My pal JA and I had a writing challenge last week, and I missed the deadline — very unlike me, but JA is a forgiving soul. Well, here’s my story relating to the Grand Canyon a few days late and dollars short:

Have you ever seen that show on the Discovery Channel, I Shouldn’t Be Alive? Well, I’m lucky that I didn’t end up on that show recounting an incident that happened when I was younger.

You see, I was the Queen of Cotton, the Diva of Wet Tents, the Empress of Unpreparedness. I would drive from St. Louis to Colorado in a day and sleep at 10,000 feet that night. I went on hikes above treeline in the afternoon during the summer thunderstorm season. I wore sweatshirts on long hikes with cotton gym shorts, cotton socks, cotton T-shirts, cotton underwear and probably a cotton baseball cap.

Now, I know better. Now, I know how little I knew back then during my first forays into the mountains. I took a wilderness survival course last week and learned even more about how little I know. And the more you know, the more you realize how unprepared you really are.

But when I was the Queen of Cotton, I was blissful in my slow-dry sweatshirt, altitude-sickness-mocking ignorance. And like so many of the tourists I see now at Rocky Mountain National Park and Indian Peaks Wilderness, I survived despite myself. Good luck was my constant companion. But experience started to creep into my bliss like water seeping into the corners of a cheap tent during a rainstorm.

That particular experience — rain seeping into a cheap tent — happened a few too many times for my taste. It only takes one cold night fighting a loosing battle against driving rain to turn your bliss to blah. I spent my college breaks road tripping across the continent with Mr. You-Don’t-Need-Gore-Tex, otherwise known as my college boyfriend. We would spend a week camping out in some far-flung destination on $200 and whatever we’d raided from his mom’s pantry the day before we left. These were amazing experiences. But in hindsight, I wish we’d spent $200 on a quality tent.

Mr. YDNGT — gosh that’s cumbersome, let’s just call him Mr. Cheap — was truly the King of Cheap. I didn’t realize this right away when Mr. Cheap took me on my first soggy camping trip. (I was a Girl Scout, but my mom, our trip leader, always made sure we stayed in the lodge with indoor plumbing at Girl Scout Camp.) I thought it was perfectly natural to be cold, wet and miserable while camping.

Mr. Cheap also took me to buy my first “hiking boots.” These were Hi-Techs, commonly referred to (disparagingly) by those who know better as Sierra Sneakers. Pair these with cotton socks and a stream crossing and you’ve got a blister factory on each foot.

Eventually, experience (read: misery) met materialism at the local outdoor store. I discovered Gore-Tex. I discovered fleece. I discovered tents that looked like they could actually keep rain out and warmth in. I wanted all of it.

Over time, I acquired good boots, a fleece pullover and a waterproof/breathable shell jacket. I still hadn’t acquired the good sense not to go from the flatlands to 10,000 feet in one day, though, and one night I puked my brains out and nursed a mind-numbing headache up at Indian Peaks after starting that morning in St. Louis. Fortunately, I was 20 and therefore relatively invincible; I recovered the next day and hiked.

The Queen of Cotton hadn’t undergone a complete transformation yet, though. A jacket and fleece and boots does not an outdoorswoman make. I was missing all kinds of essential items, and experience (misery) returned to make an example of the Queen on a winter trip to the Southwest that included my second visit to the Grand Canyon.

Both rims of the Grand Canyon are more than a mile above sea level, and when five ill-equipped 20-year-olds arrived on the South Rim one gray, blustery January day, we witnessed a sight we’d never seen — snow flurries. Just flurries, we thought, they’re not accumulating, we’ll be OK. But we found snow packed in amongst the campground’s trees that night, and considering our Mr. Cheap tents, we decided to cram into the van for a toastier night’s sleep.

I left the van in the middle of the night and headed toward the lights of the campground bathroom to pee. I was chilled through when I opened the bathroom door and felt the warm air seeping out into the 20-degree night.

