This journey has been in the making for a while. It was postponed several times for obvious reasons. But finally, we went on a plane to Seattle in late July. I brought more than one camera along for the ride and if you want, you can see photographs of a road trip from Seattle to San Francisco in various chapters over the upcoming weeks.
The title came up because the road trip wasn’t, and probably never meant to be, just a holiday with beautiful sights, great food and wonderful weather from which I will come back recovered and well. No, the world, or parts of it, showed its ugly side as well and there is no way it’s not part of the trip! The pictures and words are supposed to work as my little therapy to help me cope with what I saw and felt, be it good or bad.
And a bad start it was! Now, I would not have shown any pictures of a boring flight or plane but it turned out to be impossible, anyway. Our plane had to do an emergency landing in Reykjavík. We were told that this happens for technical reasons. After the landing every passenger had to leave the plane and we were told to leave hand luggage in front of the plane. By whom? Heavy armed Icelandic police that stood all around the plane. All cameras had to remain in the luggage as well as everything else except passports. Without being told what the matter was, we were transported to a smaller hangar where a photograph by every single one of the 240 passengers was taken. And waiting began…

 

 

… during all this, I think it was about six or seven hours of waiting, we weren’t told anything about why or what exactly was happening. Which is, I guess, normal during an ongoing investigation but the persons in charge failed to get any information out about the where to, what next and everything else. Also, it was almost scary to me how everyone seemingly let everything happen without too much complaints. In the end, all passengers were transferred to different hotels close to Reykjavík were we had to stay overnight to catch another flight on the next day. And that’s were the only picture happened. See the stuffed goose in the hotel lobby illustrating the surrealness of it all!

 

 

The flight continued the next day and at least I can tell I’ve been to Iceland, now. Of course, this is where a lot of money was lost, too, since we missed a night in Seattle that we already paid for. However, we arrived…