Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love, I’m sailin’ away in the morning. Is there something I can send you from across the sea, from the place that I’ll be landing?

Bob Dylan

Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather is one of my favourite Dylan songs because of the tension between deep, committed love and the thirst freedom. Between not wanting to be away from your loved one and the wish to explore new exciting worlds. In the end, he settles for Spanish boots from Spanish leather.

There is an old shop close to Madrid’s Plaza Mayor that sells those boots. There were times I was in Madrid, even if I did not need new shoes, I got a pair. – Not this year. But going away to Spain’s Northwest, exploring, travelling, has been good too.

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Weight bearing became a whole new meaning on the last day with Pádraig’s new friends in Torrelavega. They put up to 13 kilos on his wrists, his legs and in a vest around his upper body. This was soon becoming a full-blown CrossFit-type session, with a constant change between a variety of high-intensity functional movements, like pulling himself up a wall-mounted ladder.

In between, they asked him whether he was ok. They also said that your pain level, between one and ten, when doing serious exercise should be seven. Otherwise, it would either hurt too much (if higher than seven) or it would not have the desired effect (if lower than seven).

On our way back from Torrelavega to Santander we decided to take a short detour and visit the site of the Altamira caves. The original caves are no longer open to visitors but the museum with the reconstructed caves are a close second best.

The staff were extremely helpful, especially when it turned out that the lift the museum had to bring wheelchair users to the last stop, down into the reconstructed caves, was too small for Pádraig. It’s hard to believe that a modern museum of this stature does not have a lift that would accommodate a wheelchair, even if that wheelchair was slightly larger than the ‘norm’.

Overall, it was a very good, truly amazing experience – to see and experience (even if that ‘experience’ was slightly fake) the art our ancestors had created some 36,000 years ago.

On the last evening of our stay in Santander, we had a tapas dinner in our ‘regular’ where we met a really nice couple from Wales who had come over to Santander on Brittany Ferries’ flagship. No issues about the crossing, they said. Super smooth. If you check out the two ships, you’ll know why – even by just looking at the pictures. I think the Irish are literally getting a rough deal.

If you ever met people from Wales, you know that I had trouble understanding even half of what they were saying. But I didn’t have to. They were just so open, kind and caring, it was heartwarming. They were complete strangers when we met them and they could have been our best friends when they left.

On Friday morning, we shared a typical Euskal pastela, a basque cake, for breakfast while enjoying a magnificent view from the living room of the apartment we rented for our three nights in San Sebastián. After that, we went for a walk into town.

This city is one of the few I know where you will find people carrying their surfboards through town under their arms or on their bikes to the beach. Imagine, you wake up in the morning and decide – it’s a good day for surfing. You catch your board, walk to the beach, and enjoy the surf.

We tried to travel light when walking into town. The old part is full of wonderful little shops and spectacular tapa bars.

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Dylan’s song has a side that took on a whole different meaning for me in the last few years.

Oh, how can, how can you ask me again
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I want from you today
I would want again tomorrow

There is really only one thing I want, a thing that is unlikely to happen, and that even Spanish boots will not compensate for.

What I can do is to take heed of the western wind and take heed of the stormy weather.

And keep exploring, remain curious, maintain a healthy sense of humour, push the boundaries, and don’t let anybody convince me that life is a tragedy.

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Check out the 2nd International IronMonth Challenge 2022 on http://www.iron-month.com.

Join groups around the world – or set one up yourself wherever you live and let us know – who will complete the distances of the classic Ironman over the month of May.

If you are in Dublin (or close), join us on our first ever fun super sprint TRYathlon, suitable for all who want to try a short triathlon, supported by Triathlon Ireland and Irish Village Markets on the morning of 01 May 2022 on the grounds of Sports Ireland beside the National Aquatics Centre (NAC) – with food and fun for all the family. Sign up here.

If you were available to help out as a Cycle Marshal for the 20k ride – please get in touch.

Support the An Saol Foundation’s fundraising effort.

Tell your family and friends about the event and share it widely using #IronMonth22.

Listen to Oliver Callan, standing in for Ryan Tubridy on Friday, 15 April, giving a big plug for the #IronMonth, @15:40 – or just listen to his IronMonth clip here. All thanks to a great friend of the An Saol Foundation!

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Helen Keller

The French ferry company had warned us that the 28-hour crossing from Rosslare to Bilbao on the Connemara was “économie”, no frills. Looking back, I think the ferry might have been built before the ingénieurs had invented stabilisers.

