My First Trip Abroad

All those years I dreamed of traveling to Europe, I made mental images of standing in Westminster Abby, climbing to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and looking up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. When Wally finally took me on my first trip abroad, we did not go to England, France, or Italy. We went to Iceland and Denmark.

Iceland!

I never imagined going to Iceland. We went with a group from the Scandinavian Collectors Club of Chicago. Except for a couple of wives (like me) the others were all middle-aged and older men, whose main joy in life was sitting at a table with a tiny postage stamp, held carefully with tongs, in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. The object of the trip to see the International Stamp Exhibition in Copenhagen. Not the jolliest group to travel with, but I was thrilled that Wally was finally taking me abroad.

Our plane landed at Keflavik Air Base, built by the U.S. Air Force during World War II and still used as Iceland's principal airfield. On our bus to Reykjavik the old men talked about the beautiful blond stewardesses who served them on Icelandic Airlines. I was more interested in looking out the window at the Moon landscape. The only place I’d been which was only vaguely similar was when Wally and I drove across the Arizona desert to Las Vegas. No human habitation, just weirdly shaped rock formations. This was not like Kansas – or Illinois or Texas. And Iceland held many more surprises.

The first surprise came that evening. After dinner several couples gathered in our hotel room. The conversation was all about stamps. One couple had driven all over Iceland, an island about the size of South Carolina, searching for remote villages in order to get canceled envelopes from every post office in Iceland. They found one in a home, where a man pulled a hand cancel out of a kitchen drawer; he said his village only sent out letters a few times each year.

I looked out the window, where the sun still glinted on the windows of the building opposite. Then I looked at my watch. “Do you people realize it is 11:30 p.m.?”

It was August, and the sun still had not set at midnight.

A few days later we visited in a Reykjavik home, and I asked about the long, dark days of winter in this land so close to the Arctic. The home owner protested, “People think we don’t have any daylight in winter. We always have daylight, sometimes four or five hours.”

All of us look at the World from the place where we grow up. To him Iceland was the perfect place to live. From his contented smile, I could see that four hours of daylight in winter was enough.