Today, we were supposed to drive to Chicago O'Hare and take a red-eye flight to Reykjavik, Iceland.
We had an apartment booked for tomorrow night in Reykjavik, where we planned to spend Sunday seeing the sights, going to museums, scanning menus to decide where and what to eat.
On Monday, we were to drive to Silfra, wriggle into dry suits and snorkel in the deep rift between the North American and Eurasian continental plates, where the water is so clear and deep, you can get vertigo if you forget that you're swimming and imagine you are falling--very, very far, as off a building or a cliff.
I am afraid of heights, so, to be honest, I had mixed feelings about this adventure.
On the one hand, super cool to swim between tectonic plates. On the other, freezing face and terrifying vertigo.
It was my son's idea, which is surprising, given that my son is not known for being a great adventurer. I don't believe he has ever for a moment enjoyed that youthful sense of immortality that one hears about. He is anxiously cautious, and his skin is so sensitive that he can't swim in a chlorinated pool or take a warm shower without being very itchy afterwards. He takes cool showers only--a cruel twist of fate, if you ask me, because a hot shower is one of my life's great pleasures.
Anyway, it was Josh's idea to snorkel, and his father, who has NEVER swum in open water even once the whole 20 years I've known him, was quick to agree that this was a really great idea.
And that's the thing about travel: It fires up the imagination to such an intense heat that no vision, no matter how fantastical, appears entirely implausible.
We envisioned ourselves enthusiastically squeezing into (smelly, rubber) dry suits and snorkeling with exposed faces in very cold, very deep water in the very steep, very narrow junction between two ever-shifting continental plates.
We made a reservation, typed in the numbers from a small plastic card, and voila! That very odd and unlikely vision of ourselves suddenly became almost inevitable.
On Tuesday, we were to ride Icelandic ponies on a black sand beach in Vik ("veek"). Obviously, I chose this activity, but Phil and Josh were game to ride.
Here, too, I note a disconnect between what we do not enjoy in our daily lives and what we imagine enjoying very much as adventurous travelers.
Because we have three horses at home, and Phil and Josh will have nothing to do with them.
At first, when we planned to get the farm, they both took riding lessons.
Phil, a natural (but indifferent) athlete, showed promise, but he soon lost interest.
Josh found it physically uncomfortable to bounce around on a saddle.
Neither of them were ever into the horses enough to work through their natural fear of them. And that's understandable: If you're not irrationally drawn to horses, the prevailing instinct is to appreciate them from a safe distance.
Nonetheless, we all signed up to ride outdoors in the Icelandic winter on robust ponies along a black-sand beach.
By the way, the sand is black because it's volcanic. And there's an active volcano near Vik that's overdue to go off. I'm just saying. We all signed up for this with great enthusiasm. Such is the psychotropic effect of planning a trip.
One popular tourist activity we were not especially keen on was the geothermal resort near Reykjavik.The problem there was they have these sentinels in the shower area whose sole job is to watch you clean yourself before entering the pool area.
To clarify, they watch to make sure that you do a very thorough job, and if you don't, or they don't think you have, if they think you've missed a spot, say, then they would communicate their disapproval.
Everyone says it's no big deal and totally worth it, but I can only picture the last prophetic ghost in Dickens' A Christmas Carol raising its arm and pointing with that long, skeleton finger toward my personal private parts.
I cannot picture my adventurous alter ego passing through that gauntlet of humiliation without many hours of anticipatory dread that culminate in utter desolation.
And neither could Phil.
But Josh was game. Unfortunately, we just didn't seem to have enough time built into our itinerary for that.
We would have had a good time, I think, way over there in Iceland, far outside of our comfort zones.
But instead, we're home. Well, at least we are together.
I wish I felt inspired to come up with some activities that we three could do together, and which would give us many hours of entertainment that we could look back on fondly years from now when we might think about the plague.
We are each naturally independent and introverted, so we see little of each other even though we are all sheltering in the same house. I walk dogs, type words, clean barn, train horse. Phil works upstairs, bakes bread, and runs on the treadmill in the basement. Josh, at 16, is upstairs in that horrifically messy room carving out a life for himself that excludes his parents by design.
But someday, definitely, we will go to Iceland, snorkel between the continents, ride ponies beside an active volcano, and maybe even soak in a geothermal pool at some godforsaken resort.
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