Goodness, do people besides influencers blog anymore? It doesn't seem like it, and since I've never been one to follow/understand trends, here I am back after about two years. I'm fairly fresh off the plane from an amazing trip to Iceland, and I felt compelled to share.
Anyone who travels with me knows that I do a lot of research when it comes to traveling. I am particular about where I stay and what I eat. I also like to get a lot of stuff done. I basically want at the end of the vacation to be able to say that I did all the things I should have in the location I visited.
Now there are lots and lots of Iceland itineraries out there. Here's the thing they never have though: mentions about how to travel with a baby. And that's what we did. We flew into the capital, and then roadtripped around the entire country with a child under one year old. This meant only staying in places with free cribs,* and, against my normal nature, not trying to cram a ton of sight seeing into one day. It was a vastly different trip than when I went to San Francisco for the first (and only) time and planned an elaborate day with a bus pass, sight seeing, eating, and a grand total of walking around 9 miles. I don't play around when it comes to vacation.
So here it is, with all my tips for how to travel in the most budget friendly way when possible (because if you know me, you also know that I can be pretty frugal).
1) Plane: Buy your Icelandair tickets during a sale; they happen regularly enough. If you can't survive the flight without a hot meal, pre-order to get a discount on the price.
2) Shuttle: If you're not renting a car at the airport, use Gray Line Iceland to book a shuttle at the lowest price to take you into the city (and if you book a roundtrip, it's discounted). Reykjavik Excursions ultimately buses everyone who uses this and also FlyBus, but prices were lowest for us by booking directly with Gray Line. The buses have wifi, which is nice for the long drive from Keflavik to Reykjavik.
3) Covid19 testing: The cheapest way to test for Covid19 to return the US is by buying a self test kit that comes with the option for telehealth confirmation. You need to order these tests by mail so you need to give yourself time in advance to do this. If not, Iceland is currently charging 6980kr to test. They have multiple locations and results return very promptly.
4) Food in Iceland is expensive. Meals for two at a mediocre restaurant can easily cost upwards of $75 for two main courses. But the interesting thing is that there is very little difference in price between average restaurants and amazing restaurants. So if you're going to spend the money eating out, go for that top recommendation from Trip Advisor. I'll do a seperate post on our favorite places where we ate.
5) Groceries: If you're not looking to eat out but still want to experience Icelandic food, grocery stores are the way to go. Remember to bring your own bag though because they charge a fee if you use a bag! The cheapest grocery store is Bonus. But not all Bonuses are created equal! The smaller ones are not stocked as well and will feature less local products. The larger ones will feature things like locally made fresh rye bread and flatbread (flatkokur). All the ones we went to had a ready made food section where we really enjoyed the sandwiches until we wised up and realized it'd be cheaper to just... buy the ingredients. All the grocery stores sell containers of sandwich filling. Smoked lamb salad is a popular one, and while it sounds weird, it's delicious; smoked meat mixed with mayo, carrots, and peas. We also liked the prawn salad with egg. We enjoyed exploring different skyr options (coffee is an excellent flavor), but my favorite discovery of all was Koko Mjolk. Yep, it's chocolate milk marketed by a colorful cat, but it was great. Reminded me of Yoohoo and being six.
6) Gas/Driving: If you're renting a car to do the Ring Road, there are 2 things to know about filling up your tank:
- Orkan is the cheapest gas station (N1 seemed the most expensive) and there are locations all around the Ring Road. They also conveniently list all of the prices for their gasoline on their website online, so you can decide which station to hit up. If you can find a manned Orkan gas station closest to you early in your trip and get a discount fob (note that some car rental places may give you one, but ours didn't). This gives you about 3kr off every liter, which doesn't seem like much, but it adds up with gas prices being so high. To put it into perspective, we spent over $450 on gas during our trip, while driving about 1050 miles in a mid-sized vehicle. A fob would have saved us about $4.50 total. You decide if that's worth your time.
- You need to have a card with a pin to buy gas at most places in Iceland. This means either a debit card or a credit card with a pin (which often you need to request in advance from whatever company). You can opt to buy a prepaid card with a credit card, but that can only be done at manned gas stations, which are sparse on the Ring Road.
