Howl at the Moon Is Taking a Small Group to Iceland for a Week of Bathing

Alisa Cardenas runs Howl at the Moon Sauna Co. out of a converted 1989 horse trailer in West Michigan. This November, she’s taking a small group to a lakefront home in southern Iceland for a seven-day, six-night sauna and bathing trip. The itinerary includes Sky Lagoon, the Secret Lagoon, wild hot springs, Þórsmörk, a gusa session at Reykjavík’s Sækot, and a wood-fired mobile sauna at the lakeside. Meals, lodging, transport from Keflavík, and every bathing experience are included. It is the kind of trip more sauna businesses with a community at home ought to be thinking about.

About Alisa and the Wildflower

Alisa started Howl at the Moon in 2024, after the kind of 2021 corporate burnout that sends a lot of people looking for something more tactile to do with their lives. On her about page she describes the pull toward sauna as a series of small moments rather than a single epiphany: a Finnish neighbor’s casual “come sauna for a bit,” and the memory of a German bathhouse encounter twenty years earlier.

The flagship piece of gear is the Wildflower, a 1989 horse trailer converted into a mobile sauna, clad in Western Red Cedar and running a Finnish-made wood-burning stove with more than 350 pounds of sauna stones. The interior runs 170 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Footprint is 13 by 8 by 10 feet.

Beyond the rentals, Howl at the Moon hosts overnight bookings, special-event drop-ins, sauna tent rentals, public sauna and bathing nights, and recurring “Soup, Sound and Sauna” community gatherings, plus residencies at partner hotels and resorts. Recent residency stops include The Neighborhood Hotel in Grand Beach and The Monarch in Hart, Michigan. They showed up at Michigan Sauna Fest in Traverse City in April. The company serves greater Grand Rapids and the Lake Michigan lakeshore, and has been profiled by West Michigan Woman, Canvas Rebel, and Voyage Michigan since the launch.

That puts Howl at the Moon in good company with other US mobile saunas: Spa Fleet in the Hudson Valley (running since 2018), Cedar and Stone Nordic Sauna in Minneapolis (a Four Seasons partner), and the twenty-plus mobile rigs that turned up at the Willamette Sauna Festivaali in Portland in February 2026. The North American Sauna Society first wrote about US mobile sauna in 2020 with only a handful of operators on the map. There are now dozens of them.

What the trip actually looks like

Most travel itineraries hop you from hotel to hotel. This one parks you at one lodge for a week and uses it as a hub. Guests stay at a private waterfront home on a secluded peninsula of Lake Gíslholtsvatn in southern Iceland, described in trip materials as blending old-world Scandinavian charm with modern Nordic design, with a lake-view sauna and a lakeside geothermal soaking pool a few steps from the door. Private chef Abbey Hunter cooks the meals, with one dinner out in Reykjavík.

The published itinerary covers a different bathing experience each day:

• Day 1, arrival: Land at Keflavík and ease in at Sky Lagoon and its seven-step ritual, then settle in at the lodge for a welcome dinner
• Day 2: The Secret Lagoon (Gamla Laugin), one of Iceland’s oldest geothermal baths, then wild hot springs deeper in the countryside
• Day 3: Free time in Reykjavík, then a gusa session at Sækot and dinner in the city
• Day 4: Relax day at the lodge: an optional cooking class, a wood-fired mobile sauna at the lakeside, and an evening sound bath or Yoga Nidra
• Day 5: Super Jeep into Þórsmörk (glacial rivers, volcanic landscapes, waterfalls), then a hike to the historic Seljavallalaug pool
• Day 6: The Friðheimar geothermal greenhouses, then a swim and soak at Laugarás Lagoon
• Day 7: Group transfer to the airport for departure

Optional at-base activities include a sound bath, Yoga Nidra, and an Icelandic cooking class. Alisa hosts the trip personally and describes the program on her expedition page as “a sensory adventure through ancient waters and the healing power of heat” built around “the raw, elemental medicine of the land.”

Iceland’s bathing scene right now

Iceland is not running out of places to bathe. The country drew just under 2.3 million foreign overnight visitors in 2025, up 0.4% from 2024, per the Icelandic Tourist Board. The modern Blue Lagoon opened in 1992 and basically defined geothermal tourism for a generation. In the past five years the scene has gotten a lot deeper.

Sky Lagoon opened in 2021 on a cliff in Kópavogur, with a seven-step ritual circuit including a cold plunge and a Finnish-style sauna with a sea view. Forest Lagoon (Skógarböðin) opened near Akureyri in 2022 on a geothermal source that turned up by accident during a tunnel project. Vök Baths in the east opened in 2019 and pulls drinkable geothermal water (a regional rarity) into floating thermal lakes. GeoSea in Húsavík uses heated seawater pumped from the harbor.

