The brotherhood went big for the summer of 2018 with a trip to Iceland to hike the famous Laugavegur Trail. The trek itself was everything as promised – a primordial land with stunningly unique scenery unlike any other in the world. We had some unprecedented minor misfortunes on this trip, but not on the actual trek itself. On the way there, Icelandair lost all of our checked bags*. Fortunately, they did arrive 24 hrs later, but we had to adapt our plans. Also several of us flew back home sick as hell with a bad version of the flu (this was pre-COVID19 pandemic times)
In summary the landscape was absolutely spectacular. The physicality of the trek itself was a little tough for us old guys. Honestly, we wish we would have done this years earlier. No regrets, though. It was truly an epic adventure and we earned our bragging rights for conquering a world-class trek. Please watch our photo slide show video below that tells the whole story. Enjoy
*[truth be told, it wasn’t all Icelandair’s fault (although they didn’t help either). We had major weather delays taking off from Orlando and in turn, Boston Logan International Airport didn’t transfer the bags in time. However, we are not letting Icelandair off the hook simply because their customer service was abysmal, which made a bad situation even more stressful.]
EPILOGUE: Coming back a couple of years later, I have re-watched the Iceland Trip Video, and I am now boldly declaring this world-famous, epic trek as our best A-B Video of all time. So how did this crazy declaration come about & why did it take me two days to draft this? Ok, I will tell you.
it all started on the evening of January 20, 2021, while I was watching the Presidential Inauguration Concert. Bruce Springsteen kicked it off with a solo acoustical version of “Land of Hopes and Dreams” which was featured in our Wind River Range Trip video. I was humming it for three days. Then I remembered that we had another Springsteen song in one of our videos. It was a very different song also with the word “hopes” in it called “High Hopes,” but I couldn’t remember which of our videos it was in (with 20 Trip shows with well over 100 songs they are hard to keep straight). I woke up early as usual on Saturday morning and now began humming “High Hopes” and was determined to find it. I went to the A-B website to the Past Adventures page and starting looking over our past trips. I had a hunch it was the Iceland trip so I went there first and I was right. I ended up watching all 34 minutes of of the Iceland show including the movie clip of Elvis at the end. After seeing it again but with some distance and a fresh perspective, I say this was the most incredible, bad-ass, stunningly-beautiful trip we have ever taken. And the video slide show proves it.
It’s impossible to judge my own work objectively, but I believe this is our best Trip Slideshow out of the twenty (you can watch them all yourself. All 20 are posted on our website). Why? First of all, everyone did such a great job taking photos (and especially Donny). Every third photo in the show is worthy of framing. And not just the scenery. The people pics are awesome too. It’s worth noting that brother Bill Martini skipped this trip, so we did not have any of his usual great photos……nor were any of our photos “juiced” for color as Bill is prone to do. The quality of the photos of the unique landscape made the entire video pure eye candy. When civilians watch the show they usually say, “is that real?” For me, the soundtrack matched the imagery perfectly. “High Hopes” starts out (3:02) with this exotic tribal beat intro and then Bruce sings first verse just by himself with the percussion. Then at 4:02, all hell breaks loose at the chorus when the full E-Street Band comes in with the horn section playing that “hook” that’s drives the entire song. This is the moment when you say to yourself, “oh yeah, I’m totally on board with this song!”
Early on, our trip was on shaky ground. With delayed flights due to weather, our luggage didn’t arrive with us. We had to quickly improvise after our $40 breakfast. Thanks to a great suggestion from our breakfast waiter, we made lemonade out of our situation by renting a minivan and driving north 2 hours to a National Park. The next morning, our bags finally arrived, albeit 24 hours late. We then hopped aboard the bus and started our trek with a 1-day shift. The song “End of the Line” by The Traveling Wilburys fit nicely for how it felt as we were staging for the trek at Landmannalaugar (which was an odd circus of humanity, relatively speaking, for the backcountry) and for the pace of our memorable warm-up hike. At 9:42, there is a photo of a hand-drawn elevation map of the route that is worth pausing on. I regret not holding and zooming on this photo for 3 or 4 seconds longer.