- Costco has one location outside Reykjavik and it is actually the cheapest gas on the island. We went here to fill up our tank before returning to the car rental agency. You need to be a Costco member to get gas though.
- Don't get caught speeding. There are signs before cameras so you can mostly avoid those, but there are police who will also ticket you. The fines are very hefty, as we were warned by our car rental agency.
- You must turn your headlights on. It's just the law. You can get a ticket for not having them on.
7) Hotels: The majority of places we stayed did not have in room mini fridges and none had microwaves. Even when we stayed a hostel with a kitchen, there was no microwave. Also ice dispensers don't seem to be a thing, so don't count on packing your own cooler.
8) Pool culture: I'm not Icelandic so I don't want to speak for the people of the country, but there is a notion of pool culture that you'll probably hear or read about. The pools all have geothermally heated water, so it's very nice, even when it's cold outside. I highly recommend visiting a community pool in Reykjavik or Akureyri. The prices are lower than the touristy geothermal baths, and if you're in a group, I honestly think they would be more fun. There's generally multiple pools of varying temperatures and also hot tubs. Things to know before you go to the pool:
- Bring your own towel to save money! You can rent a towel at the pool, but we just brought a bath towel from the hotel
- Yes, you need to shower naked and there are generally not individual stalls except for handicap accessibility. It's honestly not a big deal. No one's looking; people are just trying to get clean.
- You don't have to bring your own shampoo/soap. A basic combo one is offered because of the fact that everyone is expected to wash before entering
- You can bring your baby. No admission fee, and places were very baby friendly. I'll address this in it's own section, but the pool had high chairs so you don't have to hold your baby all the time, and the showers had a baby tub. There were also Bumbo Seats at the Akureyri pool!
9) You really don't need cash. Credit cards are accepted everywhere, even little hostels. We withdrew $100 at the airport and had a hard time using it all.
10) If you want to take the bus in Reykjavik, that's the one place where cash is needed. Fare is 495kr and buses are generally pretty clean and efficient ways to travel far in the city. I took it twice to get to and from our car rental place and thought it was solid. Buses generally run pretty frequently and the best website I found for figuring out routes and time tables was this.
11) If you are traveling with a very young child (i.e. under 1 year old, as we were), the country is incredibly baby friendly. We had bought a travel high seat and found that we basically never needed it because every single place we went to had baby chair(s). Even coffee shops and cafes in museums and the pool. Generally it was at least two. And they were often the Stokke Tripp Trapp chair or the Ikea baby high chair. Obviously the hotels and hostels were good too. As previously mentioned, we opted to only stay at places that provided a "baby cot" or crib, which was basically a pack and play most of the time. Twice we got solid wood cribs.
April seemed to be a good time of year to travel because it is fairly low tourist season, but not too cold and the days are a reasonable length for site seeing. There was definitely still a lot of snow, so some smaller waterfalls were frozen and Oxi Pass had terrible visibility, but the roads themselves were fine. We didn't see any sheep out, but we saw plenty of horses.
Our itinerary was a leisurely 18 days that started and ended with some downtime in Reykjavik:
Day 1: Land in Keflavik, shuttle to our hotel (Grand Hotel Reykjavik) which let us check in early for free. Sleep, walk off the jet lag, enjoy from pastries from Braud and Co, and eventually eat a very early dinner at Hipster.
Day 2: Site seeing in Reykjavik. Lunch at Reykjavik Kitchen, which I highly recommend. Dinner was leftovers from Hipster and grocery store food.
Day 3: More of the same with lunch at Cafe Loki and coffee at Kaktus. Dinner was still leftovers from Hipster and grocery store food.
Day 4: Pick up our rental car in the morning, then head southeast to Reynishverfi Basalt Column Beach. We ate pre-made grocery store sandwiches in the car (love the smoked lamb salad and the prawn and egg). Early dinner at The Soup Company in Vik. We enjoyed their Lava Soup, Lamb Soup, and Fish curry soup. Filling enough to satisfy for the night even though we'd only snacked a little in the car. Check into our next hotel, Hotel Katla, which we chose primarily because of the good reviews about breakfast (true) and the hot tubs/geothermal pools outside.
