Despite them being a kind of universal symbol of man‘s destruction, cutting through natural terrain and permanently altering landscapes, roads have a warped, undeniable charm to me.

One day the world will be covered in roads and we‘ll have nowhere left to go.

The roads in Iceland are pretty, though. The biggest road - the 1 road which circles the whole country - is single lane and largely unobtrusive. It cuts around mountains and hugs the coast like the landscape was carefully curated around it one photo at a time. It‘s also largely empty in winter, and maybe for good reason.

After a particularly vicious snow storm we zig zagged into oncoming traffic in the ice and snow on more than one occasion. You need to drive slow, and even then.

And then there was the blizzard.

At one stage, driving near Vik, our back-passenger window smashed, opening the car to the storm. I held onto the windscreen in fear it’d come flying open too. I could not see where I was driving, but we had to keep driving for some 30 minutes just to escape. This would result in the day’s plans being cancelled so we could get the window fixed in the city some 3 hours away - not the funnest of detours. But still, the story provides the most colourful anecdote from our trip, and in a way it’ll be one of my fondest memories, because it felt like we got close to the devil of Iceland and survived.

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