The bathroom was heated. I stood there and soaked it up like a lizard and squinted against the lights. I peed and stood there again. I couldn’t talk myself into returning to the van. I considered going back for my sleeping bag and camping in the bathroom for the rest of the night. The warm air of the dirty campground bathroom was far more comforting than snuggling against Mr. Cheap, who was just as cold as me that night. The $40 sleeping bags he’d bought us and his holey cotton sweatshirt were a tepid testament to our relationship — my warmth was only worth $40, and so was his.

Still, I owe a lot to Mr. Cheap. He took me everywhere from the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Gulf of California to the Canadian Rockies. Our experiences, however miserable, transformed me from the Girl Scout in the lodge into the woman who eventually carried a 50-pound pack to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back. I carried hundreds of dollars worth of life-saving gear in that pack, and none of it was cotton. I’m now the Queen of Capilene.

Long live the queen.

A cheerful Icelander with a Toyota SUV with tires that seemed nearly as tall as me picked us up for our tour of the Golden Circle.

“My name is Arnthorr,” he said as he shook our hands heartily, his golden hair bobbing on his forehead, “But if you forget my name, just yell, ‘hey Icelander!'”

We liked him instantly.

Arnthorr swam in the 1988 Olympics for Iceland. Now he’s a physical education teacher, but his hobby is off-roading. So on school breaks, he’s a super-jeep tour guide — it’s what he likes to be out doing, anyway, he said as he droves us out of Reykjavik toward the Golden Circle route that seems to be Iceland’s hottest tourist attraction.

The Golden Circle is a collection of pure Icelandic geologic wonders one can see in a day on a loop drive out of the city. Our first stop was an overlook across the yawning gap between the North American and European plates in Thingvellir National Park.

“What’s between the plates?” one of my brothers asked Arnthorr as he gazed across the valley beneath the cliffs we stood on, which formed the edge of the North American Plate, and down to the Althing, the site of the first Icelandic parliament more than 1,000 years ago.

“I don’t know, just enough lava to stand on, I guess,” Arnthorr said. “Don’t jump up and down on it.”

My brothers figured he was kidding, but they still looked a little nervous.

We continued across the rift to the European plate and on to Gullfoss, the next major attraction along the Golden Circle. We could see Gullfoss’ spray rising above the rolling green plain before we arrived at the massive waterfall (and the hordes of tourists).

We broke out our rain jackets before heading down to the falls. I was snapping pictures on the wet rock that dips into the falls when I heard a woman in a distinctly American non-accent squeal valley-girl style:

“Oh my God, we’re from Denver!”

I turned to see my mom talking with a couple who wanted their picture taken. The woman’s legs were bare under her flowery, flouncy skirt and punctuated by impossibly impractical heels. I shivered in the waterfall’s spray at the thought of it.

“You’re from Longmont?” she said as she handed me their camera. “Oh my God,” — her voice rose, peaking at God — “it’s such a small world!”

Too small, I thought as she posed on her husband’s knee, kicked up one leg and threw her arm back. I took a couple of quick shots with the falls in the background and got back to my own shooting quickly to avoid a conversation straight out of an ’80s teen movie.

Next, Arnthorr drove us up to the icecap, which we could see from the upper parking lot at Gullfoss, and the pleasures of having a private tour were readily apparent. There are plenty of bus tours of the Golden Circle, but the buses don’t do what Arnthorr did. Arnthorr drove us down a gravel road, which quickly got rough, past some snowmobilers, past the end of the road and right onto the glacier.

Our jeep was equipped with its own air compressor, so we stopped at the end of the road so Arnthorr could check the snow conditions and adjust the tire pressure accordingly (we paused again to re-inflate the tires upon returning to the road). I doubt any of us had given much thought to the required tire pressure for the varied ground we were covering, but Arnthorr educated us. We learned that the best way to travel on the glacier at this time of year, if possible, is to deflate one’s tires to 3 psi; 5psi can be adequate, but 3 psi is really the best way to float on the snow.

