If you’d like to fly to the moon but don’t want to spend your valuable time with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, may I suggest a trip to the Blue Lagoon in Iceland? The landscape is almost as strange and unearthly, with fields of lava rocks—some deep-black, some covered in moss—curvy pools of pale-blue water, and not a tree in sight. The flight from New York City is only five and a half hours. (It’s about three from London.) And your skin will be so much happier.
I landed in Reykjavík after a few days in the lushness of Ischia. Could anything be more different? I had to blink over and over to adjust my eyes to the terrain. My driver told me cheerfully that the road we traveled from the airport to the lagoon had been covered in lava from an eruption a few months earlier. “How long did it take to build a new road?,” I asked him. “Oh, about a day.” The lava rocks were piled up like a medieval wall, in part to protect the lagoon and its hotels.
