This week is spring break for Thomas and me, so we have several items on our lists to check off. There will be a lunch and shopping trip with Nona, an eye appointment, a trip to the library, and lots of spring cleaning and decluttering … and lots and lots of walking. You see, there’s a competition going on in the district, and I have to represent.
Windsor Unified School District is taking on a healthy challenge for eight weeks. We sign up and choose a virtual trail to walk, and enter our step count, sleep count and fruits and veggies count to earn miles along our trails. We are competing as sites, teams, and individually, so my teams are North County Consortium, Chicka Chicka Voom! Voom! and myself. There are prizes, but of course the ultimate prize is health (and bragging rights).
The trail concept is kind of fun, but it meant a kind of dilemma for me. The choices were scenic routes along famous sights in Hawaii, China, Italy, Greece, France, Denmark — and Iceland.
Does one choice seem a little different? I clicked on each trail choice to check them out, and saw that as you moved along in your earned mileage, you got to “visit” landmarks and learn about each one in little vignettes.
As an example, you might see that you had earned steps that netted you a visit to Diamond Head in Oahu. The photo would be a snapshot of the famous dormant volcanic crater with the sparkling Pacific Ocean behind it, lush tropical greenery everywhere and most likely a rainbow. You might see medieval castles or ancient avenues on a European trail, or a hillside of blindingly white houses rising from a Mediterranean sea on a trail through Greece. And then there is Iceland.
I chose Iceland as my trail, for two reasons. One was my heritage — my mother’s parents immigrated from Iceland, which makes me half-Icelandic — and one was the reasoning that if I had to keep seeing pictures of places I was virtually visiting, I didn’t want to wistfully pass rainbows and warm blue waters and sun-warmed castle walls nestled in vineyards or olive groves. Can you imagine gazing at idyllic rice paddies stretching to verdant green mountains in China, then walking through WalMart, or decluttering an email inbox? Nope. So Iceland it is.
A common misconception about Iceland is that it is covered in ice. It’s not. Greenland is the island that is mostly ice, because whoever gets to name things like that gets to play jokes on everyone else.
Iceland is more volcanic bleak than ice bleak, but it does have awesome hot springs and the population is extremely literate, with approximately 99 percent of the island proficient in reading and writing (the literacy fact is not included in the trail, but it has always struck me as important because of my heritage). There are beautiful towns nestled along the coast, but most of the island is sort of empty.
I don’t know anyone who has desired a trip to Iceland in real life, but apparently it’s some niche hiking destination I didn’t know about. I do know that astronauts used some of the lava landscape to prepare for visits to the moon (true fact) and the trail information keeps touting hikers and tourists — plural — so there must be someone going, right?
My virtual trail is having me cross the island, basically bisecting it, so I’m getting a lot of the empty middle right now. So far I have passed Odaoahraun, which spans 1,700 square miles, and is Iceland’s largest continuous lava field; Dimmuborgir, which is Icelandic for “dark castles,” and consists of oddly shaped lava fields east of Lake Myvatn; and Hverfjall, which is a crater of consolidated volcanic ash (I am totally not kidding).
There have also been sparkling lakes and streams and fjords, but I’m mostly plodding through a greyish landscape of rock and a rocky landscape of grey, all helpfully identified in unpronounceable names with lettering not available on my keyboard. Email inbox decluttering is safe.
Let me close by saying, “Hamingjusamur ferlar!” Now you, too, can say, “Happy trails!” in Icelandic.
Juliana LeRoy wears many hats, including wife, mother, paraeducator and writer. She can be spotted around Windsor gathering material, or reached at ml****@so***.net.
