Guiding Lights

Reflections on an Icelandic road trip and a surprise aurora sighting

Mellisa Pascale's work has appeared in Elsewhere Journal, City Creatures Blog, Matador Network, and other publications. She holds an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and is studying for her M.Phil. in Medieval Language and Literature at Trinity College Dublin. She is from southeastern Pennsylvania.

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“They’re here!” I said, shaking my friend Colleen’s shoulder. I declared this as if “they” were physical beings whose hands we could shake in greeting. 

Colleen sat up in bed and glanced out the window to confirm what I’d seen. Our heads racing faster than our hands, we struggled to zip up coats and shove fingers into gloves before bolting into the hallway. Pushing open the doors of our guesthouse, we stumbled out into Grundarfjördur, Iceland. Frosty October air poured over us as we made for the edge of the bay, and hardly any lights illuminated this slice of the town, save for little green streaks spreading their fingers across the sky.

When we first set out on our journey to drive Iceland’s Ring Road, seeing the Aurora Borealis, amazingly, wasn’t on our to-do list. Or more precisely, we just didn’t want an exhaustive to-do list. A year and a half prior, Colleen and I had studied in London for a semester and then taken what Colleen appropriately dubbed a “sampler” trip in Europe. I had started in Iceland and Denmark, met up with Colleen a week later in Berlin, and for the next two weeks, we’d trained, bussed, and flew through Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Innsbruck, Rome, Athens, and Santorini. Every day had been meticulously planned in advance, every ticket and tour reserved in our relentless pursuit of art, castles, history, cathedrals, and gelato. Traveling, I felt as though a portal had opened, one that led not to a fantasy world but to the magic of ours. And I wanted to see it all. 

Yet as thrilled as I’d been by the sampler tour, I was also worn down from chasing Europe and checking off activities. That’s not to say it’d been the wrong way to go about experiencing new places — it’d been the perfect initiation for a novice adventurer — just that the next trip would be different. A few months after graduation, each of us feeling antsy in our office jobs, Colleen and I broke out our Hostelworld and Airbnb logins and slipped into the familiar rhythm of plotting a great escape. Our first trip had been about gathering stamps and seeing everything we could. This one would be a return, and the only thing we intended to log was kilometers. 

The Ring Road, whose real name is Route 1, drifts along Iceland’s edges, the vehicles on its tarmac orbiting the island’s remote core like planets circling the sun. Colleen and I rented a beige Suzuki Vitara that we christened Gaudí, for the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, whose work had captivated us in Barcelona. Setting out from Reykjavík, we headed southeast on the Ring Road, making for Vík, a small town perched on the edge of a black sand beach. 

I’d visited Vík on my prior trip. Colleen had also been to Iceland once before, going north to Grundarfjördur on the Snæfellsnes peninsula. Our shared journey would be bookended by these towns — Vík and Grundarfjördur — places new or old to us, everything in between a world of unknowns. After a night in Vík at an Airbnb with a host named Máni and a dog named Máni, the road took us east, through the eerie lava ridge Laufskálavarða, past two waterfalls that tumbled down a mountain like parallel roads, and on toward the vast Vatnajökull ice cap. Near the town of Höfn, we stopped at Diamond Beach. At the mouth of a glacial lagoon, icy fragments winked like stars in the inky sand. 

For two weeks, we drove counterclockwise around the island. I remember fog, cloaking the mountaintops. I remember the wind, smacking us with drops of rain, waterfall, or ocean. I remember the silver waters of Lake Myvatn and stopping for lunch at a nearby restaurant called Daddy’s Pizza. I remember turning up the volume in the car for “Fröken Reykjavík,” a song that Iceland’s radio stations favored. I don’t remember ever fighting with Colleen, though surely we must have disagreed over something. Two weeks in a car molding a journey out of vague ideas? There was so much room for error. But we found a way.  

On the road, we treated the Northern Lights like a snippet of gossip we were hesitant to dissect. On her previous visit, Colleen had caught a green smudge in the night sky. “They weren’t how you see them in photos,” she’d said. I pictured green blemishes instead of ribbons and didn’t feel particularly inspired. Besides, neither of us was up for a night-long chase, especially when simply seeing what showed up in our path each day was exciting enough. Through Gaudí’s windows, in place of castles and museums, mountains rose like palaces on the horizon, and glaciers carved a chronicle of rock and ice. 

On the way to Grundarfjördur, our last stop before returning to Reykjavík, Colleen steered Gaudí into Stykkishólmur, a small fishing village. Scenes from Walter Mitty had been filmed here, a movie that we both regarded as a source of inspiration for our voyages to Iceland and beyond. There was something about Mitty draining his bank account to travel that resonated with us. Or maybe it was something else, like the way Mitty both took charge and surrendered control, chasing a dream even though it would inevitably turn out to be different than he’d imagined. 

As the road trip wound around to the finish line, our nonchalance toward the Aurora Borealis finally yielded. Colleen checked a Northern Lights tracker and reported that solar winds were expected to be fierce, the skies clear. In short, ideal conditions. While Colleen rested, I took the first watch, imagining but not getting my hopes up, not for dumb luck in a last-minute stakeout. 

Then we found ourselves outside, gazing across dark waters while an emerald glow illuminated the silhouette of Kirkjufell Mountain. They weren’t what you see in photos. They were more, unfrozen by the lens and breathing in deep gulps of atmosphere. Gossamer fabric veiled the stars, wrinkling and unbending and sprawling. After the initial flurry of people and camera shutters, the excitement gave way to communal silence. The freezing air, typically unkind as autumn inched toward winter, felt refreshing beneath a morphing sky. I felt a surge of something caught between new and old, the thrill of chasing down the unfamiliar in the familiar. I’d never seen stars in the sand or waves in the sky until I went back to Iceland.

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