I wanted to start out by saying how grateful I am that I get to travel. I mean that. A United States passport can get you just about anywhere in the world and so it’s another form of wealth that we have already in a very great country. Not everyone has that privilege and it’s important to keep that in mind. This story is going to detail some of my personal travel troubles and the final few hours I was in Iceland. While it sounds a lot like complaining, I’m calling it documenting. Because this story happened over 2 years ago, some of the details are a little fuzzy. I called my friend Jordan to get things straight as best as I could and to get his perspective on the trip to ensure it was as bad as I remembered it. And one last thing, there’s a character in this story named Lishka. I was going to tag her Instagram here but I forgot that I actually unfollowed her after the events of this story, and I’ve been unable and unwilling to find her on any social media platform to get her side. Without further ado here’s the story….
I’m not sure how Travel influencers came to be, but I can tell I will not become one. I think some of the popularity might be that the highlight of traveling for most is to see new and novel things you wouldn’t have the chance to see in your own neighborhood.
With the invention of Instagram, everyone can enjoy the beautiful views without buying the plane ticket, renting the car, enduring a 10 hr. flight and struggling through jetlag. You can live vicariously through someone else’s vacation/travel for no cost. It’s a novel concept that has pushed itself into my Instagram feed every morning. When I open my Instagram it’s immediately flooded with travel influencers showing me beautiful pictures and videos of what’s available at my fingertips as a US citizen with a passport. While I’m very happy that these influencers get to live their dream I wanted to pull up a microscope to travel and the things that most travel influencers don’t tell you about. The reality of travel and why pictures/videos don’t tell the whole story.
In May of 2022 I had the travel bug. I was at a crossroads in life where a lot of my friends started having kids and very little time to socialize. I felt that I was needing to go abroad and see the world. Even if for a few days. You see, if you’ll let me back up a little further, in 2017 I had planned a trip to England with 5 friends after my sister has passed away. I had thought this was how I was going to really seize the day, carpe the diem, live the most of life while the time was short. Slowly but surely all of my friends ended up needing to cancel and honestly I had too many things on my plate to make the trip work.
5 years later and I said “enough is enough! I’m going to England to see where JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter and to see a live Premier league match.” I called up a friend that I thought might join me, (Jordan), and told him my plans. Jordan said he was very much inclined to travel but he couldn’t do England.
He explained, “If I go to England I’m going to watch a Leicester City game. If I go to a Leicester City game without my Fiancé she will never dedicate another Saturday Morning to watch Leicester city again.”
I understood and asked what suggestions he might have as to where we’d travel. “How about Iceland? I see a lot of people posting sweet pictures from there. We should go there” Jordan explained. Ok, so it was settled. We bought our tickets, packed our bags, and told some friends.
It was very empowering to tell everyone we were going to Iceland, It became a good dinner party conversation topic and the more I told people about it the more I thought I liked travel just for leisure. What a marvelous time in life. I could go and see things I only dreamed of.
May 5th 2022 we drove to the Minneapolis airport got on a plane and flew to Reykjavik. When we landed it was about 7am Iceland time and 1am Minneapolis time. We took a bus ride that cost us $50 a person to get from the airport to the city. There is no uber, no other options. At $50 a head and 17 busses lined up I did some quick math and realized this was a lucrative career.
We spent the next 4-5 days touring the country, seeing the sites, eating some food and spending lots of money.
ok, so as I was thinking, I realized I’m making this story go too long. I’ll get to the parts I wanted to tell.
The day we left.
This is when it all came to a head. I need to fill you in on my mental state to tell you about the end.
While I was in Iceland I had a dating prospect from back in WI text me back after 8 days saying she’d like to be friends. I was disappointed but probably more hurt that it was an 8 day ghosting prior. Getting friend zoned isn’t a good feeling so I wanted to shake that off by sewing some wild oats in Iceland. Sewing wild oats in this case would be going out and being semi flirty with someone at a bar. That’s about it. The oats aren’t very wild in my family.
Wanting to sew those wild oats led me to connecting with Lishka. She worked in a bookstore me and Jordan visited and we struck up polite conversation that turned into more. She enjoyed our company so much she invited us out to the restaurant she worked at that night. The invite had implications of getting a deal on some food and drinks and possibly seeing Iceland through the eyes of a local. I remember thinking, “finally, we found a local, this is going to be like the movie “Walter Mitty” and this trip is about to really pick up!
It was not.
We showed up to the restaurant and it was quite packed. We looked over a menu to see what they had and everything was pretty expensive. It smelled of a tourist trap. I don’t think we would have come here if we didn’t know Lishka. But not to worry, Lishka worked here. She wouldn’t lead us into a tourist trap. Well, not quite.
