Me, Myself, And Iceland (eBook)
eBook Download:
EPUB
2015
|
1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-68222-505-9 (ISBN)
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-68222-505-9 (ISBN)
A High School teacher/photographer experiences a mid life crisis, takes a giant leap, and goes on a life changing three month adventure to make photographs in Iceland. It covers a little about the photography, and a lot about the kinds of things that happen to an individual mentally and physically while living out of a tent for three months.
Brian Rueb is a middle-aged, high school teacher who is looking to have an adventure before he gets too old to do so. He convinces his awesome wife and kids to let him leave home for three months and take photographs in Iceland. This is Iceland before it became the hotspot on everyone's bucket list. He packs as much as he can into his backpack and sets off. This tale is an autobiographical story of all the crazy travels, colorful characters, and hilarious experiences that he had while on the road.
Brian Rueb is a middle-aged, high school teacher who is looking to have an adventure before he gets too old to do so. He convinces his awesome wife and kids to let him leave home for three months and take photographs in Iceland. This is Iceland before it became the hotspot on everyone's bucket list. He packs as much as he can into his backpack and sets off. This tale is an autobiographical story of all the crazy travels, colorful characters, and hilarious experiences that he had while on the road.
CHAPTER 1
“Why Iceland?”
I get that question a lot.
“Why of all the places you could go did you pick Iceland?”
The short answer is--it’s all Bjork’s fault.
In the 8th grade I was deeply into music and finding bands that nobody else listened to. This involved spending a lot of time watching MTV (back when they played videos) late at night when they played less mainstream music, and even put on shows dedicated to music from other countries. I was smitten with a band from Iceland called the Sugarcubes. More importantly, I was smitten with the exotic Nordic beauty that was the singer of the Sugarcubes, Bjork. Almost like an elf from a fairy tale, she captivated me. One of the shows I had seen profiled Iceland and the Sugarcubes. I remember seeing a country that looked like no other. They were technically a part of Europe, but due to the remoteness and small population, Iceland may as well have been a different planet.
Even after 8th grade my attention always seemed to be drawn back to Iceland. When I got into photography it was inevitable that while doing a search for landscape images I would always stumble across images of a bizarre and barren volcanic moonscape. They were always pictures of Iceland. The more acclaim I got with landscape photography, the more people I knew sent me pictures they saw on the Internet,
“Hey you should check these pictures out.”
Nearly every time they were pictures of Iceland.
I traveled a lot in my younger years since graduating from high school. While I went to Europe on five different trips, never once did my plans involve Iceland. I always wanted to visit, but due to the remote location, and extremely high cost of travel in the country, it never made sense for these budget trips to include Iceland. Even though I never made it to Iceland on those early trips, I still tried to figure out some way to make it work into the schedule, just to SEE it. Each time I failed to figure out an economical way to make it happen, but it always strengthened my desire to see it.
Flash ahead to 2009.
While sitting in my chair at work early in the year I was reading a comment on one of my stories that informed me, “You really need to write a book. I’d buy it.”
I never truly contemplated that someone would PAY to read something I wrote, but it seemed like a nice idea. I had wanted to write something a little more substantial and made a decision that it was time to write a book. I didn’t know what writing a book entailed entirely. In my mind a book was 250-pages, at least. I knew to fill that many pages, I needed a grand adventure; an adventure big enough and long enough that I would finish with enough material. A weekend outing wouldn’t cut it, unless said outing ended in a catastrophic tragedy. The first thing that came to mind was Iceland. I had been looking at a lot of images from the country in the recent months, and this was the perfect opportunity for me to finally visit Iceland.
The one advantage I had with my job was that it allows me a big chunk of free time in the summer. Normally that time was divided into two parts. The first half is always spent recovering from the previous school year. The second half of summer is a gradual building of dread and anxiety as I count down to the beginning of the next school year. Summer we saved money on daycare and fuel costs because I was home with the kids all day. I would find some time during most summers to get out and photograph, but never anything worthy of a book. It was usually a weekend or three days here and there. Whatever project I came up with would need to take every second of my summer from the second I got out of work until the day I had to come back. It had to be big. There was one glaring problem that struck me immediately.
I would need to figure out first and foremost how to approach my wife with this crazy idea.
My wife knew I was not happy with my job; she also knew how much I enjoyed photography. Luckily my photography had worked itself into a good second income source for the family. This meant she was more understanding when I was gone on hikes, weekend excursions, and the occasional week-long effort in search of new photographs. Those were little adventures in relation to the one I was going to ask her for now. I wasn’t sure how she was going to react to my request to take off for an entire summer.
It took a couple weeks before I found the nerve to ask, and even then I didn’t ask, I was a coward and sent it as an email to avoid stumbling over words, and more importantly not being within arms reach should she have chosen to turn into the incredible she-hulk and smash me. There was no two ways about it, asking to leave my family for over two months so I could wander around in an arctic country with my camera was crazy. I expected the worst.
I didn’t even know how to write a letter requesting something that grand. There certainly aren’t Hallmark cards for that occasion. There are no ‘YOUR’RE TRYING TO GET SOMETHING CRAZY OUT OF YOUR WIFE WITHOUT DYING’ Sections in the card aisle at Target.
