I thought sex on vacation was supposed to be easy.  And constant.  I’ve always had a lot more sex on vacation than I do during my regular life. Okay, I totally admit that I’m a horny little fucker on average, but after a long day at work, half the time I don’t really care if we don’t have sex that night.

But on vacation, it’s on.  I’m horny every morning, and most nights.  And I want to make the time for sex that I don’t have during a work week. Plus, before I met Angel in Reykjavik, we had been apart for almost three weeks.  I had gone to New York, and he had gone to visit his family and our schedules didn’t line up for a few weeks.

So, when he picked me up at the airport, I was about ready to rip his clothes off in the parking lot.  But this being an Angel vacation, he had already gone on one hike, and had another planned on a long wilderness drive around Reykjanes.  We got back late to the guesthouse, and after a quick shower and eating, he said he was tired, “Can we wait til tomorrow and have amazing passionate sex then?”

On an irritation scale, I was zero to 60 in 5 seconds.  I knew that we were just as likely to be out all day tomorrow and return exhausted, and I’d get the same question then.

And it wasn’t just horniness.  Angel is not good on the phone.  So, while I was in NY and then later when he was in Spain, he just didn’t have much time to talk.  And when we did connect after a couple days, I could hear in his voice that he didn’t really want to talk.

So, I wanted connection, too.  I wanted to feel close to my boyfriend, who I had missed. Affection keeps me going.  Yes, sex is a part of that, but also cuddling and kissing and taking a moment to only be with each other, spooning or dozing.

So, I semi-stormed to the bathroom to brush my teeth and popped an Ambien to go to sleep.  The fact that when we cuddled for a minute, he got horny and we had a quickie didn’t really resolve my frustration.  I wanted connected sex, and sex when I wasn’t on a sleeping pill because he already told me he was too tired.

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The floor of the canyon was bisected by a meandering stream that went back and forth from canyon wall to canyon wall, so we weren’t sure we could actually trek along the floor.

Angel asked a ranger along the top of the canyon, and she said that we could, though we’d have to cross the river many times.  We grabbed our Tevas, and unzipped our hiking pants into hiking shorts, and set off.  The water was freezing, but not only about halfway up to our knees in most places. After each crossing, there were slivers of canyon floor to allow our feet to recover, with a weirdly pleasurable throbbing as feeling returned to our toes.

In a couple of spots, we clambered over steep rocks or a bit of the cliff side to get around an unclimbable boulder or deep pool.  At two points in the river, the current was strong enough to make us walk nervously, bracing ourselves with our thighs wide apart.

Finally, at a waterfall a few kilometers in, we weren’t able to go any further.  From a viewing platform high on top of the canyon, I’m sure that the walking tourists were jealous of our solitary adventure through the river.

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A US Navy DC-3 went down in the seventies on the wide black beach west of Vik.  The fuselage was left on the beach, and it remains tattered but intact, a surreal wreck alone on a desolate black expanse.  The wreckage has become an Instagram tourist destination.  It wasn’t in either of our guidebooks, but there were at least 40 cars in a lot off the Ring Road, with phone toting young tourists trekking the 45 minutes to the plane.

Though the trek is barren and long, the wreckage is an oddly interesting artifact, with some equipment still intact and wiring hanging from the ceiling.  Most of a toilet sits tilted on the side in a cubbyhole.  The cockpit instrumentation is only three quarters gone.  And the wreckage does make for an amazing picture, if you’re patient enough to wait to frame the right angle without anyone else in the image.

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Though Iceland was intimidatingly expensive for what you got, we did book a few activities.  The most expensive was a snowmobile tour on Vatnojokull Ice Cap.  We drove to the edge of the glacier, where a line of snowmobiles waited in a line.  It’s hard not to love speeding across a blindingly white expanse of glacier, up sloping hills and down, the snowmobile slipping and sliding underneath you.  We rode together, taking turns driving. Though driving was fun, when it was my turn to ride on the back of the snowmobile, it gave me time to look around and focus on the amazing landscape spread horizon to horizon.  We bumped along at 20-30km per hour until everyone got used to the vehicles and then sped up a bit.  I hit 58 kph at one point, fishtailing with glee across the snow field.

On the way home from a 3 hour hike into a rugged valley in Southern Iceland, we passed by Jokusarlon at about 10:15 pm.  The light was going down, and the lake was turning indigo and fluorescent white in the twilight.  We stopped to walk around the lake that we enjoyed so much in the daylight. With only a few people around the miles of lakeside, the experience of the lake and the floating icebergs was meditative, and mesmerizing.  Tiny waves lapped the hollows and undersides of the glacier, creating a melodic murmur like rain, a beautiful dripping music as if from a thousand icicles into a bucket of water.  The ping ping of droplets, but from all around you, from a thousand directions.

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To me, traveling isn’t supposed to be easy.  Vacationing is easy.  But on a vacation, you generally get a little bit of the destination, and a lot of the resort.

Angel and I definitely traveled in Iceland.  We struggled with creature comforts, and we struggled even more with each other.  But the wild landscapes that we hiked, and the discovery of difficult parts of each other, were both integral parts of the trip.  We searched and explored, and in the end, found a little bit more of each other.