Why Iceland?
In exactly one week we will be setting off for our big summer trip to Iceland! A little background on how we got here. This past Christmas rather than give our kids a bunch of shit they would forget about in a week, we decided their big present would be a summer trip. (Ok, we also got them a bunch of shit, but less shit, I swear. …Effing Christmas!) Anyways, each of us picked a trip we wanted to go on. C was stuck on ancient Greece for awhile, which, you know, is more of a time than a place, but he is realllly into mythology right now. Eventually, after being subtly pushed by Kevin that it would be too hot, he settled on the 9 year old standby…Orlando. Which I can’t imagine is much cooler than Greece in July, but whatever. For B and P, I feel we again played the role of "woman" as described by the mother in the classic film, My Big Fat Greek Wedding: the kids were the head, but Kevin and I, we were the necks. We twisted those little heads right where we wanted them. It went like this, “oooh B, do you like horses? Like wild ones on the beach?” “Yes!” “oooh B, check out this place called the Outer Banks!” “My trip choice is the Outer Banks!” It went much the same way with P and monkeys and Costa Rica. I settled on Banff and we had 4 trips locked and loaded by early November. Kevin was the one hold out and it wasn’t until Christmas Eve that he decided on Iceland, a place none of our children had really heard of.
Christmas morning arrives. The kids wake up to their diminutive piles of crap, but everyone’s psyched because we have the big trip reveal. B developed this elaborate scheme for picking the winning trip which was some mash up of a cake walk, musical chairs, and picking out of a hat. In the end, I was chosen to pick out of the hat, and I picked the only one we hadn’t been researching and building up for the last two months, Iceland! Needless to say, tears were shed and the moment I had envisioned of my kids happily trading in stuff for an experience was completely, well, a big pile of shit!
Anyways, we’ve now had 6 months to research and talk up this trip and everyone is appropriately psyched at this point because Iceland looks ridiculous!
