Fresh off our 2018 wedding, my wife and I dove headfirst into a long-overdue bucket list trip through Southeast Asia. Raised on Bourdain and a reverence for travel rooted in food and culture, Vietnam anchored our journey — over a week moving through the country, soaking in everything it had to offer. Bookending it all were two cities I'd spent decades dreaming about: Singapore and Hong Kong, their skylines burned into my brain long before I ever had a passport stamp to match.

After a few days in Reykjavík, we grabbed a rental car and set off counterclockwise around the island. The Golden Circle draws crowds, but cross east of Vík — the gateway to Iceland's wilder half — and the traffic thins to almost nothing, replaced by empty, rugged terrain and roads that feel like they belong to you alone. Push further northeast and the landscape turns arid and almost lunar. Heading west along the north coast takes you through Akureyri, the country's second city, before the road begins to narrow again. We skipped the remote Westfjords and instead spent time on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula — nicknamed "Iceland in a Nutshell" for good reason, packing an almost absurd concentration of dramatic scenery into a compact stretch of coastline.