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Do not step or walk on the moss.
As you are traveling throughout Iceland, there are certain parts you will pass through that have beautiful lava rock fields with moss growing on it. It will be tempting to stop on the side of the road and get your Instagram-worthy photo, but DO NOT STEP OR DRIVE ON THE MOSS. It is extremely fragile and can take hundreds of years to repair. With tourism in Iceland gaining popularity in recent years, many areas of the moss fields have been destroyed by tourists walking where they shouldn’t.
I do not recommend speeding.
In general, I do not recommend speeding at all but, it may be tempting when you have a stretch of open road ahead of you with no cops around. In Iceland there are satellite cameras posted throughout the Ring Road. The last thing you want when you are home saving money for your next trip is a speeding ticket.
BÓNUS Supermarket is the best place to get groceries on a budget.
To give you some perspective of how expensive Iceland is, a single serving of fish ‘n chips cost us $25 USD. Yes, seriously. When we were planning our trip the cost of food was one of our concerns, but we learned that one of Iceland’s main grocery stores, Bónus Supermarket, was a great way to do Iceland on a budget. I highly recommend planning to cook your own meals with groceries from Bónus rather than going out to eat if you want to save money. We spent about $115 USD for the three of us, and our food lasted about a week.
When you go grocery shopping, don’t buy all your food in one stop.
Split the grocery shopping for your trip up in half or in thirds so you don’t have any food that will spoil. We were scrambling to eat some of the food we bought so it wouldn’t go to waste, and we also could have saved some space in our cooler and in the van.
The tap water is great to drink - you can’t get anything better than it.
I seriously miss the water in Iceland. I miss being able to go to any faucet to fill my HydroFlask with some of the cleanest water in the world.
‘Impassable’ road signs means that the road is closed.
We had to learn the hard way. Our first thought was that impassable meant you couldn’t pass any other vehicles on the road, but after continuing on a snowy and narrow road for quite some time, we found online that it meant that the road was closed to visitors and if you get stuck, you’re out of luck.
You don’t need to pack as many clothes as you think you do.
This is more so advice from my friend and my sister who packed more than what they feel they needed. I had five outfits for the trip, one pair of pajamas, a pair of flip flops for the showers, moccasin slippers for the van, and my hiking boots and felt I packed the right amount. Each outfit I wore 2-3 times over the course of twelve days. It is also not a bad idea to get these charcoal air purifiers to put in your bags and your shoes to keep your clothing as fresh as possible. There are washing machines at many campsites, but we never got around to doing any laundry.
The air is very dry.
Bring extra moisturizers / sheet masks and even a travel humidifier if you are used to humid climate. Our skin was extremely dry and we were wishing we had been a little more prepared.
Plan your meals ahead of time.
This will help you decide on what to buy at the grocery store and help you stick to your budget. I also recommend that you plan your meals so that they are simple and don’t require a lot of cooking. Some campsites don’t have great kitchens with all the resources you need, or they get crowded with other campers prepping their meals.
Set up a PIN number on your credit card.
You will need this mostly for gas, as the pumps will not take credit cards without a PIN number. Some places take Discover (honestly, more places accepted it than we had anticipated), but everywhere takes Mastercard and Visa. I have a travel Mastercard with no foreign transaction fees, so we used that wherever Discover wasn’t accepted (which also has no foreign transaction fees).
Without questioning, get the four wheel drive vehicle.
If you will be driving in snowy parts of Iceland (Northeastern / Northern / Eastern Regions / high in the mountains), four wheel drive is worth getting, hands down. While we were driving in the snowy mountains, we saw a few cars that were flipped in ditches and we couldn’t imagine what we would do if that happened to us.
Invest in travel insurance.
This comes in handy if you have any injuries, or if there are any damages to the vehicle you rent (we ended up getting a few scratches from rocks that kicked up and dents from horses biting the van… if your curious you can read more about our interaction with the horses in my summary post here.)
Get WiFi and use Google maps for navigation rather than using a GPS.
We paid an extra fee to have both a WiFi router that traveled with us as well as a separate GPS system in case the WiFi was not reliable. It turned out Google Maps was more accurate and much easier to use than the GPS. Overall throughout the whole trip, we had great a WiFi signal with just our three phones connected to it. We got to some points where the signal was week, but Google Maps was still able to track and show us where we were as long as we had started the navigation when there was a strong signal.
When leaving Iceland, get to the airport early.
Keflavík International Airport was the most tedious airport I’ve ever gone through and there were a lot of checkpoints between when you arrive and when you board the plane. We arrived to the airport four hours before our flight, and by the time we got to our gate we had about twenty minutes to spare.
Related Posts:
Iceland Ring Road Trip Summary: My adventures of living out of a van and traveling the Ring Road
I hope this information helps! Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions!