However, if the conditions are not right, and your tires are no good, they will fall right off the wheels at three psi, he said.

“They’ll come off?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he confirmed.

At this point we were on the flat snowfield at the foot of the glacier. I was sitting in the middle of the back seat, which meant I had nothing to hold onto but my seat belt and camera bag. The bumps were getting bigger. I held one hand against the ceiling of the truck to stabilize myself, but I was still getting tossed all over the back seat while my family roared in laughter at me and took pictures.

The path smoothed out once we started up the glacier proper. Arnthorr told us where it would be dangerous to drive the jeep or walk — to the left, to the right, up ahead. Pretty much everything around us was dangerous. When he parked on top of the glacier so we could get out and look around, we were afraid to move off the jeep’s tracks.

I’ve been to Alaska in the winter, but I’d still never seen so much white. I suppose I’ll have to travel to Greenland or Antarctica to see more. What’s more, the biggest Icelandic icecap is far to the west; we’ll see it in a few days, if the weather cooperates. Arnthorr had taken us onto the edge of one ice cap, where ahead we could only see white, and another icecap was visible in the distance, I think to our east. I can’t say for sure, because frankly, I was turned around most of the time we were there. I usually have a good sense of direction, but when it’s cloudy most of the day and the sun doesn’t really rise or set, you start to wonder how explorers made it to the North or South Pole.

After being thrown all over the back seat again, we stopped at the road to fill up the tires — three psi is not safe on the road — and Arnthorr took us to Geysir.

Geysir is the original geyser. It’s not the first ever, of course, it’s just the first one somebody named. So all those geysers at Yellowstone have Iceland to thank for that useful brand name.

But the name and the thing itself are as far as the similarities go, because Geysir is no Yellowstone. A little rope about a foot off the ground is all that separated the biggest geyser from the crowds. In America, this would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. In Europe, it’s too bad you were stupid enough to walk into uber-hot water.

My brother Matt was incredibly tempted by this freedom. He wanted to walk through it. He wanted to stick his finger in the water of a tiny gurgling offshoot of the main geysers. So help him, he wanted to interact with the Mid-Atlantic Rift, Mother Nature be damned.

He was getting on my nerves.

“Just. Stop. Don’t touch the water. Just — ” I rolled my eyes ” — cut it out.”

The big geyser was shooting water 30 feet or so into the air, so I went to take pictures of it. Mom came up behind me and said Matt had thrown a rock into the gurgling pool below.

He walked up, and I laid into him. Yes, I am 30, and he is 14. I am an adult. But right then, he was my little brother, and being the big sister and the oldest child, I was of course smarter than him and had to tell him exactly what he had done wrong in the way that only an older sibling can.

“Why did you throw a rock into the geyser? Don’t you know that clogs them? People throwing things into them? Then they don’t erupt anymore. They die.”

Mom gave me a look.

“You think I’m kidding? They have signs all over Yellowstone, examples of clogged geysers, because people threw things into them.” (I haven’t been to Yellowstone since I was 14, so I don’t know whether that’s still true.)

Matt was “whatever”-ing me, and a nearby American couple said to Mom:

“Brother and sister, right? We’d spot that anywhere. It’s universal.”

I was trying to keep my brother from being the ugly American, but I had turned into the ugly American instead. That’s okay, though, because by now we were all laughing about me giving poor Matt such a hard time over a stupid rock. (In my family, bad behavior is generally made fun of, thus embarrassing the person behaving badly into not doing it again.) Would a rock clog a geyser, anyway? I know coins and other man-made debris do at Yellowstone. But a rock?

On the way back to Reykjavik, Arnthorr took an off-road route through the geothermal area that supplies Reykjavik’s hot water. Steam seemed to be pouring out of pipes and random cracks in the rocks all around as I was jostled about the back seat again. It was odd to me that we could drive right through the city’s hot water supply structures on well-used jeep roads. Back home in Colorado, Boulder’s supposedly pristine water supply, a reservoir a few thousand feet above the city right between popular hiking areas, has a wide berth that is completely off limits even to hikers.

