Our Iceland road trip

When we got to Iceland, our first conversation with our car hire guy went a little like this. ICELANDIC MAN: “first time in Iceland guys?”. US: “yeh!” ICELANDIC MAN: “make sure you hold the door when you open it, or it will blow off and our insurance doesn’t cover that”. US: “haha!”. ICELANDIC MAN: “no, really”.

We left with our subaru too excited to care about his advice, or the crazy weather we were driving in. Our first stop was ikea. It was the end of our Europe trip and we were pretty poor at this point and realised we couldn’t really afford accommodation, so we picked up outdoor lounge pillows as a makeshift mattress for our road trip. We grabbed some groceries, set up the boot and officially set off for our road trip around the Ring Road. And if you were wondering, Icelandic man wasn’t joking. Our doors almost blew off that very first day.

The next 10 days was filled with some of the best memories of our lives. We ran around in giant fields of weird mossy mounds (which we’ve now found out were lava fields), swam in ancient hot springs in the freezing cold and watched icebergs drift past the shore of black beaches. We hiked through foggy canyons, along side of glaciers and around countless waterfalls, later joking that theres more waterfalls than traffic lights in Iceland. Literally, you’ll stop pulling over for them. We watched wild horses run and play for hours, puffins nest in the sides of giant cliffs and seals swim amongst giant hunks of ice. We’d veer off the road daily, climbing over rocks into giant pits into valleys filled with rocks smashed into perfect halves that seemed out of this world. We ate baked beans for breakfast most days and spent the evenings camped somewhere on the side of the road, barely sleeping in our shit makeshift bed (we failed to realise is the time of year we went it basically doesn’t get dark… and trying to sleep in a subaru in constant daylight, freezing your ass off on the side of a highway isn’t ideal). We had the most incredible end to our trip and were crushed when we had to leave. If theres one place you have to visit in the world, its Iceland. And we’re itching to go back.