Day 5: Eldhraun Lava Field and Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon. Check into Magma Hotel, which we loved. Easily our favorite place that we stayed. The little cabins were private but spacious, but had great views, dinner (not included) was excellent and breakfast was solid. Also the bath products smelled really good.
Day 6: Stjórnarfoss (which we only put on the list because it's basically across the way from Magma Hotel, but it was a very nice fall, almost felt like our private place because nobody else was there) & Skaftafell National Park. At the national park, we only opted to walk to Svartifoss, because hiking with a child is hard work. Check into Hali Country Hotel. Dinner at the restaurant was fine; we mostly ate there because there weren't any other good options around.Day 7: Jokulsarlon Glacier Lagoon and Diamond Beach →Hofn → Djúpivogur. This was our longest driving day. Diamond Beach was fantastic the day we went because the waves were crashing and all the ice fragments moving around were beautiful and striking. I'd probably recommend just staying in Hofn. It was a very cute town, had groceries and gas, and was lovely to walk around. We ate dinner at Pakkhaus because I'd been there once and loved it. Years later, still very good. We stayed at a hostel near Oxi Pass. I wanted to give us time to hang out somewhere with our baby and... I would not do it again. I won't name the place but it didn't have hot water the first night and communication was just really hard because it's run by one man and his wife (who does not speak Icelandic).
Day 8: Fossarfoss & Folaldafoss. Back to the same hostel, lunch and dinner was stuff we'd bought at the grocery store in Hofn.
Day 9: We drove through Oxi Pass to our next hotel (Gistihúsið - Lake Hotel Egilsstadir). After checking in, we went to the Vok Baths. This was one of our favorite things we did in Iceland and thought it was worth the hefty price tag ($92.68 for two adults, or 5990kr per person). The baths are not cheap, but I could easily see spending several hours here. The facilities are very clean and gorgeous. There were tons of baby high chairs and the shower had wonderful bath products, including conditioner and body lotion. The floating pools are large but weren't crowded when we went, and the water is not sulfurous. There's a bar where you can get as much water to drink as you'd like, as well as other drinks (including even chocolate milk). After you're done, you can get the tisane (herbal tea) that comes free with your entrance fee. We tried nettle tea and birch tea. Then we got pizza for dinner at Askur Pizzeria. This was a solid meal, but anticipate needing to order at least one pizza per person if not more.
Day 10: Rjúkandafoss → Vogafjós Farm Resort → Myvatn Nature Baths → Hverir. The nature baths in this area are sulfurous and so there's a smell and almost silky feeling to the water. You cannot drink it, so we had to be very careful with our baby, but it wasn't too big of a problem. The biggest issue here was that it was so crowded. It was hard to not be close to people and the showers felt like they were almost constantly packed. Still, they had baby high chairs, a baby bathtub, and very nice bath products. Our order of doing things might seem weird and circuitous, but it's because we bought a package from the farm resort that gave us tickets to Myvatn. Also we were going to skip Hverir but then our baby fell asleep in the car and we didn't want to just drive back to the farm resort and have to wake her, so we stopped at Hverir (where I stayed in the car with baby because I'd already been there before).Day 11: Krafla's Viti Crater → Goðafoss → Akureyri. The road up to the crater was closed after the geothermal power plants because of snow on the road, so our walk was much longer than anticipated. The crater was also frozen, so we couldn't appreciate the very striking blue water that shows up in photos of the area, but we enjoyed the hike nonetheless. We stayed at an apartment in Akureyri, but stopped at the Bonus on the way in to buy more groceries. Note that there's a speed camera going into Akureyri after a big downhill and in the place where the speed limit drops.