The car is still covered in sea salt left behind from the waves that came crushing across the open car deck. We were luckier with our “full Irish” than many other guests who lost their breakfast to unexpected and sudden moves of the Connemara.

I thought back to 1977 when I had travelled to Ireland for the first time, from Le Havre on the famous St. Patrick. That was de luxe in comparison. But even with the storm and seriously moving ship, or maybe because of it, this crossing was a super adventure. One of those you’ll never ever forget.

We got over it and are now enjoying the Spanish wild atlantic coast in Santander from the firmer grounds of the beautiful Sardinero beach and from the window of our hotel room at night. One week here and then a few days in San Sebastián before another crossing (but I won’t think about that for the moment:).

Our hotel is right beside Santander’s grand auld Casino. We haven’t been into the Casino (yet:), but have been down to the Sardinero to watch the dozens of surfers riding the waves. And we enjoyed the absolutely breathtaking sunrise over the sea.

Today, we went into town, on the bus. Nothing could have been easier. Much better than taking the car. We went for a walk, discovered Café Bar Dublin and had some tapas. Those alone would have been worth the journey. I have no idea what they do or how they do it. But there is a taste in those bites that is to die for.

Afterwards, Pádraig chilled out having a Coke on the Plaza de la Catedral in the early April sunshine, drinking from a straw and just being happy and content. Life is good.

We wondered: why would the small town of Torrelavega, about half an hour away from Santander, have a highly specialised neuro physiotherapy clinic? We were curious and followed the advice of a clinic in Santander who had told us that all neurological physio treatment was handled by this specialist clinic, Sinapse. So we went to check it out.

We were stunned. It was such a brilliant experience. Pádraig gave it 9 out of 10 and I couldn’t disagree with him. (Even if it’s perfect, it’s always good to leave a bit of room for improvement.)

We now know why the clinic is in Torrelavega – it’s because Cantabria’s physio university is also based there. The clinic is run by one of its professors, Dr. Carlos Rodriguez López.

The two therapists worked with Pádraig for two hours as if they had known him for a long time. They worked so hard, they were sweating. And they enjoyed it so much, you could see their happiness and satisfaction on their faces. They were so proud they asked me to share the pictures and videos I had taken of the session. It was fantastic and we’ll definitely be back there next week.

We didn’t have an idea of what to expect when we went on this trip. The first few days gave us a taste. They made as feel alive, making new experiences and discoveries every day.

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore”, André Gide once said. And Hans Christian Anderson was convinced that “to travel is to live”.

We all know that “a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step”. Let’s take that step together. One each day.

And we’ll have changed the world before we know it.

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Mark Twain

A well prepared impromptu speech, an exact estimate, small crowds, the only choice, and something seriously funny – have in common that they are all oxymorons. We know what these phrases mean. Yet, they are contradictions in themselves. Something well prepared is not impromptu, an estimate isn’t exact, crowds aren’t small, a choice always offers options, and whatever is serious ain’t funny.

Music Technology is another oxymoron. Technology is tangible reality, music is creative and intangible imagination.

Yet, last week, a visitor to An Saol who teaches and researches Music Technology opened my eyes and my mind, and made me realise that sometimes things that seem to be opposites, can work together to produce radical change.

Pádraig (and others like him) are deprived (amongst other things) of a huge amount of sensory input. Worse: many clinicians working with severe brain injury don’t even realise this. Never mind realise the enormity of it.

Anybody with some common sense understands the difference between preparing, cooking, eating, and sharing food – and being fed some predigested nutrient liquid through a tube into the stomach. (As an aside: on one occasion a speech and language therapist and a dietitian made a combined effort to convince me of the opposite.)

But it’s more complicated than that. Because it is routine for us, we rarely realise what it means to be able to touch. Things and people. To transmit and understand information through touch.

Eminent scientists like Martin Grunwald have explained that we cannot survive without touch. Touching (haptics) is more important than seeing, hearing, smelling or tasting. Because through haptics we feel our body, our physical existence.

Now, what does it mean if I cannot move? Cannot touch soap and feel warm water on my hands when I wash them (because I cannot and others don’t do it with me); can’t feel the food that I am about to eat (because it’s injected into my stomach)? What does it mean if I spend most of my time on a special air mattress ‘floating in space’, designed to reduce ‘touch’? If I am ‘floating in space’ while being transferred in a hoist, instead of feeling my body’s weight on my feet while I transfer from bed into my chair?

