Iceland has been on my travel bucket list ever since I saw it featured on an episode of the Amazing Race a number of years ago. Who knew it was not just a pile of snow, but actually was a country filled with a variety of stunning landscapes! My three friends and I have been planning this trip for several years. In this post, I will share some details of how we put our trip together (to help others who might be interested in visiting there). In future posts, I will share what we did each day with hotel and food details.
Airflight: We did some comparing of flight cost between WOW airlines and Icelandair, and found Icelandair was cheaper. In November we booked flights out of Cleveland. Boy, were we glad that we did when WOW went bankrupt a couple months before our trip. Then Icelandair canceled all their flights out of Cleveland due to the Boing 737 grounding. Thankfully, they were able to change our reservation to Toronto.
Parking: We drove to Toronto from Detroit on the day of our flight. We used the Park and Go at the Delta Marriott Hotel near the airport which was very efficient and convenient. We stayed at the hotel the night we returned from our trip.
Trip Planning: We debated if we should take a tour or drive ourselves for our trip. We really wanted to have the freedom to drive ourselves at our own pace but felt a bit overwhelmed to plan everything on our own.
We opted to use Nordic Advisor (in January) to design a self-drive trip for us. They reserved all our hotels (wonderful breakfasts were included) and rental car. They also supplied a driver to pick us up at the airport to get us to our first hotel and then to our rental car in Reykjavik the next day. They gave us an itinerary of suggested places to visit and detailed maps. They also gave us a loaner phone to use for emergencies/contacting our hotels if needed, a GPS (which was useless), and wifi for the car. The wifi was essential - we used it for Google Maps for our entire trip. We had great coverage for most of the trip. A few remote places the coverage dropped, and we used the Maps.Me app with a downloaded offline map of Iceland (worked great with GPS and no wifi). Nordic Advisor was not a "budget" way to do Iceland, but it was a very convenient way to create a custom tour. They worked with us to get the experience we wanted and patiently answered our many questions. They also appeared to have partnerships with some of the guest houses/hotels that we used - they appeared to fully booked for the summer if you searched online for them. We enjoyed the many unique places and locations where we stayed.
Our rental car was a Land Rover Discovery. We definitely needed the size to hold our luggage!
Our trip was for 11 days/10 nights. We began and ended with a night in Reykjavik. We traveled the Ring Road counterclockwise. I think that was a good plan because the first few days were loaded with many sites to visit and it was great to do it when we were fresh. We also had 2 nights by Lake Myvatn in the middle of the trip, which was nice to have an easy day to tour without heavy driving.
We got a lot of ideas, hints, and helpful advice by joining the Iceland Tips for Travelers group. It was a great place to ask questions and I learned a lot by reading about other people's trips and seeing their photos.
In future blog posts, I will share photos and info on what we did each day. Stay tuned!
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