As I sit here in the departure lounge at Keflavík, having just walked past this sign, a wild range of emotions are running through my head. I've had the incredible privilege of spending four fantastic months in this gorgeous country, with a stack of heartfelt memories now stored away deep in my soul - images, …
Author: johnelsewhere1968
Thoughtful wanderer in search of virtual meaning
The Next Step
If the pedometer app on my phone is to be believed - and I choose to do so - I've walked a combined distance of 481km since arriving here just after Easter. Given that Reykjavík has endured its most miserable May and June in decades, I think I'd have managed a lot more than that …
Route 1, here I come…
After a few weeks of settling into the rhythms of life here in Iceland, the time has come to hit the road and break out of the Capital Region, leaving the bright lights of the big city behind in the rear view mirror. On a number of previous visits, I’ve been able to cover roughly …
What day is it again?
After nearly thirty years of working and then nearly six weeks of not working, I find myself in an odd mood. I guess it’s the absence of an external imperative - like a boss who expects you to turn up every day and provide labour or services in exchange for currency. To not be doing that …
Space And Time
A month has now passed since I cast aside my previous incarnation as a sensible grown up with a mortgage and a job and a car and a predictable 5/2 routine to become a wandering itinerant in a distant land - still with a mortgage, but with few of the other trappings of my previous …
With thanks to David Attenborough…
...for it is he that set me on this path, unknowingly of course, more than ten years ago. As his landmark "Planet Earth" series was launched by the BBC in 2006, a promotional trailer was heavily rotated on TV, laced with stunning images and a mesmerising tune by a band I'd never heard of before. …
The Imminent Immigrant
As I approach the date shown on my one way ticket to another land, I find myself surprisingly unsentimental at the prospect. Each time I make a certain journey, it crosses my mind that it might be the last time I pass that way for quite a while, so I mentally store it away for …
What’s next?
As a child, one of my most favourite books was “Travels With Charley”, the final work of John Steinbeck, an autobiographical record of a last tour around his homeland at a time of great change and uncertainty, made in a determined effort to stave off feebleness and debilitation. Its opening page had me enraptured immediately, …
johnelsewhere 