Lishka was waiting tables and when she finally did find some time to come over she recommended a few drinks and food and quickly had it ordered to the table. Thinking she was going to be giving us these things “on the house” we accepted. Well, yeah you can see where this is going. She had us trying some Icelandic Liquor (disgusting she said but we had to try), some crazy appetizers and then a few other items that really aren’t memorable. To make matters worse, while at dinner Lishka began bragging about a guy she was seeing. I asked if she had a boyfriend, and she said she didn’t. But then she kept talking about this guy she was in a romantic relationship of sorts with. As I sat in the booth squirming, Jordan (who was engaged at the time) shook his head and sat back. There’s something about thinking you’ve been invited specifically by someone because that person wants to spend time with you, and then realizing they really don’t and getting stuck paying for their meal which they probably could have just gotten for free because they work at the place your visiting.
I felt disrespected and out of sorts. Jordan told me later that he would have just got up and left when she started talking about her love interests but because he didn’t want to leave me alone he stayed. As we paid the tab on this $100+ meal that was sub par at best, I realized that this could be a very normal Tuesday evening for Lishka and I probably wasn’t the first and won’t be the last tourist she tricks into visiting her at work. If you’re in Iceland and your a single guy, watch out for Lishka. If Lishka had a yelp I’d leave her a poor review.
One other thing I need to add so we can get to the grand finale.
My aunt had asked me to grab some Icelandic butter while in Iceland and I obliged. I stocked up quite a bit. 4lbs of butter was coming home with me. I think it was about $35 of butter.
The rental car needed to be filled with gas prior to returning it and we needed to catch a bus at a stop 2 miles from the rental car return place so we could get back to the $50 bus that took us out of the city to the airport that left in 30 minute intervals. We needed to time it all perfectly in order make it happen. Here’s where it starts to go wrong.
Somehow we were running late. I don’t like running late to the airport, I usually try and arrive early enough to wish I hadn’t showed up so early. But today we were running late.
So late in fact that I said to Jordan, “Jordan, after I gas the car up, I’m going to drop you at the bus stop. I’ll return the rent a car, and run the 2 miles on foot to the bus stop. In the meantime you hold the bus for as long as you can.”
Jordan agreed and we put the plan into action. I pumped the gas at the petrol station, and drove to the bus stop, threw out our bags on the ground as I pressed down on the gas pedal on this 2 cylinder mini car. Once at the rental car return I began sprinting back up the road I had just driven down towards the bus stop. It was about a 1.5 mile run but It felt like 20 miles. I arrived winded, a bit anxious, and fretful. But, I was on time to catch the last bus we could theoretically take to get onto our airplane in time.
On the back of the bus on the way to the airport I commented “Iceland was nice but this country is expensive. I think I spent $1,200 while I was here for 5 days. Jordan asked me how. I opened my phone to check my bank and explain how. Weird … a $255 charge …..and underneath that the $88 charge for the gas station we were just at. Someone had skimmed my card when I had paid for gas and immediately used it again. I spent the rest of the 45 min bus ride reporting the fraud to my bank and getting my card cancelled and and filing a claim for the stolen money. At the airport Jordan checked 1 bag and I elected to only have a carry on since I had camera equipment that I didn’t want damaged. We started hustling for the gate. My bag was partially unzipped and a lens fell out and cracked. Nuts. We got to security and the man explained that the butter in my carry on looked a lot like a plastic explosive. I had to check the butter in a bag if I wanted to take it with me. We didn’t have time to go back to the checked luggage counter and catch our flight off this moon like island so I dumped the butter, another cool $40 down the drain.
You might be thinking, “Gee Tim, that’s not all that bad.” And you’re right, thinking it through, it was a bunch of annoyances all at the same time that compounded it. I can handle getting my card stolen. That’s a couple phone calls and 5 business days later I’ll have a new card and the charges are wiped off. I can handle cracking a lens, it’s a bummer but it’s not that big of a deal. I can handle getting friend zoned and then getting conned into picking up the tab by a local. That’s probably sticking my nose where it shouldn’t have been anyway, even if it’s unlucky. And, I can handle forgetting I had $40 of butter in my carry on and having to throw it away. But when they all happen in the same hour? It starts to feel like your cursed.
When my lens hit the ground and cracked, my friend Jordan remarked, “Dude I have never seen so many things go so wrong in such a short amount of time, you might be cursed.”
To end the story, I did get back to Minneapolis fine, I had lots of pictures that friends were envious of which I really haven’t looked at since returning and Jordan and I got to spend some quality time together before he got married. While we did get to cross a country off of our bucket list, it was no where near as simple as a travel influencer tempts you to believe. Honestly, for parts of the trip, I wished I was back at my house playing Fortnite and drinking an IPA. The trip was sparked from a “Seize the day attitude after my sister passed, and it ended in an absolute dumpster fire. In some ways it really embodied a lot of the trips she liked to take and a lot of situations she ended up in.” Emily had a way of using humor to get through the hard parts of life that often times she seemed to pull like a magnet towards herself. I will always be thankful for the time I had with her and continue taking trips, leaving my comforts, to make the most of what I have today because tomorrow is not a guarantee.
PS…I am going to Mexico at the end of February for a fun trip. I haven’t given up on travel, I just think that the general public should have a full and accurate view of it.
-Tim
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