On top of all this: what does it mean for my being, if I am deprived of all agency? If people perceive me of not being able to understand or communicate – so they take decisions for me without me; if I’m perceived to be ‘dead weight’, not being able to act on anything, do anything that would have any effect on anybody or anything?

It would be hard to find meaning in life.

Yet, this is what many people with a severe brain injury face.

Now imagine, what if there was …

• a sensor that measured the position of your hand, and raising and lowering it would change the pitch of a note played by an instrument or the vibration rate of a cushion you’re sitting on?
• a ring around your finger that converted tapping, bending and stretching movements into sound or a haptic effect?
• a heart rate monitor that produced rhythms that can be not only heard but felt based on the beating of your heart?
• a strap around your foot that produced the sound and vibrations of a bass drum in time with your foot-tapping?

And these are just some example of how music technology can help people with limited abilities to feel the effect of their actions on the world surrounding them – actions that anybody with a heart beat can control?

Remember the way how Pádraig controlled how a clarinet player plaid his instrument just using his breath?

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Last week, Pádraig had a tiny visitor who really made him happy and smile – big time.

He got, after months of waiting, a new custom-made seat and back support for his wheelchair.

And I had some fun at the barber – who in COVID times decided to accept cash only, and in our National Car Testing Centre to get the annual NCT for Pádraig’s car – where they prepare for Brexit.

Although many people have tried, the world and its people cannot be understood. Even time, past, presence and future, are not what they used to be as Gumbrecht, who taught me literature in Bochum and recently retired from Stanford, explains quite eloquently, in German only unfortunately.

Crowds can be small, choices present one option only, fun can be serious, and music technology be creative – even creating meaning and purpose for those largely deprived of it.

And what looks impromptu is often quite well prepared, as Twain reminded us many years ago.

The Irish soccer team last night played against the world’s number one, Belgium

The Irish won 2:2. Who would have thought that they would get a draw with the no.1 team in the world?

The weather is getting better and Pádraig went out with some friends from An Saol to the Botanic Gardens.

Hoping for the best, instead of just carrying on.

It is believed that the initial plan for killing all of the birds and replacing them with flying cameras was thought up one weekend in May of 1956.

Peter McIndoe, the 23-year-old creator of the viral Birds Aren’t Real movement

In January 2017, Mr. McIndoe traveled to Memphis to visit friends. Donald J. Trump had just been sworn in as president, and there was a women’s march downtown. Pro-Trump counterprotesters were also there. When Mr. McIndoe saw them, he ripped a poster off a wall, flipped it over and wrote three random words: “Birds Aren’t Real.” – As reported by Taylor Lorenz in the New York Times towards the end of last year.

That was the beginning of a movement.

According to Lorenz, in Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, “Birds Aren’t Real.” On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren’t Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral. In November 2021, Birds Aren’t Real adherents protested outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo.

The lesson: Fight lunacy with lunacy. Or, as Cameron Kasky, 21, says: the parody “makes you stop for a second and laugh. In a uniquely bleak time to come of age, it doesn’t hurt to have something to laugh about together.”

How to make the connection between Birds aren’t Real and St Patrick’s Day?

The thing is that Patrick’s Day is no longer just a day. It’s a whole week, with two, instead of the usual, one bank holiday. As a ‘thank you’ by the Government for all the great work that was done during the COVID-19 crisis.

We went out in search of a bit of ‘craic’ in Dublin’s Patrick’s Day Festival Quarter, the Collin’s Barracks.

The weather was fabulous and there were lots of people in the place. There was a group of really good dancers on the stage – Go Dance For Change -, two DJs were doing a night’s work in the middle of the day, and about two dozen food trucks sold burgers, waffles, and bratwurst dressed up as ‘hot dogs’.

The whole affair didn’t manage to create this “St. Patrick’s Day Feeling”. But it was good to be out and about and in a crowd of people again.

A walk along the boardwalk in town and sitting under our beautiful cherry blossom rounded up the week.

It mightn’t have been a real St. Patrick’s Day celebration we managed to join, but it was fun. The nice weather, the blue skies, the warmer temperatures, and the beautiful flowering trees certainly were real.

Having a bit of fun, being out and about again, brought a bit of relief to what are, for so many people, dreadful times.

