Iceland Planning

Here’s a link to ^^^ that ^^^ map if you’d like to play with it in google….

I’m in the planning stage for a trip to iceland. This page is to collect all the information I’m finding and keep it in one easy to access place. It’s also so others can see what goes into planning a trip like this!

First up, flights. We’re flying Wow airlines because it’s the cheapest option.  Their flights also work best with our work schedules.  They leave Boston at 7pm and arrive in Iceland (Reykjavik KEF) at 4:30am.  The flight home leaves at 3:30pm and arrive in Boston at 5:30pm.  Our plan is to sleep on the plane on the way their so we can enjoy our first day once we arrive.  Wow charges extra for EVERYTHING.  Water, food, seat assignments, baggage, EVERYTHING.  Know that going in.  But we have two round trip tickets for <$600 for both.  Here’s some of their baggage policies though:

  • You may only have ONE carry on.  Not one overhead and one personal, ONE bag.  A “duty free” bag is also allowed but only filled with duty free items purchased in the airport before boarding (which you might want to do because alcohol is expensive in Iceland).
  • Carry on can be ~11lbs for free.  You can purchase more weight.  An additional 15lbs costs $38 24 hours ahead of time or $48 the day of (at the airport).  Carry on luggage can be 22″ x 18″ x 10″ which is actually bigger than US domestic carry on size but you’ll be fighting the weight so you’ll want as small and light of a bag as possible.
  • It’s $48 for a checked bag up to 44lbs if done 24 hours+ ahead and $67 day of.

Now we’ll be renting a caravan/camper while we’re there.  There are a few reasons for this but primarily it’s so that we can control our own schedule and help to reduce costs a bit.  Hotels and car rentals are expensive in Iceland and you need reservations for hotels in advanced (can’t expect to drive up and get a room in the busy season/June July August).  Having a camper means we can go anywhere we want when we want.  AND you can camp “anywhere” allegedly…  So you’re combining your car rental with your hotel room for about $200/day.  Prices and features vary.  Here are the two companies we’re looking at:

  • https://www.happycampers.is Happy camper is the established brand.  It’s been recommended to me from photographer who’ve been before and used them before.  The negative with happy is they’re located a quick 10 minutes from the airport but the have normal business hours.  We arrive at 4:30am and they open at 8am leaving us 3.5 hours to kill at the airport when we’ll be chomping at the bit to get going…  The one option we’re considering here is to rent a car for the morning and explore the Keflavik area.  The other issue here is happy charges per 24 hour period (which is fair) but if we pick it up at 8am we’d need to return it by 8am at the end of our trip or we get hit with another rental day for 8~1pm.  If we rent the car we can use it until noon and then the camper rental works out better from noon to noon with time to catch our afternoon flight.
  • http://www.rent.is/ These guys appear to be the brand new option for camper rentals in iceland.  They have 22 posts to their instagram account and only 21 uses of their hashtag “#wohocamper”.  Their first post is only 5 weeks old.  They don’t even have pictures or a floorplan of their 3 person camper (what we’re looking at).  But what they DO have is 4 things that make me want to go with them.  They have built in WiFi in their campers.  If we don’t have that we’d have to swing by vodaphone and get a SIM card for one of our phones (which are both unlocked).  The also have GPSs built into the dash of their vehicles.  The big one though is that they’re located AT the airport AND they’re open 24 hours a day…  So we can pick up the camper immediately when we arrive and get going, no waiting…  The last thing is they offer a 100 euro discount for anyone who writes a blog post about their trip (cake!) and if you’re the “best blog of the month” you can get a refund for your entire rental!!!  The negative though is they’re so new are they trustworthy?  I think so.  But will their brand new camper be ready in time?  That’s the tough one for me…  I will say I’ve been emailing back and forth with them and they’re very responsive and I’m close to going with them pending some assurance the camper will be ready for us or if it’s not they’ll provide us with something else…
  • other options are either more expensive for the rental or have harder issues with getting there OR both.  Some charge 50 euros to get a ride there and even more to deliver the camper to the airport.  I’m well aware nothing is free in life but it’d be nice if they built that cost into their rental and made it easier for those of us flying in at weird hours…

From there, once we have the camper we can camp “anywhere” but we’re looking to camp at campsites if possible…  For that we’re looking at getting a “camping card”  For $123usd we can camp 28 night at the 41 different camp sites included in the group.  They all have varying amenities, but those include a pool, showers and hot tubs a lot of the time.  The biggest thing I’m concerned with here is there aren’t a TON of sites along the south and south east coast which is where we’ll be for at least one night.  I also need to do some more homework on the price of a night w/o the card as we’ll only be there for 3 nights so it might not be as much of a deal for us.  You have to pay extra for showers at the sites anyway so we’ll see how that goes.

As I mentioned earlier if we don’t have WiFi included in the camper we’ll get a vodaphone SIM card for one phone so we can call home as needed, but also for data for maps…  We’re on t-mobile so I have to check which plan we have.  If we have a simple choice plan we’ll have excellent coverage (they’ve got a great tool here to help you):

The other crazy thing about Iceland is the sunrise/sunset times.  Here’s a screengrab of photoephemeris:

 that’s right, sunrise is at 2:42am and sunset is 23:48pm!!!  That’s 3 whole ours where the sun is below the horizon but because it’s so far north it won’t get dark for those three hours, just dusk!!!  Because of this we’re looking at staying up for the amazing light at night and sleeping during the day.  Not sure how that will work when the time difference is only 4 hours between there and here…

Here’s a map of gas stations, hot springs and pools (link):

 

weather: http://en.vedur.is/weather/forecasts/elements/#type=precip

 

From there now we’re just working on planning where we want to go.  The map at the very top of this post is interactive and each of the red points (these will likely get color coded later for different days) have images to show you what’s there.  I’ve put all the big places I want to go on the map.  The points with the black markers are places I keep thinking I’ve forgotten but are out of our reach on our first trip.  I’ve also got a bunch of links I’ll post that I’m pulling information from:

 

Here’s a (very) rough look at our itinerary…  This has ZERO of the stops we’re going to stop at added to the maps (so lots of added time and mileage).  The big question here is the trip north west to Kirkjufellsfoss “worth” that extra time -vs- stretching out the first three days shown below.  The other concern is that Hof doesn’t have any official camp grounds listed on the camp card site (but we can “camp anywhere”).

Day 1: 

Day 2: longest day because it’s all road we will have been on so it’s only half new stuff

Day 3: 

Day 4:

 

filmed in iceland: http://www.filminiceland.com/case-studies/filming-locations/