The Howl at the Moon itinerary pulls from this mix. Sky Lagoon is the arrival-day anchor, and Laugarás Lagoon is one of the newest baths on the Golden Circle. The countryside hot springs, Þórsmörk and Seljavallalaug are the wild-bathing pieces. Iceland’s wider public-pool culture (laug, sundlaug) was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in December 2025, joining Finnish sauna culture (inscribed in 2020).

One Icelandic site the trip does not include this November: Laugarvatn Fontana, a public bath in the southern lake district with a steam room built directly over a geyser. Fontana closed for renovation on October 1, 2025 and reopened on August 1, 2026. If Alisa runs the trip again in 2027, Fontana is an easy add.

A quick word on gusa

Gusa is the Icelandic name for the guided group sauna session that Danes call saunagus and Germans call Aufguss: heat, cold, scent and music combined under a gusa master, in three quarter-hour rounds in the sauna. That is how Sækot describes it. Sækot is a sauna fitted into a lumpfish fisherman’s shed on the Ægisíða shoreline in Reykjavík’s Vesturbær district, with the sea for the cold. One of its gusa masters, Vala Baldursdóttir, learned the practice in Denmark from 2020 and in 2024 developed an Icelandic gusa-master training course on the Danish model. Sækot says Icelanders have shaped their own gusa culture, one where the cold gives the ritual a different meaning than it has in warmer countries.

The “saunagus” name is the Danish-influenced Nordic version of the word (sauna plus gus, the term Danish operators use for what Germans call Aufguss). The closest US analog is the competitive ritual that runs at Bathhouse in New York under the Aufguss USA banner. The Icelandic gusa-master training dates only to 2024. Pulling it onto an itinerary instead of defaulting to a Finnish löyly is the kind of choice that tells you the operator has actually been paying attention to where Nordic sauna culture is going right now.

Basalt Architects’ completed Earth Lagoon Mývatn expansion offers another view of Icelandic bathing culture, with communal, more private and fully private changing zones. Our report on its design explains the choices. It is a separate northern Iceland project, not a stop listed on Howl at the Moon’s southern Iceland itinerary.

Cedar Grove in Maine is doing a version of this in reverse

Howl at the Moon is not the only US sauna business looking outward. Cedar Grove Sauna in Montville, Maine has been doing a related version of the same idea, just from the opposite direction. Jackie Stratton runs Cedar Grove out of wood-fired saunas on a wooded property in Montville, in inland Maine, and two mobile saunas (Reef, a converted horse trailer, and Eddy) that take up residence at Spinney’s at Popham Beach. Before she opened Cedar Grove in 2020 on a 200-year-old farmstead in Montville, she traveled to Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, and Sweden to study sauna culture.

Rather than packaging a trip back to the Baltics for her customers, Jackie brought the Baltic tradition to Maine. On May 1 to 3, 2023, Cedar Grove hosted Lithuanian Bath Masters Rimas Kavaliauskas and Birutė Masiliauskienė for what it billed as their first North American training: a three-day Level One Bath Master course plus evening workshops on plant whisks, sauna construction, and Lithuanian bathing practice. “Winters in Maine are long and cold and dark,” Jackie told the Portland Press Herald. “We can look to our neighbors in northern Europe to see how they cope. People feel good when they sauna.”

Alisa is taking her community to a bathing culture. Jackie went to a bathing culture and brought a piece of it home. They are two different shapes of the same move, and both are the kind of move that turns a small sauna business into a cultural connector rather than a transactional rental service.

Why more sauna operators should be looking at this

The Global Wellness Institute puts wellness tourism spending at $894 billion in 2024, up from the $439 billion it first measured for 2012, according to its wellness tourism research page. The category has plenty of room.

Bathing-anchored Nordic retreats already sit at a few different tiers. Northern Star runs two-to-five-day Finnish sauna trips, mostly around Helsinki, including a four-day winter trip led by Nichlas Rasmussen. Responsible Travel books an eight-day guesthouse-to-guesthouse Finnish sauna vacation in Nurmes. Black Tomato sells an eight-night Sweden and Finland luxury sauna sojourn. Green Edventures runs a seven-day women’s Iceland hot-springs and mindfulness retreat. None of them are led by a US mobile sauna outfit.

That last bit is the actual point. If you run a sauna business in the US and you have built a community at home (regulars at your residency hotel, an email list that responds when you post a session, the same fifteen faces at the Friday pop-up), you probably have ten people who would pay to go to Iceland with you. Or Finland. Or Estonia. Or Japan. Manufacturers have stayed on the supply side. The window for small operators to be the ones doing this first is wide open.

If going abroad with paying guests sounds like more than you want to take on, Cedar Grove’s model is the other half of the same move. Go yourself. Study a tradition for a few weeks. Bring a teacher or a practice or a piece of vocabulary home. Both routes turn a small sauna business into the kind of place where people show up not just for the heat but because they want to learn what their operator just learned.