laid onto the cover of a current travel brochure, will be 45 years old.

It was taken in JFK Airport in New York City on March 20, 1968, before I boarded a Loftleidur Airline (now Icelandair) turbo-prop airplane with a score of other students from the small midwestern Quaker college I attended. We were on our way to London for spring quarter.

Nine hours after our plane took off, we landed at Keflavik International Airport in Iceland to refuel. It was 4:45 a.m by our internal clocks, and we hadn't slept much on the flight. I remember getting off the plane and going into the tiny terminal, where I bought some postcards of Icelandic horses. We re-boarded and settled in for another few hours before touching down in Luxembourg, the destination nearest to London that the airline offered then.

Something about that very brief stop in Iceland stayed with me -- and grew -- over all the intervening years. I read some of the Icelandic sagas in translation in college, always thought that living in a country where the literacy rate was 99% would be great, saw Icelandic horses now and then, admired a classic Icelandic-patterned cardigan on someone in Bellingham, read The Windows of Brimnes by Bill Holm (highly recommended), my son gave me a beautiful photo book of Iceland -- and I saw fabulous images of Iceland on Blipfoto.

Twenty-four weeks from today, on September 3, I will again land at Keflavik International Airport.

That's where Phil and I are going after our long weekend in Toronto at the North American Festival of Wales.

We'll have four days in Reykjavik, then a 45-minute flight to Akureyri in the north part of the island, where we'll spend three days in a self-catering cottage on an Icelandic horse farm in Varmahlio and three days at a country guesthouse near Akureyri, relishing local lamb and fish.

Our last day of travel will be Akureyri to Reykjavik to Seattle to Bellingham -- I'm not going to tally how many hours that will be, but I do know that travel fatigue will be a small price to pay for this marvelous experience.

(I'd planned to use this photo and journal entry on March 20, but in the next few days, I'll be getting a new computer and may not be online much initially.)