Several years ago, a woman holding a clipboard knocked on my front door. People show up all the time wanting money for all kinds of causes and charities, but after hearing what this woman wanted, she definitely gets the award for Most Ballsy Request. She told me that she was one of my local neighbors (she wasn't) and that she was currently going door to door, accepting pledges for a study abroad program.

It took me much longer than you might expect to finally comprehend that she wasn't collecting the money for a son or daughter, or even some random and unspecified underprivileged child, but for herself. This was probably so difficult for me to wrap my head around, because the woman appeared to be in her mid to late 30s, just slightly younger than myself.

I told her, "Ma'am, at our age we don't call that 'study abroad,’ we call that a vacation. But sign me up!”

“For a pledge?”

“No, no, to go ’study’ abroad with you. What do you know?! As it turns out, I'm also accepting donations!”

Jeez. Now get off my porch.

The reason Iceland made me think of this story is because everything over there is stupidly expensive. Like, shockingly so.

Don’t be fooled by the cheap international flights the way I was, because that is the one and only thing about Iceland that is affordable. Once you get there, all bets are off, and everything from the lodging to the food to everything in between, all costs soooo much more than what you would normally expect to pay for a good or service.

We would pay some ungodly price for a meal, or a place to stay, then we would hop in our car and try to hypothesize why everything was so expensive over there. We certainly had a lot of down time on our hands while in the car, because everything in Iceland is so spread out. Every bit of civilization is separated by hours and hours of nothingness, so it took forever to get anywhere.

Which, interestingly enough, is what we eventually concluded to be the reason why everything in Iceland is so expensive. The ingredients (or building materials, or whatever it might be…) for every single meal we ate, or place we stayed, most likely had to travel a long, long distance to get there.

We learned that only 20 percent of the entire country is habitable! A fact that obviously contributes to both the vast natural beauty of the island, as well as the upsettingly higher than normal prices. It makes me irritated all over again just thinking about it. Don’t they know I have student loans to pay!?

But not to worry, I’ll be fine, I have a plan to purchase a cheap clipboard from Office Depot. Then I can go door to door (in someone else’s neighborhood) and see if anyone wants to donate money to a Post Factum Scholarship Fund for Needy Children, which is really just a fund to help me pay for the university I attended over a decade ago.

I got this, y’all!

Sorry. I'm being a bit of a dick. And so is this GLACIAL ICEBERG.