Arnthorr had talked to us all day about the concerns Icelanders had about the environment and especially global warming. But four-wheeling doesn’t seem to be an environmental concern. It’s as if they know firsthand that in Iceland, the forces of Mother Nature are far more powerful than any super jeep.

That night, we spent our last night in Reykjavik. Icelanders partied in the streets into the wee hours again, so my folks were glad to leave town the following morning. We struck out on the southern part of the ring road that circles the island and spent the night near a spectacular waterfall, Skogafoss. Dad was reading his guide book that night and gathered us in my room to read a special passage:

“The great geyser at Geysir first began spouting in the 14th century, blasting a jet of superheated water up to 80m into the air, but the spring became inactive in the 1960s, after being bunged up by rocks and dirt tossed in by tourists attempting to set the geyser off.”

I jumped up to perform my in-your-face dance, followed by the I-was-right dance. My family brings out the best in me.

Two of the listservs I subscribe to have recently descended into an e-mail nadir of catty personal attacks and combative “discussions” that have made me wonder:

If Dante were alive today, would he create a special place in hell for the people who mount these attacks and the fools who continue to read them day after day?

(I keep reading them, so I am one of the fools.)

Part of the problem might be that many of these folks are writers, and writers scrutinize words and phrases for meaning. Writers also write for therapy, and let’s face it, we all need therapy sometimes. But this makes posting on a listserv group therapy, and there’s no shrink running the group and keeping things focused and under control.

Case No. 1: I won’t name the name here, but let’s just say this listserv is for local women who are media professionals. After one too many off-topic discussions about peach cobbler, someone posted the equivalent of, “What the hell? I thought this listserv was for media professionals.” This triggered a massive discussion about what the group is, who is in the group, what the group is for, how the group started, what the group is now. Which brings us to the “lurkers.”

You know what a lurker is. You are out there reading this right now. You’ve never commented on my posts, and I might not know you, but there you are, reading these words. You are a lurker.

And I don’t care. Lurk away. I’m happy to have lurkers. But the lurkers caused a stir on this other listserv. Some don’t like it. Some don’t like the word “lurker.” (It is a rather nasty word for something so innocuous.) Some defending lurking, citing work and children and elderly parents and busy lives. Which brings us to working moms and kids v. no kids.

Okay, I don’t need to detail this battle, because you’ve heard the arguments before. Let’s just say that being childless and a lurker and also completely exhausted after days of watching the struggle to define a group with more than 300 women with diverse interests in the media, I thought it prudent to end my lurking. I’m still on the list; I just ignore the irrelevant posts.

Will my renunciation warrant a reprieve from Dante? Or will I be kicked out of group therapy for not participating? (Or if one of them reads my post here and is insulted?) I don’t know, but that’s only the first listserv.

Case No. 2: My journalism school has a list for alums. We are all underpaid, overworked, unemployed, understaffed, saddled with student loans — basically we’re an angst-ridden bunch. So when someone posts a job (which is potentially helping someone out) that contains one of the following common phrases:

“Great opportunity to get your work published in a new market!”

“Successful candidate is more concerned with quality work than a paycheck.”

“Pay isn’t great, but it’s a chance to have your work published in (insert publication name here).”

People who are struggling to get by — and who have been taught by our alma mater to scrutinize words and phrases for meaning — get a little pissy.

To make matters worse, while people are coming to blows over how these great opportunities for low pay actually devalue one’s work, someone’s out-of-office reply is going off, flooding people’s mailboxes every time someone posts their take on the low-pay-devalues debate. This prompts an alum with a Blackberry to complain about out-of-office replies, which are apparently extra painful on a Blackberry (?), which then prompts others to tell him to suck it up or subscribe to the daily digest instead of the individual e-mails, which prompts me to delete the messages as they come in without reading them and wonder what happened to the camaraderie we shared when we were in J-school and all in this together.

