Jökulsárlón, Iceland

Is it weird that a bathtub of icebergs halfway around the world is my happy place?

Jökulsárlón is a glacier lagoon at the edge of Vatnajökull National Park. ("Jökull" is the Icelandic word for glacier, by the way.) Within this park, Breiðamerkurjökull is melting and sending massive chunks of ice into the lagoon, which then calmly float around and around until they are washed out to the Atlantic. Some of the ice winds up back on the black sand shores, where they look like glittering diamonds in the sun.

It is one of the most spectacular places I've ever seen, like a giant punch bowl of melting ice cubes. Only the cubes are enormous and the bowl is a huge glacial lake.

The first time that my husband and I visited this place on our honeymoon in 2014, it was a rainy, windy, beast of a day in southern Iceland — not exactly perfect conditions for sailing across a glacial lagoon. Luckily the second trip (in October 2016) we were able to see so much more.

frozen.