Planning this trip took a bit more effort than we usually like to spend on something that lasts less than a month, but that’s the nature of planning a journey that has you moving locations every coupe of days.
We arrived in Iceland on Monday August 17th and left on September 6th. We arrived via a relatively short three-hour flight from London on Iceland Air, and we left from Reykjavik on a cruise ship.
Our itinerary in Iceland was guided by our desire to circumnavigate the Island. Route 1 is about 820 miles long and circles the larger part of Iceland. We extended our loop to include the Westfjords as well which takes quote a bit more driving since the roads are following the coast and the drives between towns are farther than they seem like they would be because of the curving cast line.
Planning
When we started to plan Iceland an early decision was to not be there for the solar eclipse. It would have been cool, but our trip was bookended by a repositioning, transatlantic cruise which left on Sept 6th. The eclipse was on Aug. 12. With Iceland being such an expensive place to visit, and even more so during the eclipse we decided to spend more like three weeks there instead of a full month.
Iceland is small, but it’s not that small. Once we decided about how long we’d spend there we started planning what to do. Since we were planning to be there for about 3 weeks the 21-day ring plus Westfjords would work well for us.
We used this as a rough draft of how to plan our legs:
We then started looking at comping some of the nights to take reduce cost, and also to hopefully be in more interesting, kind of off of the beaten path sort of places. We considered renting a full RV, but they are beyond reasonable for prices. Not to mention that driving a large vehicle like that on some of the rough and remote roads was not appealing. We ended up compromising and getting a small SUV with a pop-up tent on top.
Go Camper – Not a glowing recommendation.
We rented from Go Camper. We had some issues with our car that wasted a few hours of our time — stuff that I felt like they should have vetted before giving us the thing for a three-week rental, so I won’t go out of my way to recommend them. There was something wrong with the electronics of the drivers side door which caused the door to not always open when pulling the handle. Additionally, the driver’s side window wouldn’t always open, and wouldn’t always close. (Both were HUGE safety concerns in my mind.) I didn’t feel at all comfortable taking this thing across the island in that state. After some back and forth we ended up taking almost three hours out of our one full day in Reykjavik to bring the car back to the airport to swap it out.
It turned out they were able to fix the main issue with the door and it was solid from that point, but I later realized that the 12v plug in the dash didn’t work either. That was particularly frustrating because it meant that I couldn’t use my USBc quick charger to top off my electronic toys (can’t charge your stuff at night if you’re camping!) but by then we had already started our loop so I just lived with it.
That said, one real convenience for us with Go Camper was that we were able to pick up the car at the airport and drop it off in town. That was perfect for us because we arrived by air, and left via a cruise ship and the cruse port was walking distance from downtown, whereas the International airport is over an hours drive away.
Camping
Chrissy has done a lot of car camping in her youth. I’ve not had that life experience very often. That said, Chrissy and I both enjoy backpacking trips. Those trips I find to be very enjoyable because they involve hiking and detailed planning of what to bring and what to leave behind since you have to carry it all on your back. It also allows you to stay in wild places where there is no infrastructure. No houses, no hotels no cabins…. just you, the rocks, and the trees. Driving a car into a parking lot with dozens of other people and sleeping without most conveniences just doest sit well with me. Especially when there are perfectly good cabins, yurts and guest houses often with private bathrooms, right there as well. If I’m not out in the wilderness alone with nature, I may as well just be comfortable and have a hot shower and climate control.
Anyway, since we were going to be traveling for almost three weeks we did some quick math and decided that the break even point of making car with pop-up tent work out to be a cost savings was to camp for 8 nights and to spend the rest of the nights in guest houses. We ended up camping for four nights before I threw in the towel.
I’m a nervous nancy. I admit it. I like having things booked, planned and sorted out as soon as possible so that I can relax and enjoy my time. Many of the camp grounds in Iceland don’t really do reservations. They are first come first serve. That is not me. It kept my anxiety level at a 9 of 10 feeling like we’d arrive where we intended to stay only to find that was full and that we needed to pivot. Combine that with the *not* so fun need to walk across a dark, wet, cold field to use the restroom in the middle of the night… I gave up and suggested that we see if we could book real accommodations for the remaining days that we had been planning to camp. Once we had those booked, I was able to really start enjoying being in Iceland.
So what did we do?
Waterfalls, Puffins and Hikes ( oh my )
There are so many waterfalls in Iceland that I don’t think that all of them even have names. There are big ones, small ones, tall ones. Ones that require a hike, ones that are just along the side of the road. They are absolutely everywhere.
My favorite waterfall, actually waterfalls were Dettifoss & Selfoss. I mention them together because they are both along the same hiking trail. Each one on its own is quiet epic mostly for the size and ferocity of the water but the farther one, Selfoss is the one that gave me some serious Iguazu falls vibes (the monster waterfall system on the Argentina/Brazil).
I’d say second runner up for me would be Skógafoss. It’s a part of the “golden triangle” and it’s super popular, for good reason.
Puffins
We took the ferry from the main part of Iceland to a small island off of the southern coast called Heimaey. Not so fun fact… back in 1973 there was a volcanic eruption so powerful that it created a whole new volcano called Eldfel (Hill of Fire). One third of the buildings on the island were destroyed by the lava flow. Today there is a hike that you can do through the cooled lava fields and a museum. On the hike there are placards every so often which have the names of the streets that used to exist before the lava buried them.