Tired yet? Me too. I’m ready to call my pal Jeff, who is a mediator and longtime Zen practitioner, because apparently we need an alum from the LLM program to mediate. And offer a little sound Zen advice.

If your Blackberry goes off and you’re not there to hear it, does it make a sound?

What did this listserv look like before your parents were born?

I suppose I’m mixing themes now with my Zen and my Dante, but there really is a point here that involves both: we’re all suffering. But why should we take it out on each other like this? We have so much in common. Why can’t we substitute our combative attitudes for compassionate ones when we’re all suffering — even suffering in the same way?

I’m sure the answer is the usual suspect: ego. But if I posted that, they’d all write me into a place in hell even Dante never thought of. So in the meantime, I take refuge in Writer L, a listserv whose members post thoughtful commentary and rarely allow anything that could be construed as a personal attack…and have guardians who watch over it and direct the conversation when they’re not ascending the mountain with Dante. And that reminds me of my favorite haiku:

Climb Mount Fuji

O snail

But slowly, slowly.

Good advice for non-snails posting on listservs. Go slowly and have compassion before you post, o snail.

I’ve been gone for a while — sorry about that. Those of you who know me best know that I’ve had an eventful summer that kept me from blogging as much as I’d like.

One of those nice little events was a visit from some out of town friends and our subsequent trip to the Shambhala Mountain Center to see the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya.

None of us are Shambhala-brand Buddhists, but how many stupas can you go see in the U.S.?

One of the unusual things about this stupa is that one can go inside of it. Most stupas are practically solid and sealed; this one has a small meditation room on the first floor that’s open to the public.

I say it’s a small meditation room, but it’s really not that small. It just feels small because:

1. There’s a great big buddha sitting inside of it. He takes up most of the space, and

2. He’s staring down at you with those wise buddha eyes making you feel even smaller, like the great stupid in the Great Stupa.

The stupa itself is impressive, but the buddha inside seemed so real I wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d just started teaching the dharma right then and there.

Speak! Relieve my great stupidity!

But statues don’t speak, so we were left to circumambulate the stupa (for good fortune) once before another storm rolled in and contemplate what the buddha would have said to us instead.

If you’re one of my journalism pals, go check out today’s post from Roy Peter Clark at Poynter. I just had to share.

All spring I trained for an event that takes place every year on the Fourth of July. My winter bout with bronchitis and my grad school chub left me weak and sluggish, unfit for the task ahead, but I trained hard anyway. I rode my bike to the point of collapse, practiced yoga to improve my core strength, cut back on sweets. Nothing was going to stop me from riding 2,000 feet up the hill this year for the annual pancake breakfast in Jamestown, Colo.

We wanted to get an early start to beat the heat on the way back down the hill, so we were out the door at 7a.m. I had a light breakfast; it’s no good to ride on a full stomach, and besides, I wanted to save room for pancakes.

No one was out at first, but when we hit the start of the climb we knew it would be crowded. Cars with bike racks lined the entrance to Left Hand Canyon, and we dodged fellow cyclists spilling onto the road as they unloaded their bikes and donned their helmets.

Even though I’d drafted off of Jeremy up to that point to conserve energy, my knee was aching from the repeated pedal strokes, and I had to slow up to do my awkward-looking, contorted on-bike AT-band stretch. But I could practically smell the pancakes, so I ignored the pain, rode through it, sacrificed my knee for the promise of indulging in fluffy mapley goodness ahead.

People passed me — fit people on sleek road bikes, like mine. I passed others: a couple on a tandem pedaling furiously around a steep corner, two thin girls on carbon copies of my Specialized Ruby (“Nice bikes, ladies!”), people on mountain bikes, people on squeakers, creakers, people who perhaps only ride to Jamestown once a year and only for this occasion.