Day 12: Akureyri - We just had a relaxing day in which we enjoyed some really surprisingly tasty hot dogs at Pylsuvagninn á Akureyri (I loved the one with red cabbage - yes you read that right - as a condiment). We went to the community pool where entrance was only 1200kr. The showers only had combo shampoo/body wash (no fancy products like at the geothermal baths), but the pool set up was fantastic. You walk into a big pool with an open area where a lot of family and kids were. Then there a few lap lanes, but no one seemed to be swimming laps too seriously. To the left was a formal lap lane with the ...er... fancy enter-the-water-by-diving-like-in-competitions platforms. There was a large kiddie pool to the right. This had a very slow graded entrance to it and never got too deep. Maybe slightly higher than waist level for your average adult. We were able to just sit our baby down in the area where it was shallow and she enjoyed splashing around. The water was very nice and warm. Like bath temperature. There were also several hotter pools and a hot tub that went up 41C. There are floaties available for kids. Also the set up was generally very handicap accessible. There was an elevator for lowering someone with a wheelchair down from the locker area into the water. For dinner we went to Bryggjan which a good dinner. The langoustine pizza was interesting, but maybe not to the level that Tripadvisor reviewers seem to think.
Day 13: Reykjafoss → Kolugljúfur Canyon → Laugarbakki. The first stop was almost impossible to find because our GPS could not figure out the farm roads to get to the coordinates we entered. Finally we saw a small sign and pulled into a muddy field and then walked the short distance to the falls and then, the better park, the natural "hot pot" or geothermal pool. There were several places where hot water was bubbling up right beside the falls, and a little rock pool had been built. It was very natural and lovely. We didn't choose to lounge in the water, but there were other people there who did. There were a couple places I found in my research that looked good for food, but they were all closed when we were there, namely: Sjávarborg Restaurant, Sauðá, and Sauðárkróksbakarí. We ended up just having dinner at our hotel, where we also enjoyed the hot tubs.
Day 14: Kirkjufell. We really drove all the way out here just to see this. We easily could have combined this with Arnastapi and not been too busy in the day, but we didn't know that. As it was, we enjoyed a leisurely meal of the foods we'd bought from the grocery store, while sitting by the water.
Day 15: Djúpalónssandur beach was something I added on last minute, when I realized that we could really be fitting more in our day. The walk to the beach isn't long and there were some other labels paths/hikes that we chose not to do. We somehow narrowly missed Hellnar, and then decided it wasn't worth it to turn around, and so just continued on to Arnastpi to see the cliffs. We had lunch at Samkomuhúsið, which is solid Icelandic food, and then drove back to Reykjavik. We went to Costco for gas and bought some solid sushi for a very reasonable price. That night we went to Skuli Craft Bar, which was a nice place to hang out and queer friendly.
Day 16: We drove to the Kvika Footbaths and walked around that scenic coast area for a bit before driving to the harbor to get ice cream at Omnom. Sadly they weren't doing tours while we were there, but the ice cream we got was very good (we discovered just how good coffee and yuzu are in combo!). After some window shopping, we had dinner at Matarkjallarinn. I highly recommend this restuarant. We had their 6 course "secret menu", which was very good and honestly not that expensive for the quality and portions. Service was impeccable. There was never a moment we had to wait for water to be refilled. They were patient about explaining and repeating dishes to me when I tried to take notes.
Day 17: Breakfast from Deig, which has bagels and doughnuts. The creme brulee doughnut was very good, and the bagels were solid, but not the earth shattering thing that Tripadvisor reviews would have you believe. We had lunch at Fiskfelagid, which was so good, we'd come back there to eat dinner that night too. This was not in small part due to the fact that they had outdoor tables with heat lamps and blankets. We felt very Covid19 safe and the food was excellent. They give you granola along with bread to start your meals, and while this seemed a little bit odd to me, the granola was really good. I highly recommend their reindeer carpaccio and the fish of the day. We also enjoyed their sushi and lobster soup.
Day 18: Waffle from Mokka Kaffi, which was fine, again not the amazing thing we'd been lead to believe from Tripadvisor. Shuttle to the airport, duty free shopping (little liquor bottles and chocolate), and then enjoying the best lounge I've been to yet. Very good food, with a solid variety, and a lot of alcohol options. They had all the local spirits and beer that we hadn't really gotten around to trying, and it was possible to take tiny little samples, which we did. There's also showers if you need. Then we flew home!
More details on meals to come later.
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