Why do so many of us Jellies have an interest in Iceland?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but there are three reasons I would like to go to Iceland:

1) the homogeneous population and culture

2) the lay of the land: rocky, rough, almost visceral, with the backdrop of the North Atlantic.

3) a country with in active volcano – how cool is that….

I didn’t list it because I’ve been there. I think the reasons you gave are good ones; also, certain areas just become “hot” destinations at times.

It’s a total hype amongst hikers and photographers/videographers.
If I ever have the funds to go (it is not on my top 5 list), I’ll first wait a year or five to ten.

I can’t speak for other people, but I think a lot of jellies are older and have already seen many other places. Iceland, being remote, is one place a lot of people haven’t been to yet. It has some cool things to see as mentioned above. It also has a very inexpensive airline, WOW, so it’s an easy, relatively cheap stopover if you’re going from Europe to the east coast of America or vice versa, so people are hearing friends talk about it. Plus, travel articles are talking about it, so it’s a country that is trending.

I don’t just want to visit, I want to live there. Granted, that’ll probably never happen, but a boy can dream.

I’ve been fascinated by the natural beauty of that country since watching some thing about it on TV like 20 years ago. And I’ve been fascinated with it’s culture for ages as well (which ties in with my broader interest in Norse culture in general, and my family’s own Hiberno-Norse roots).

Plus there’s this.

(The divers in that photograph literally have one hand on the North American Plate and the other on the Eurasian Plate. How goddamn cool is that?)

It has become popular lately because of cheap air fares. Some guys in the New York office figured out it was cheaper to have a long weekend bachelor party in Iceland than it would have been to go to Miami. For people on the East coast, it’s closer than California.

And, the geography is exotic, given it is at the tectonic juncture of North America and Europe.

@zenvelo I was at the valley there where the tectonic plates meet.

I was there recently, even though it wasn’t especially my top interest (as @JLeslie suggested, I’ve been many other places multiple times before getting to Iceland), and I have to report that the landscape was spectacular and visiting there was very nice, interesting and enjoyable, and I don’t think I could really imagine what it would be like from pictures, videos or texts. However it is almost always quite cold. :-)

A couple of friends of mine have been as has my son and they all had a great time. The rocky primeval landscape appeals to me with its waterfalls, glaciers and hot springs. I can fly there from my local airport in two and half hours so it’s not hard to get to but probably not this year.

I had a high school friend that went with his family (after he graduated from HS) to visit his dad’s older sister, she still lived outside London. They traveled on IcelandicAir and stayed for a day in Iceland. I think the airfare was cheaper than flying BOAC including hotels while in Iceland.
That was in he middle 1960’s.

@Zaku

Eh, around Reykjavik it’s warmer during the winter than it is here around Chicago.

It is an inhospitable wasteland. It reminds them of home.

Because of all the dirty women over there, beware chaps, they’ll wreck ya dick…a capital offence

@Darth_Algar Perhaps (and I agree Reykjavik appeals to me while I hated living in Chicago, and not mostly due to the weather), but in Iceland there’s nothing someone from the non-Arctic 49 United States would recognize as summer weather, or even spring, at least not for long – one Icelander said Summer consisted of one afternoon sometime in June or July.

Yes, the Icelandic summers are mild to relatively cool (I’ve been monitoring them, and many other places, on my phone)—but Iceland, Shetland, Orkney, and the Faeroe Islands are almost always above freezing in winter. This December through February (I’m writing this on the 12th of February), temperatures in Reykjavik have been considerably warmer than Memphis. Or maybe that’s just the irregular weather and climate change we’ve been having.

Eastern Canada, New England and the upper Midwest U.S. are much colder than Scandinavia, especially along the Scandinavian coast, Even Narvik (Norway) is usually above freezing, whereas New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, Canada are below twenty Fahrenheit.

Well I’m not sure what Memphis is typically like, but the Scandinavian countries tend to be warmed by air and ocean currents coming up from further south in the Atlantic.

The country or the discount frozen food stores?