ICELAND

After finishing an intense project, I suggested to Maya—my girlfriend at the time—that for our next trip she choose between Amsterdam and Iceland. To my surprise, she picked Iceland.

We left at the beginning of May, just when the weather in Canada was finally becoming tolerable, climbing to a hopeful 16 degrees. Within hours of landing, we were thrown back into 5 or 6 degrees, misty rain, and a raw wind. After a long winter, that part was a little hard to accept.

But the landscapes quickly made us forget the cold.

Driving through Iceland felt like passing from one overwhelming mountain range to another, each more surreal than the last. It was a world unlike anything I had ever seen before—or since. Vast, elemental, almost prehistoric.

I also have a weakness for hot springs, something I had first experienced in the American Southwest, and Iceland offered plenty of them.

The food is expensive, but the real luxury there is the freedom of the road: driving alone on small winding routes, crossing volcanic territories that feel less like Earth and more like stepping onto another planet.