I love long evenings, my partner wilts in the heat,
one child's a congenital night-owl and the other floats through the day
on minimal sleep. Trade twenty degrees of sticky East Coast heat for
twenty hours of daylight in a kid-friendly utopia? Midnight sun, here
we come!
When we arrived at Keflavík airport, Iceland was
already keeping its end of the bargain. There was a cool autumnal edge
to the air - as warm as it gets in an Icelandic summer - and at almost midnight, it was still barely dark outside. More importantly, we hadn't been in the country ten minutes and we were already testing
the official tolerance for youthful enthusiasm.
At the baggage
carousel, our older son had spotted a punky Icelandic pre-teen noodling
around on a bike he'd just been reunited with. James insisted I dig his
scooter and helmet out so he could join the fun. Against my better
judgment — but also because I wanted to see what would happen — I did.
The
cunning collapsible scooter had been a last-minute inspiration, seized
upon after I remembered the daily walking range of the average
kindergartener and compared it to a map of Reykjavík. If little bro
would be swanning around in a stroller for the next ten days, it seemed
only fair to bring a set of wheels for big brother too. Over the next ten days that scooter would save our bacon so many times, especially once we discovered Ingólfstorg plaza, a little sunken square with three perfectly pitched ramps where kids and burly bikers showed what they could do with their wheels.
So I
snapped the scooter open while James fastened his helmet. He whizzed
off across the linoleum, swerving nimbly between tired tourists and
their suitcases, and I braced myself for the inevitable appearance of some uniformed
naysayer. James cut graceful figure-eights around the arrival hall,
working off travel-related stress and entertaining his little brother
at the same time. Amazingly, nobody materialized to stop the fun. Not
even when he coasted through Customs, in the Nothing To Declare (Except
Coolness on Two Wheels) lane, with his parents and brother jogging
behind him to keep up.
What were we doing in Iceland, exactly?
Well, one of the upsides of being wedded to a man who's wedded to
academia is the travel. I have very fond memories of one conference in
Florence when Richard was a lowly post-doc. I don't recall exactly
which sub-branch of astrophysics was on the agenda, but I do remember
that the hotel had a rooftop swimming pool, where we sat one night
watching a thunderstorm light up the Tuscan hills and marveling at how
far you could go on a shoestring travel grant.
Then came children. We always swore we'd continue our scholar-gypsy
ways regardless, but in truth we hadn't properly hitched our caboose to
the international conference gravy train since James was born. Sure,
I'd held the fort for any number of Richard's domestic work trips, and
we'd been back to New Zealand regularly to visit family, but otherwise
our passports might as well have been in cold storage.
So we vowed this summer to hit the road and take the kids — James, five and
three quarters, and Toby, one and a half. I'd swap my science-widow's
weeds for the role of endlessly accommodating conference spouse and
child-minder, in exchange for subsidized accommodation in a foreign
city. Richard would spend long days nutting out the finer details of
the Big Bang, then meet us back at the hotel to hear all about our
experiments in applied bus timetables (it's not rocket science, but
it's close). We just had to find a reasonably family-friendly
conference.
There were two appealing candidates,
one an annual get-together in Trieste, Italy, the other a one-off in
Reykjavík. On the one hand, a known quantity: Mediterranean climate, a
vaguely familiar language, and a country where bambini are universally
revered. On the other, a mystery combo of Scandinavian wholesomeness
and Björk-esque kookiness, plus a bouquet of attractions that seemed
tailor-made for children: volcanoes, hot-pools, lava fields, horses,
whales, and Vikings — everything but dinosaurs. And all those hours of
daylight in which to enjoy it...
The topic of the Reykjavík
conference was "Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology." My only
question was: so when do we leave?