For Spring Break 2026 (March 20-28, 2026), the Dorl family headed to Iceland and went sightseeing in a camper van. Our family, from oldest to youngest, consisted of:
- Ray, age 50: working as a lawyer, interests at the time included lifting weights (a passion that he would inflict on his family during the trip) and learning guitar (ditto, wielding a travel guitar that was a persistent pain in the ass to stow away in the camper van).
- Kaye, age 46: working as an in-house lawyer for a medical technology company; interests at the time included yoga (which she really didn’t get to do during the trip) and learning bass guitar.
- Gwen, age 9: in fourth grade; outside activities included dance team and playing piano. The owner of a vast array of stuffed animals (or “stuffies,” as we term them), she traveled with a pretty light complement of stuffies by her standards: just her shiny blue and silver Narwhal named Bo-boo, her stuffed bunny named Jelly, and a stuffed polar bear named Peanut Butter. She also traveled with her beloved “monkey blanky,” a small blanket decorated with monkeys that she had owned since she was an infant.
- Billy, age 7: in first grade, outside activities included tae kwon do, basketball, and playing guitar. A precocious lad, he had a vast trove of knowledge concerning the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and had recently become an afficionado of caramel lattes (decaffeinated only, at his parents’ insistence) and clamored after his favorite beverage at every stop.
The origins of the trip are murky, even at the time of this writing, just a few weeks after we returned. Based on various comments Kaye made, I always assumed we headed to Iceland because of Instagram travel content. But after the trip, when Billy’s first grade teacher asked us what made us go to Iceland, Kaye told her that Gwen had wanted to go ever since she saw an episode of the cartoon “Bluey” in which the family travels around Iceland in a camper van. Gwen bashfully but firmly refuted this idea, though, deepening the mystery.
Regardless of how it came to be, we were all excited to be going. And of course, the trip necessitated some outfitting. We went to an outdoor shop in town to get Gwen fitted for some new hiking boots. We really should’ve done that for Billy as well, but decided he’d be OK with a pair of waterproof low-top Keens we got him for the previous year’s trip to Alaska. That wound up being a big mistake: the shoes were woefully overmatched by the snowy conditions in Iceland, which we would soon learn at Billy’s expense. As for myself, I picked up three sets of Merino wool base layer underwear, as well as a handsome brown-and-rust pair of overall-style snow pants, marked down by 33% but still costing the princely sum of $200. I balked a bit at the price, but by the time I was done with our trip I’d decided that they were worth every penny. Less worth it was the travel guitar, for which I paid an embarrassing amount of money and hardly touched during our trip.
We’d been warned before our trip about some of the hazards that tourists encountered in Iceland. Most concerning were the so-called “sneaker waves” that sweep people from the coast of Iceland to their icy deaths in the North Atlantic. Our friend Jessica had almost been a casualty of one of these waves; the prospect of losing one of our children was just too much to bear and we deliberately chose to stay away from beaches known for dangerous waves.
We also wanted to impart upon the children that Iceland, though beautiful, could be a dangerous place for them, and had them sit down and listen as Kaye read a page from the Rick Steve’s guidebook to Iceland entitled “All The Ways Iceland Can Kill You.” At one point while we were reading this to the kids, Gwen asked if she could jump into a geyser and be borne into the air by its water pressure and we knew we had some work to do to ensure the kids would be safe.
Of course, my attention gravitated to the more exotic things on Rick Steve’s list—things like “sneaker waves,” “volcanoes,” “scalding thermal water,” and “avalanches.” You know, all the cool stuff. I did not pay as close attention to the more prosaic hazards of Iceland: “winter driving,” “wind,” and “icy streets and sidewalks.” I internally scoffed at the idea that these things could be hazardous to tough, hardy Chicagoans like the four of us, who had survived many a brutal winter. Boy, was I proven wrong.
I also fretted that the kids, used to having their own rooms and perhaps spoiled by our previous Spring Break trips to places like Disney World, Universal Studios, and a beach resort in Mexico, would balk at the relative privations of the trip: sleeping in the back of a van, as well as long stretches of road that—while beautiful—wouldn’t have the same sensory overstimulus as the theme parks we’d been to.
Given the tight quarters and long drives, I told the kids that our trip would be a “test” of our family unity. The kids held onto this statement and referenced it more than once over the course of our trip.
Would we pass the test? I guess you’ll have to read and find out.
RayDorl.com 