It’s the final evening of our stay in Iceland. I wanted to write this before we left this country for good because it seems more meaningful to compose it here than to wait time far away and distracted by other things.

I want to describe our thoughts and emotions about Iceland before they evaporate, much like the snow is currently doing. I read the lonely planet guidebook to the country. The opening two pages are very evocative – as someone who writes I could even predict that it probably took them three days, five rewrites and three editors to bring that together. And in that way, we also want to capture our memories for posterity and for our family to reflect back on in years to come.

Nothing could have prepared us for the aircraft approach over Iceland. Snow fell in the UK in the days preceding our departure. I saw the amount of chaos it created. They even seemed to pause the debate on Brexit to deal with news about the snow.

Over here, I suppose that snow is an expected regular event. The have snowploughs doing their jobs and cars driving around seemingly unhindered. Everyone appears to have studied winter tyres on as well which must help. I haven’t seen any sort spreading trucks anywhere and despite that things just seem to run.

I wonder if this country will be the same in 20 years? It’s becoming more popular, and although it deals with the tourists well, one can imagine that there is an upper limit to the number of people it can accommodate. For example, we are staying in a beautiful, architecturally designed habitat in the middle of nowhere. Last night some people arrived quite late. They waited for the night and were off early this morning. They didn’t stop to appreciate the countryside around here, breathtaking as it is. My understanding is that lots of people circumnavigate the island and find accommodation en route. It’s possible to make the journey in about two weeks if you just stay somewhere different every night. But it is that kind of transience which may create challenges later with people passing through but never becoming part of what they see or letting it bond with their soul.

My Iceland has been a thought-provoking and inspiring one. I marvel at the snow-covered passes, the deep ravines, the frozen waterfalls and the fact that you can go round the corner of a mountain and all the snow has disappeared due to what must be some kind of microclimate. I marvel at the fact that all the coffee I’ve drunk here has been beautiful, and that beauty has been apparent even to me, and I’m not a coffee lover and rarely drink coffee. I marvel at the fact that things run, even though the snow is thick and the days (and nights) are cold. I marvel at the fact that the air seemed so clean and the place seems so pure, and the water tastes so great.

I marvel at the fact that I can go to the supermarket and it feels like a supermarket in any other country. The shelves are full of stuff which could not possibly have grown here but still exists on that shelf for us to buy. And even though so many things must be air-freighted into the country, things are not as expensive as you expect. And of course, how could I forget the northern lights. Those beautiful, mysterious occurrences that people say they understand but somehow seem to defy understanding when you actually stand on the ground and watch them. We were lucky to witness two shows. The first one is probably what most people will remember as their experience, the tour guide saying that it was sporadic to see it like that. But it is the second show on Friday, 8 February 2019 that blew everyone’s minds. We saw multiple colours, shimmering and twists and turns in the light that I’m reasonably confident are extremely rare. The curious thing is that our guides on the first night said that the lights get stronger as the night goes on. They said you just stay there and watch and things will only get better. But on that second night’s display, that proved it all wrong the spectacular light show was only visible for a few minutes before it petered out into nonexistence. If you’d been inside for a little bit too long or held out for it to get better as the evening drew on, then you would have been sorely disappointed. In that, I find a model for all of us. We sometimes take the advice that things will be ready in their own good time and that the expert knows best. But when you are talking about ephemeral and mysterious things then perhaps there is no such thing as an expert, and you just have to seize the moment when it comes away because life and time don’t wait for anyone.

So our journey has involved a few days in Reykjavík staying in an apartment followed by a few days out near Selfoss in the south of the country. It has had its challenges. For example, when visiting Gesir yesterday, I fell over and injured my wrist quite badly. Don’t think it’s sprained but you never know. I can move my hand at least, albeit with pain, so at least no tendon snapped. But that was caused by slipping on the ice. I wasn’t being complacent, but accidents can happen. Glad it happened near the end of the trip.

Currently, I’m sitting in the architecturally designed home that I mentioned earlier. Let me describe in more detail. Two owners called Inga and Isac have created three beautifully designed houses on the mountain escape. They have underfloor heating and lots of wooden windows and glass walls. There clean and warm and the kind of place that I could imagine sitting in all day and just gazing out at the scenery. If you know me, you would also know that there are very few things that could captivate me for so long. But this place and the vista from it are to such things. I don’t think I could live here permanently, but I doubt it is designed as a permanent dwelling. It is, however, a beautiful holiday home. 12 of us have been able to co-mingle in comfort.

Being the last evening, we took some photographs of all of us, by making use of Eugene’s tripod. It’s a lovely photograph to remember our time here, but it was the family moments that followed afterwards, but I think I will remember the most. These unscripted and choreographed moments that change lives and form lifelong memories. While I cannot say that Iceland has changed me forever, what I will say is that every experience you encounter changes you in some form or other. I look around here and like said before I’m not confident that it will be this way in 20 years. There’s a certain intransigence and disrespect for the earth, personalised by some of the politicians who are in power at this moment. The land seems more fragile than ever, and while I’m not getting on my ecological high horse, I can see that there are certain things humans do that will be very difficult to reverse or recover from. And the blatant disregard for those behaviours by those in charge makes me a little sad.

So I am grateful to see Iceland now. And perhaps one day I will return with the family. I’ve watched the scene from Walter Mitty a few times, and although that is a very different Iceland from the one that I see here, not least because that was shot in summer, I think this is a beautiful place to reconnect with nature and appreciate its rugged terrestrial beauty.

As we fly home to prepare for the next stages of our big adventure, I do not know what is to come. It looks like we will leave the UK the day before Parliament makes its allegedly final Brexit vote. The timing is surreal. But for now, I will enjoy my last night in Iceland breathing this air and feeling direly uncomfortable with my arm wrapped in a towel and strapped to a book to prevent me from bending my wrist. Heady days indeed.