I drafted numerous emails that I never sent for one reason or the other. Ironically, I had writer’s block. There was no way around it, whatever wording I chose was going to be ridiculous. My final email was quite dumb and lacked any real solid case for why I should be allowed to go.
“Hey,
You know how I write all those stories, and people like them and always tell me I should write a book? WELL, I think I’m gonna finally do it. I was thinking it would be fun to go to Iceland for the entire summer and then I’d write a book about it. Wuddya think?
OK, Love you LOTS, Bye.”
I REALLY expected the reply to be something like, “Hey, you should go fuck yourself…oh and enjoy the couch. I might kill you. Bye.”
Not that my wife is unreasonable as a person, I just expected she’d see the request for what it was, a pipe dream, and then give me a sarcastic smack back into reality that such requests should warrant. The minute I fired off the email I freaked out.
OH shit. I actually SENT that. Oh boy. This is going to be bad. I’m going to have to come up with a defense for when she fires back her response.
“Are you out of your mind?” I knew some version of that phrase was coming at me after the “Go fuck yourself” part. I had to figure out my next volley when I got my letter of rejection back. I knew I was going to get shot down. My next plan of action was that when she sent me the letter telling me I was crazy, I would start the negotiation process and counteroffer. I would try for five weeks. Five weeks wouldn’t be the best, but it certainly would be doable when compared with three months. I sat and waited nervously all day for the email to arrive. Work goes by slowly on normal days, on this day the time moved almost sloth like.
That afternoon upon returning from lunch, I saw it sitting in my inbox, a reply. I let out a deep breath and clicked to open it.
“Hey,
GET LIFE INSURANCE FIRST. I’m not going to have you run off and die and leave me without a way to take care of the kids. Otherwise, I guess you should probably do something like this before you’re too old and frail. We’ll just need to figure out how we’re gonna pay for this trip and all the expenses while you’re gone.”
Wait-- WHAT?!?!
I was in awe. Life insurance was the only stipulation? That was easy, and probably something I needed to get anyway. I hadn’t fathomed that she would say yes, so other than a bit of daydreaming, I had done no planning. I didn’t want to get my hopes up and then have it not come to fruition.
Now it was game on. I had roughly 10 months to plan and fund this trip.
I believed that to make an interesting book the project needed a central theme or mission, something to tie the whole experience together. The first few days of my research I found out that a main road ran the circumference of the country. Most of the main attractions were on this road or near this road. I figured the best thing to do would be to walk that road- The entire road. I calculated the length of their ‘Ring Road’ and it came in at a little over 800 miles total. I did the math and surmised I would need to walk almost 18 a day to walk the entire thing during the time I had. For the first few weeks of the planning that became my central focus-- I was going to walk the ENTIRE ring road.
The original plan lasted only two fantastic weeks before reality set in. The more I researched the country the more places I wanted to see. I wanted to go to the western fjords to see arctic fox and explore one of the last truly wild uninhabited places in the country. I wanted to go into the interior. Some places on the ring road I wanted to stay more than the one day I would need in order to stay on pace. The more places I added that were off the main ring road the more distance I would need to walk on the road during a day in order to complete the goal. It never gets dark in Iceland during the summer, so in theory I could walk 24 hours a day and have visibility. I added in my changes, and recalculated the math, and if I went to the outside areas I wanted to see I would have to walk almost 38 miles a day in order to still walk the entire ring road. I’m not...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 1.11.2015 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Sachbuch/Ratgeber |
| Reisen ► Reiseführer ► Europa | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-68222-505-4 / 1682225054 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-68222-505-9 / 9781682225059 |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
EPUB (Ohne DRM)Größe: 612 KB
Digital Rights Management: ohne DRM
Dieses eBook enthält kein DRM oder Kopierschutz. Eine Weitergabe an Dritte ist jedoch rechtlich nicht zulässig, weil Sie beim Kauf nur die Rechte an der persönlichen Nutzung erwerben.
Dateiformat: EPUB (Electronic Publication)
EPUB ist ein offener Standard für eBooks und eignet sich besonders zur Darstellung von Belletristik und Sachbüchern. Der Fließtext wird dynamisch an die Display- und Schriftgröße angepasst. Auch für mobile Lesegeräte ist EPUB daher gut geeignet.
Systemvoraussetzungen:
PC/Mac: Mit einem PC oder Mac können Sie dieses eBook lesen. Sie benötigen dafür die kostenlose Software Adobe Digital Editions.
eReader: Dieses eBook kann mit (fast) allen eBook-Readern gelesen werden. Mit dem amazon-Kindle ist es aber nicht kompatibel.
Smartphone/Tablet: Egal ob Apple oder Android, dieses eBook können Sie lesen. Sie benötigen dafür eine kostenlose App.
Geräteliste und zusätzliche Hinweise
Buying eBooks from abroad
For tax law reasons we can sell eBooks just within Germany and Switzerland. Regrettably we cannot fulfill eBook-orders from other countries.
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
aus dem Bereich