Trail day 1 was such an incredible day of both intense scenery and brutal effort to make it to the high elevation camp of Hranftinnussker which included lots of hard trekking on snow & ice. The next song was a lucky find and didn’t happened until the show was almost finished. I don’t remember what song I had use as a place holder but it wasn’t working. I needed something to match the pace and our evolving levels of joy vs exhaustion. I kept searching my collection and happened upon a song I didn’t know I even had, which was Michael McDonald‘s cover of the Stevie Wonder hit song, “Higher Ground.” It starts at 11:59. You can just feel the vibe difference in this song vs the previous ones. The thing that I really love about McDonald’s arrangement of this song (in addition to his famously unique vocals) is the 3-note horn tag at the end of each chorus where it rides up…”dant, dant, dant!” The Hranftinnussker campsite was stark, barren & rocky and a beautiful sight for us exhausted trekkers. The photos validate the beauty of the surroundings and the joy on our faces after finally reaching it.
Trail day 2 was straight back down with more of same incredible scenery & tough peddling. We arrived at the lakeside campsite of Alftavatn but things were not what we expected. It was the windiest place we’ve ever encountered and it took a team effort to erect the tents. Although it was in the middle of nowhere, this campsite had facilities including bathrooms and a backcountry “restaurant” with beer. How could we resist checking it out (most of us did)? The place as cramped but warm and gave us a brief respite from the brutal winds at the time. All they served was lamb stew ($20) and beers ($12). Thanks to Armando for buying a round of beers for 4 of us after dinner. For reasons not completely understood, the Davis brothers refused to join (Donny was having his reoccurring heartburn issues and barely got anything down at dinner and was totally not up for a beer. B.D. was feeling fine but stood his ground on the principle that there should never be a restaurant/bar of any kind on the trail). The song “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere” was a big hit for Dwight Yoakam in 1993 and seemed like a great fit for the show both lyrically and tempo-wise.
Trail day 3 from Alftavatn to Emstrur-Botnar was a long day with more incredible views that included 3 water crossings, and a lunch break where we ironically conducted both an A-B pin ceremony and a Captain’s Mast, back-to-back. We had a great time hiking with our new young friend Sam Lanza who surprisingly joined us for the whole day. The actual camping area was very small and our tents almost touched each other. One thing about this trek that was so unusual is that groups of hikers are brought in by a guiding company in off-road buses and are fed and sleep overnight indoors. In camp we also made fast friends with Oleh Mudra from Cleveland, OH. Our friendship with young Sam (who was our kids’ age) was almost a Jedi Knight/Padawan relationship. With Oleh, however, he was like an clone of us. We had a great afternoon/evening in camp with both of them.
Our final trail day was a long trek to Porsmork. We were fogged in initially but it quickly lifted. In honor of our host country, I wanted to include a song written and performed by an Icelandic band in their language language. Through a lot of hard searching on YouTube, I found the perfect song that matched our mood and expressed the indiscernible beauty of the land. That song picks up at 22:00. You can see a good view of a rock feature they call “The Dragon’s Tail” at 24:52, which was visible to us on and off for much us the day. After a final big water crossing we arrived at our trail terminus. Although both Sam & Oleh left before us that morning, we caught up with Sam at Porsmork (this was not as easy as it sounds. Unlike the others places, this campsite is a huge, city-like complex that is spread out and separated into different areas). We knew that Sam was continuing on another day or two to Skogar and that he was short on food. All six of us unloaded all of our extra meals and snacks (we always carry too much) with him and he was very grateful.
For the final song of our shows I always try to pick something fun & upbeat to reflect our good mood (because the hard part is over). This time I picked a song that sounded simultaneously familiar yet also unfamiliar. I chose Rod Stewart’s cover of the hit classic song by Credence Clearwater Revival, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain.” Unfortunately the very end of our adventure was dampened slightly by three of us coming down with a bug (Don had it first and worse, with Dave & B.D. getting it somewhat later & less). For the outro song, I used Sammy Davis, Jr. singing the Broadway standard, “What a Wonderful Day Like Today” (1965), which lyrically summed up everything we felt about this trip of a lifetime. All and all, I would say this was the finest adventure 6 middle-age guys could have possibly had. As Mr. Tee might say, I pity the fools that missed out on this trip
Mecca Lecka
Don