Now I was hungry. Need drove me, sped my cadence. I sat on Jeremy’s wheel and chased up the hill until we saw the line of hungry cyclists and heard the live bluegrass music pouring over huge griddles and crowded tables in Jamestown’s tiny park.

We had arrived.

Never in my wildest dreams of the Jamestown Pancake Breakfast did I imagine blueberry cakes. It was too hopeful, too outrageous. But there stood a woman with a spatula asking:

“Blueberry or buttermilk?”

And

“How many?”

I had done it. I had met my goal, my training hadn’t been in vain. I gleefully tore off my cycling gloves and gave my blueberry pancakes an even but light dousing of maple syrup. After all, my next goal is to haul my cookies up to Ward on two wheels by the end of the summer. But Ward’s myriad eccentricities make it another story for another day.

The parking lot of the Whole Foods Market in Boulder is a crowded, cart-swerving, bumper-crunching paved path to insanity. But somehow, a spirit of congeniality prevails, or at least it does when I’m there during off-peak hours. I never go there during the post-work rush hour or weekends, so I can’t vouch for a lack of road rage within this parking lot’s tiny borders when it’s truly busting at the seams with organics-seeking Boulderites.

I like to park in a garage off to the side of the building. It’s nice to park in the shade, and I can always find a spot there. That’s where I parked today, later in the afternoon than usual, but still within a reasonable hour to avoid the insanity. I came out of the store, wove my way through people and cars and jogged after my cart down the little hill into the parking garage, nearly home free, when a car zoomed around the corner in front of me, into the garage. The driver yelled out his open windows:

“Get out of my fucking way!”

I was stunned. First, I hadn’t been in anyone’s fucking way. I was definitely out of the fucking way. Second, this violated the unspoken rule of having good manners in Boulder’s most crowded grocery store, the pact of civility shared by every denizen of Whole Foods. Whether we wait inside at the seafood counter for our non-dyed salmon or wait outside for a Subaru to pull out of a spot so we can pull our own Subarus in, the patrons of Boulder’s Whole Foods Market maintain an outward semblance of Boulder mindfulness. Any frustration we might feel, we keep to ourselves.

Angry Guy tore around to the far corner of the garage where I couldn’t see him, but I knew he would have to walk past my car to get back out. I loaded my groceries into our Subaru (yes, we have one, too), and just as I turned around to return my cart, Angry Guy rounded the corner on foot. Jeremy wasn’t with me — he doesn’t like it when I create a situation — so I felt free to express myself without causing my significant other any embarrassment or distress.

Watching him, I started pushing my cart to the return, right behind him.

“Hey, are you the one who told me to get out of your fucking way?” I said, even though I knew he was.

I’m sure other people in the garage heard this and wondered what sort of a road rage incident they had missed. Angry Guy, though, gave me a furtive sideways glance — I knew he heard me — and then darted his eyes back to his cell phone to send either pretend or real text messages.

“That’s what I thought,” I said as I reached the cart return. He continued up the ramp, and I put my cart away and walked back to my car. I was proud that I’d publicly humiliated him. He deserved it; his words were uncalled for and incredibly rude, especially considering the pact and all. He should be embarrassed for his bad behavior.

As I drove home, I remembered something Anyen Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist lama I met over the spring, had said during teachings I attended. This is the condensed version, but it’s all about me. Everywhere you go, everything you do, it’s always all about me me me. I’m stuck in traffic but I’m in a hurry. I’m waiting way too long for the waitress to bring my water. I want to be in the shortest line at the grocery store. We only think about ourselves in these situations, he said. Me me me.

Angry Guy was all about him, I decided, but I knew immediately that I was wrong. It wasn’t just Angry Guy who was thinking only of himself; so was I. I took that one little sentence we exchanged personally, so I decided he should pay for his transgression on me. I made his moment about him all about me when I confronted him. I could have easily let it go, but I made a choice to make it all about me instead and even congratulated myself for it.