Our main reason for visiting Heimaey, however, was to see puffins… and boy did we. There were thousands of them. The colorful birds are migratory and the time to see them in Iceland is between April and mid August. Peak season is June and July. Since we arrived in mid August I wasn’t sure if we’d see them, but we were very fortunate and there were plenty. The Westman Islands, where Heimaey is located is one of the best places on earth to see them because it hosts the largest puffin colony in the world.
Hikes
We hiked to see waterfalls, glaciers, steaming bubbling sulfur pits, black and brown sand beaches… we hiked on cliffs to get breathtaking overviews of small villages and the Atlantic ocean. We even hiked around the upper rim of a volcano. Most of the hikes we did were fairly short, just a few miles. A few had some technical challenges with rock scrambles, steep ladders, or small rivers to ford. One even had a section where you had to use a rope to climb up a particularly steep rock cliff. The scenery was wildly varied and was always a treat.
Swimming
Ok, we didn’t do the super popular “blue lagoon”, but we did go swimming. We spent two nights in an inn in a city called Akureyri. Right down the street from us was a local pool… an outdoor pool open year-round… with waterslides. In a place that was 45 degrees Fahrenheit in August! Well it turns out that the pool complex uses geothermal energy to heat the water making the large swimming pool something like 85f. They even pump hot water up the waterslides! It was wild. They also have hot tubs for higher water temperatures. I’m pretty sure that we were the only tourists there, but (or and) it was glorious. Absolutely loved it.
Driving
Iceland has roads that are called “Fjallvegur” or Mountain Roads. Non Icelanders just call them F-roads. These are unpaved mountain tracks that lead into the remote central highlands of Iceland. It’s illegal to drive those roads without a 4×4 and many rental companies don’t allow it at all. We didn’t have an real plans to drive any of them, but in our nearly 3000 kilometer (2,000 mile) trek around the island, we did encounter some rough areas that made me happy to have an all wheel drive car and permission to use it on F-roads. That said, much of the highway system that we drove on was paved and in excellent condition. I didn’t do a lot of research as to what we might encounter on some of our routes. I just used Google maps. Speaking of, I thought that Google maps did an excellent job. We never felt lost and always found our intended target locations. That said, there were some desolate stretches where we wouldn’t see other cars or buildings for many kilometers. And some of those stretches were very rough gravel roads and did not feel like places where you’d want to be stranded.
Iceland drives on the right, like the US. For me there wasn’t much noteworthy about the driving. Reykjavik has tons of roundabouts. But once you leave the big city, they are few and far between. The most noteworthy part of driving on the more remote roads is the prevalence of one-lane bridges. Usually you’d be out there alone so crossing is a non issue. But other times you couldn’t quite see how long the bridge was or there would be a corner so you’d always wonder if the approaching driver was another tourist and wouldn’t stop!
Oh, but the most interesting driving experience in Iceland was driving through Vestfjarðagöng (or The Westfjords Tunnel, for English speakers.) The tunnel has three branches that connect in a central core. We first encountered the tunnel heading from Ísafjörður to Flateyri.
Noteworthy things about the tunnel… it’s almost 6 miles long in total. And some of the sections are only one lane wide! One direction usually has pull off spots every few hundred meters to allow cars heading the opposite direction to pass. It was… quite a surprise the first time we did it. No way to describe that “chicken” feeling when you’re driving down a dark tunnel that is only one lane wide and then you see headlights on the horizon! But after making a round trip grocery run back to Ísafjörður on our second day in Flateyri, I felt like a pro.
With what you know now, what would you change?
Well, planing to camp, at least for us was a mistake. It made the rental car much more expensive to rent a sleeper. And there are plenty of cabins, guest houses and little hotels all over Iceland. Unless you’re doing more wild camping in the highlands, sleeping where there are really no other options, for me, the better choice would have been to rent a cheaper 4×4 without the camper stuff and just stay indoors.
Yes, I’m glossing over the potential money savings… but I’m kinda bougie, and if there’s a comfortable place to sleep with a private shower… it’s worth the extra spend.
But here’s something that we noticed about Iceland. Chrissy and I tend to book our travels 11-12 months in advance. That usually works in our favor because we see the most inventory. But we both suspect that that strategy may have failed us in Iceland. We’re convinced that when we were originally booking things that we didn’t see many hotels in the places where we wanted to spend those nights. So we ended up booking some places with shared bathrooms, and in some places it didn’t seem like there were options aside from camping. But when we decided to give camping the boot, and book some conventional lodging we had no problem finding places just a couple of days in advance. We’re starting to suspect that they don’t list inventory as far out as we’re accustomed to and that maybe we should have been planning 4~6 months out instead of 11+.
In conclusion. Iceland is amazing. It’s incredible to have such a wide variety landscapes in such a relatively small place.
Oh, one last thing, a tip! Bring a bug net! Iceland doesn’t really have mosquitos but they do have something called midges. There are two varieties. Biting and non biting. We encountered hoards (HOARDS) of non-biting midges in the north east. We also encountered some of the biting ones between Egilsstaðir and Ásbyrgi. Come prepared. Bring a net, and bring repellent.