Birds charge on power lines. Pigeons are liars. And the world is flat.

Think about it. And smile. I think Albert Camus would have liked this new movement.

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

Dolly Parton

We saw this rainbow when we were driving home, up Drumcondra Road. And while I wouldn’t dream of correcting Dolly, this time it didn’t even rain. It was just beautiful.

The rainbow, its colours, variety, and beauty, has been used as a symbol by many, from ancient mythology to modern equal rights campaigns. Some look for the pot of gold at its end, a girl from Kansas just wanted to get over it and get to the place where trouble melts like lemon drops.

Pádraig went to this year’s first Patrick’s Day gig in St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra last week. It was a beautiful day and an absolutely brilliant lunch time concert. Nearly a dozen very accomplished traditional musicians played the most enchanting ballads and uplifting reels and jigs.

With Patrick’s Day coming closer, days are getting longer, trees begin to blossom, and the first flowers appear around the place.

I listened to someone talking about the idea of fractals. As Jack Challoner put it in the article he wrote for the BBC on fractals: “Unfortunately, there is no definition of fractals that is both simple and accurate.”

He quotes the genius who coined the word, the Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot:

“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” 

Challoner concludes that the chaos and irregularity of the world – that Mandelbrot referred to as its roughness – is something to be celebrated. That it would be a shame if clouds really were spheres, and mountains cones.

My take on fractals is that what might on the surface appear to be simple, singular and well defined, is, in reality, often just a distant view of something that, at a closer look, is quite complex, multiple, and chaotic. Yet, there is system in the chaos. The multiple layers, the complexity, are made up of an endless number of similar-shaped objects: fractals.

A bit like the world and our lives: from a distance, the world looks blue and green, and the snow capped mountains white. There is harmony, we all have enough, and no one is in need. There are no bombs, no guns, and no disease.

Look closer and it becomes clear immediately that war, bombs and guns, hunger and disease, injustice and cruelty are all around us.

There are days when I’ve had enough of the complex, the chaos, and the irregularity. Of injustice, cruelty, wars and bombs. When I just cannot celebrate that roughness. When I need to see the world blue and green, and the snow capped mountains white. With people living in harmony.

When I want to enjoy the rainbow without the rain.

Those are the most beautiful moments in my life.

Being able to share them with the ones I love makes it all worth it.

Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.

Paulo Coelho

The world remains a scary place.

Who remembers COVID? Now it’s Ukraine.

There are situations when right or wrong cannot be used to justify your actions. Invading other countries and killing people is wrong. Apart from the destruction, misery and death it brings with it, it creates more problems than those starting the fighting said they wanted to resolve.

I’m old and I’m German. Believe me.

Did I say that a friend kinda encouraged me to register for a few runs, including a (short) triathlon? Being able to run suddenly moved up to a whole new level of significance.

Pádraig continues to exercise. His hip is slowly getting back to where it was before it developed some serious problems about 2 or 2 1/2 years ago. Lying on his back and with a little help from his friends he is again able to lift it up from the ground, four fingers high.

Pádraig continues to enjoy the longer and brighter days.

Nothing like a walk along the sea front on a good day.

On Sunday night, he went to see the Lumineers in The Point. I think it’s now called the Three Arena.

He really enjoyed the concert and himself. One of his carers had had the idea, bought the tickets, and accompanied him.

Apart from the concert itself, it must have been some experience to attend a concert without another family member, for the first time in nearly nine years. I think it was a great night for the two of them.

Were we nervous?

While the Lumineers were playing across the road, we had dinner in what you might have seen on TV as the location for the First Dates programme. Food was the least important item during the two hours or so we were waiting for the gig to finish. We were watching our phones all the time and when we didn’t, we tried to figure out how they had adapted the layout of the Coda Restaurant in the Gibson Hotel to suit the show.

The trouble started as the car nearly disappeared in a cloud of smoke when I turned on the engine to collect Pádraig. The engine didn’t run smoothly and took about 15 minutes to recover from whatever had happened. Maybe it wanted to remind us that we should start looking for a replacement.

We got back home safely and the car works as if nothing had ever happened.

I am trying to put things into their place. Do what is right.

On good days, I can feel and see a balance. That’s when life is good.

We learn nonstop. Through experience. Taking reasonable risks at each step of that learning experience.

Would that be a way to make the world a bit less scary?

