Visit Iceland To Escape The Trappings Of Modern Working Life

In the midst of the post-pandemic travel boom, Iceland has emerged as the place to go in order to escape the trappings of modern working life. This country is so much more than the northern lights...

- Jennifer George

If you'd have said a few years ago that I would be voluntarily packing thermal leggings, gloves and binoculars for my summer (yes, mid-July) holiday, I would have told you to sod off and pass me the tanning oil. Holidays were about basking in the sunshine, saturating myself in rosé and hunting down the wankiest Michelin-starred tasting menu a location had to offer. A rooftop pool was basically an essential.

Call it middle age or a post-Covid affliction, but that's not what I was craving this year. After being mostly basement-flat bound for two years, what I wanted was air. And calm, and adventures, and a place that would make me feel like I'm a million miles from the stressful memories from the last few years that my beloved London has unwittingly left me with: redundancies at work, three house moves falling through, a fairly constant feeling the world was imploding. My husband's business - only a year old when the pandemic started - had survived, but the financial worries and 18-hour working days he endured meant he was equally, if not more, frazzled. Despite coming out of the other end relatively unscathed compared to so many, we were like a pair of slowly sinking swans: looking OK, if maybe a little tired, on the surface, but with legs under the water that had whirred so hard they'd all but given up.

And that's how we ended up in Iceland.