Iceland Recollections

 Our trip to Iceland was absolutely wonderful.  If we had it to do all over again, knowing what we know and what we don’t know, we might have done a few things different.

If you are going to visit Iceland, staying in Reykjavik will not give much of a feel for the country.  Taking a day tour of the Golden Circle (a small circle of attractions including a seismic fault, a geyser, and a waterfall) is pretty much like having just the sorbet at a fancy dinner.  We did the ring road around the island which took about seven days which was a pretty good length of time to see most of the attractions in Iceland without doing any of the longer excursions such as snowmobiling or hiking on a glacier or taking a boat ride on a glacier lake.  We only spent one night at each place on the road.  We would have liked to spend another night in Akureyri because it was so charming.

We spent quite a bit of time trying to plan for the trip.  We have waterproof hiking boots, rain jackets and rain pants.  We also wore a merino wool base layer under our hiking pants pretty much every day.  The first three days we were here, it rained most of the day, but by the time we were leaving it was sunny most of the time with highs in the 60’s.  The Icelanders say the most useless thing in Iceland is a weather forecast! The hotels provide wool throws if you want to sit outside. Oh, hotels have no clocks.

We rented a small Kia car in downtown Reykjavik which met our needs well.  The price of gasoline is about $9 a gallon, so getting 40 miles to tha gallon was helpful.  The downtown car rental location is pretty far from most of the hotels.  They do have a shuttle, but it doesn’t run very often.  We called a taxi (there is no Uber or Lyft) and it took about 45 minutes to arrive at the hotel.  Renting a larger car or a 4x4 might offer some comfort on some of the gravel roads (we encountered several).  Renting at the airport is another possibility.  There are lots of unattended gas stations, they require Debit Cards (although you can specify the maximum amount to charge).

The common way to get from the airport to the hotels in Reykjavik is by taking FlyBus.  They have a website where you can make reservations.  They say they meet every flight, so no reservation is need but you do need to have a ticket.  We called to confirm the trip back, they were completely punctual.