A bit more caring?

Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?

Albert Camus

He looked like Humphrey Bogart, terribly attractive. He could have become an actor, but he didn’t. Instead he became one of the most popular voices of existentialism, a philosopher, writer, and journalist.

Adam Gopnick wrote in an article in the New Yorker a decade ago, Facing History – Why we love Camus, that a person who met him on his one trip to New York, in 1946, when asked what he was like, said, “All I can tell you is that Camus was the most attractive man I have ever met.”

The man himself wrote from New York to his French publisher, “I can get a film contract whenever I want,” joking a little, but only a little.

Looks matter. Think Instagram.

Gopnick reminds us that Camus never asked the Anglo-American liberal question: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? He asked the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight?

We are all Sisyphus, he said in his 1942 essay, the Myth of Sisyphus, condemned to roll our boulder uphill and then watch it roll back down for eternity, or at least until we die. Learning to roll the boulder while keeping at least a half smile on your face—“One must imagine Sisyphus happy” is his most emphatic aphorism—is the only way to act decently while accepting that acts are always essentially absurd.

He describes the absurd condition that we build our life on as our hope for tomorrow, while, at the same time, tomorrow always brings us closer to death. For Camus, the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world.

Camus believes that the absurd can never be permanently accepted, nor resolved, it requires constant confrontation, constant revolt. The contradiction must be lived; reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without false hope. The absurd does not require suicide. It requires revolt.

All this echoes in my mind. There is a lot I recognise.

While there are certainly differences, for me Camus’ thoughts connect, to an extent, with those of Edith Eger and Viktor Frankl. It’s the idea that we cannot change the world, nor those who are sharing it with us.

Nonetheless, we have to keep pushing the boulder up that hill. With a smile on our faces. There is no choice and no way out.

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Today, Pádraig and his wider family had lunch in the Constitution Room of the Shelbourne Hotel. No better place to remember his grandaunt who had died during COVID without her family being able to say goodbye. She was a great believer in Irish independence and freedom. And the Shelbourne played an important role on that journey. She would have been in her element today.

We had lunch in the room where exactly 100 years ago, between January and March 1922, Irish Patriots drafted the country’s constitution which later became a model for other states declaring their independence from the United Kingdom, including countries as far away as India. The table, the chairs, the room itself were renovated but never changed substantially. Some chairs, like the one used by Michael Collins, were left untouched. A facsimile of the Constitution is on display. – In other countries, this room be a museum.

It was the first time in many years we all met. A really enjoyable afternoon, with many stories to catch up on. A fitting day to remember Pádraig’s grandaunt.

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I want to mention a few things that became clearer to me in the past week in relation to the progress Pádraig has been making over the past months and years.

He is now able to reliably press a switch not just with his left foot or the fingers of his left hand, but also with his left knee. Using a three-button mouse, three fingers of his left hand can click the mouse switches independently and reliably (though we haven’t found an app that he could control with these switches). He should be able to use two or three switches at the same time now – a challenge for the near future. When we were helping him recently with eating some pretzels, he stuck a finger into one, lifted his hand up to his mouth, took the pretzel off his finger and ate it. No help required. At mass, he opens his hand, receives holy communion, and brings his hand up to his mouth. When he washes his hands, he picks up the soap floating in a bowl and squeezes the soap to wash his hands. He opens up a belt around his chest when he is ready to get out of his wheelchair. When I sit him up to prepare for the transfer from bed to wheelchair, he now nearly pulls his body up himself. He also pushes his body up from the floor during transfer to assist. He has travelled around Europe and the US. Most days, he ‘cycles’ around 5k using the MotoMed (no motor). He ‘walks’ around 1.3k using the Lokomat. He understands four languages, can read and respond to pretty complex quiz questions using a switch, he spells words using morse code, and keeps himself and us entertained with his tongue in cheek sense of humour. He is the best informed member of our household in relation to current affairs.

It all happened over a period of time. But when I look at it all together, take stock, and compare this with his condition from where he started following his accident, what he has achieved is truly phenomenal.

And above all, he is ok with his life. He smiles. He likes a cup of tea, rather than coffee.

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Here are two more of Camus’ quotes.

“In the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself” and “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” 

Let’s be courageous. Let’s be free. Let’s rebel.

Let’s smile.

And let’s have a cup of coffee, tea, or whatever you’re having.

