"Iceland Air is offering a package deal for a long weekend in Reykjavik for less than the cost of a roundtrip ticket," I replied.
"What, are we going to Iceland now?" asked Kathy, with a precocious eye-roll. She's only 8, but she's got the skills of a fourteen year old.
Just so you don't think we are impulsive, our answer at that moment was a good, solid maybe.
A few hours of research, comparison shopping, and soul-searching later, our answer had morphed into yes.
You say impulsive, I say decisive.
Or maybe it was the post-coffee-and-waffle high.
The first time I planned an overseas trip as an adult was in 2010. Back in those dark ages, there was no Pinterest. I did Google searches, and jotted down info on sticky notes, and stuck them on a map.
Four years later, my first step in planning a trip is to multitask with Pinterest, Google, Facebook, Flickr, and Spotify. I've got indie Icelandic music streaming as I search blogs, tour companies, and Wikipedia. I've added movies filmed in Iceland to my watch list on Amazon Prime. YouTube has Icelanders teaching basic phrases in their language. I stick pins on a Google Map that I made for the trip.
I also use the relatively old school online library catalog -- within minutes I can put holds on as many books on Iceland's culture, geography, and tourism as I want. When I go to pick them up, there will be an entire shelf of books tagged with my name.
This is going to be a self-referential post: when I publish it, I'll pin it to my Iceland board. I haven't quite figured out what the organization standard is on Pinterest. Should I use hashtags? What works for me is to put the name of the country first, then the city (if it applies), and then a phrase reminding myself what I liked about the site.
It turns out that going to Iceland is not so impulsive. My husband just found an email I sent him two years ago with a link to a company that does family tours of glaciers, geothermal pools, and volcanoes. So maybe the journey does not start with a step, or a Pinterest board. It starts with a dream of horseback riding through lava fields "someday."
Iceland! I can't wait to see you.