I don’t want to get all after-school-special on you here, so I’ll conclude with more of a Zen koan instead: if it’s not all about me, and it’s not all about you, then whom or what is it all about?

Jeremy and I stayed in one of the interior rooms of Hotel Fron. Mom and my brothers had large, apartment-style space with windows looking onto an alley just off Laugavegur, the main street through the city center.

Apparently their room was also right above a night club. All Mom heard all night was the BOOM BOOM BOOM of the bass.

We went downstairs for breakfast — Mom needed coffee just to drown out the leftover BOOM — and to wait for Dad. If he made it.

Mom was finishing her first cup when she thought she spotted him on the street. We ran around to the front of the hotel and there he was, luggage trailing, looking desperate for sleep and a light for his cigarette. Mom and I threw our arms around him, and he smiled and asked where he could get coffee.

We’d been extra worried that Dad wouldn’t make it to Reykjavik because Dad isn’t the jet-setting type. He’s a nervous flyer. He doesn’t plan the trips. He doesn’t travel a lot. Mom, however, travels nearly every week for business. She’s been to all 50 states, she knows every airport, has status with every airline. Okay, so maybe not every airline, but the woman knows how to get around, and if the passport debacle had happened to her, none of us had any doubts that the dragon lady would have gotten a passport and gotten herself to Iceland. But with Dad, we weren’t convinced until we saw the whites of his eyes on the street in Reykjavik.

Turns out we needn’t have worried. Remember chipper blonde behind the Iceland Air desk? She didn’t just get him a seat. Dad flew first class. He sat next to a Norwegian woman who explained the difference between the lox they enjoyed on the plane and the lox she’d eaten in Alaska. He had a glass of Jack Daniels and ate caviar and stretched out and relaxed.

We crowded into coach quickly during boarding because the air conditioning on the plane was out, and then ate meatballs of uncertain origin.

Nevertheless, he had arrived, and we were all happy about that.

Matt came down for breakfast and found himself in another food nightmare. Breakfast was the same as yesterday. The had what we’d call lunch meat; that was out. They had tomatoes and cucumbers; out. They had cereal, but only plain corn flakes and Cheerios, not his usual sugary fare. Dejected, he settled into orange juice and toast with jam. There was sugar out for coffee, so I told him to pour sugar over some Cheerios, but my suggestion was filtered through teen angst and Mom already making his toast and jam as he complained about the cereal. Now that we’re back, I’m planning a book: “The Picky Traveler: How to Eat Chicken, Pasta and Sugary Cereal Anywhere in the World.” The book will include a forward by my brother, of course, and a chapter by my mom on tormenting international waiters and waitresses with special requests for plain chicken and pasta with white sauce, regardless of the menu choices.

After much toast and coffee, we moved on to whale watching that afternoon, which was cold yet invigorating. We only saw one far-off Humpback whale, but we saw plenty of puffins, and Atlantic dolphins played in our boat’s surf for a long time. After shooting at least 50 frames of dolphins, my mom came over and asked whether I’d gotten any dolphin pictures. She’s always eager to document every moment with the camera and isn’t afraid to try to recreate moments she misses, tell everyone where to stand, how to pose, or tell me what to shoot to ensure complete coverage. So I usually shoot these from the hip while looking at her and remind her in a snotty fashion that I took a few photo classes at a rather famous journalism school.

She doesn’t care, she just wants pictures of the dolphins.

We went on a super-jeep tour of the Golden Circle the next day. Jeremy got up early that morning to walk around the city. It was Saturday, and evidence of Reykjavik’s night life was everywhere. The drunks were still heading home, and broken bottles littered the streets. Jeremy even spotted blood spilled on the street. I slept in, so the street cleaners were out by the time I made it down to the street level for breakfast; I missed the carnage.

Next: the Golden Circle, including how to float on a glacier in a super jeep. Hint: three p.s.i.