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

Muhammad Ali, Olympic light heavyweight champion, Rome 1960

It’s a different Mohammed in the picture, Arif Mohammed Khan. And he is not from the USA but from Kashmir, administered by India.

He was the only participant from his country taking part in the Winter Olympic Games that just finished, representing 1.4 billion people. Because his father ran a ski shop in Kashmir. Check it out.

His first run was last Sunday in the men’s giant slalom event. He finished in one minute 22 seconds, 19.42 seconds behind the winner, Switzerland’s Odermatt.

You don’t have to be the best but you have to keep trying.

Yesterday, we had a meeting of the An Saol Family Support and Advocay Group in the An Saol Café, now in the An Saol Foundation Centre in Santry. Guest Speaker was Áine Flynn, Director of the Decision Support Service, DSS, that supports the implementation of the “new” Assisted Decision Making (Capacity) Act 2015, abolishing the Ward of Court system based on the Victorian (!) Lunacy Regulation (Ireland) Act 1871. Yes: 1871. You can listen back to Áine’s presentation and the following Q&A session here. Access Passcode: Ansaol!01

Áine gave us a very good overview of the Act and responded really well to the questions some of the 20 session participants had, in person or online.

I have the impression, though, that this now seven year-old act (!) that has to be amended (!) before it’ll be commenced in June of this year, is a bit like Arif. Only that Arif has already made it over the finishing line while the act still has a bit to go before we’ll be able to say the same about it. And as all Winter Olympians know: there is always the risk of falling or being disqualified.

Pádraig had a good week in An Saol. He started to use his Pforzheim-made arm splint again to stretch his left arm, surprisingly with relatively little effort.

Stretching works if you do it on a regular basis.

The ancient Olympics were held during a religious festival honouring Zeus. Today they honour those who keep trying, those who never give up, those who are courageous enough to take risks. Because if they didn’t they would accomplish nothing in life.

And everything he sees is just blue

Eiffel 65

Everything was blue in the Blue Lagoon. I had heard about it but didn’t have a clue what it was like to “experience the radiant powers of geothermal seawater. An otherworldly wonder.”

All this just a couple of hours after we had arrived in Keflavik Airport. An airport Pádraig visited on his way from Cape Cod to Dublin in his private air ambulance Learjet almost nine years ago. He doesn’t remember it as we do. We were not sure at the time whether he would arrive home ok.

This time, he is not with us. But he and his sisters last Christmas gave us a very generous present: a 5-day visit to Island. Flights, lagoons, 3-day expedition, hotel, dinners – all included.

We have been here a few days and still have some days left. This must the closest thing to Alaska Europe has to offer. Probably on a slightly smaller scale. But breathtaking.

And I have to think nonstop of Pádraig’s (and my) dream trip.

We relaxed in hot springs, stood in the freezing cold waiting for the Northern Lights, we walked between the tectonic plates, couldn’t believe how high the water shot out of the geysers and how bad it smelled, we climbed up a glacier in gear that would have brought us up Mt. Everest, walked on a black beech covered in white snow, saw what feels like dozens of the (mostly frozen) ten thousand waterfalls in the country, and just drove by Iceland’s largest glacier with a volcano underneath, the one nobody wants to erupt.

We have been travelling with a small group of nineteen tourists in a bus driven by an ex-school principle who now works as a photographer when he is not driving the bus. Most of our co-travellers are Asian. When we were admiring the scenario, they opened up our eyes to social media. Seeing them ‘capturing’ the scenery and themselves for their sites is nearly as interesting as the countryside and really ads to the excitement. Different worlds.

Today, one young lady, who must have thousands of followers on Instagram, asked us whether we would like her to take a picture of us. She took two dozen. At least. To us, they all look the same. To the trained eye, I am sure there are vast differences.

Last night we received a text from the Police telling us that we were close to Hekla. A volcano about to erupt. First we thought it was a fake. When we showed it to our guide this morning he said it was kosher and came from the police. But not to worry. We should only take those texts seriously that told us to get the hell out of wherever we were.

Pádraig and his sisters send us on a trip we won’t ever forget. Time for us in a different world. I am writing this driving through a snowstorm. Never mind the volcanos.

We finished today as we started our Iceland adventure. Blue. At a lagoon.

We didn’t get into it though. It wasn’t nice and warm but filled with 600 year old blue ice. Still an otherworldly wonder.

Da ba dee da ba di.