The kitchen is over in the corner, And the water comes from pumping by hand. The dining room table is a loner; It wobbles when you wish for it to stand. Across the way is the room for living Which is really nothing more than a couch. Underneath it you can keep your clothing, What we call our convenient storage pouch. At night, it turns into a single bed Where two of you can cuddle together. The back door id where you will rest your head, Safe against the cold, Icelandic weather. In here, across the island, you’ll scamper, Ready to become a Happy Camper.
One of the best ways and also most common ways to enjoy Iceland is to get a camper van and drive the Ring Road. Along the way, there are many campsites where you just park your van and then just camp for the night. Some of these campsites are right in the heart of some quaint Icelandic towns; whereas, others are out in the middle of nowhere, and no matter where you go, you will always run into crowds. Despite this, there are things that you can do to make these crowds more manageable, and the time that you spend at these campsite more enjoyable.
Be Early
This is the most essential tip I can give, especially if you are coming from some other place than Europe. There are a lot of Europeans in Iceland, and they are pretty much already adjusted to the time zone. They are on vacation and want to take advantage of the ability to sleep in a little bit later than usual. Because of this, the camps don’t get moving early in the morning, but around 9 o’clock, things start to get busy in the kitchen and bathrooms. Considering that there are limited burners, and showers, this means if you start moving around this time as well, you will have a harder time accessing these things. It is amazing how easy these things are to access if you are up and moving as late as 7 o’clock.
It adds another little extra bonus. You will be pulling out of camp before everybody else which means that you will be getting to the sights earlier as well. Sometimes you will be at extremely busy locations all by yourself until the middle of the day which makes it feel like you are truly in the wilderness that is Iceland.
Another bonus to this practice is that you will also arrive at the next campsite before everybody else. There are many times that we showed up at our campsite at 5:30 or 6 and basically had our pick of the sites, but by the time 8:30 rolled around, the campsite was so full that we would have ended up at the worst spot available.
Buy Pre-Seasoned Meals
We spent some time at home before we left getting a couple ramekins together with the spices that we thought we would enjoy the most when we arrived in Iceland. On our first day we ran to the grocery store to buy some food for the trip. We thought that we would have to find various meats and then prepare them at the camp at night. On a whim, we picked up a couple packs that were already marinated. They cost about the same, and little did we know how good they would be. We liked them so much that we bought more of them and were pleased each time. The best part of these pre-seasoned meals were the fact that they made cooking exceptionally easy.
Basically, it made us feel like we were eating something good instead of the ramen and hot dogs that seem to be the typical fare that is found in Iceland. They do cost a little bit more, but if you buy your food at Kronan or Netto, these meals will not break your budget. We still squeezed in the cup of noddle of hot dog every once in awhile, but this made our meals in Iceland so much better.
Park Close to the Facilities
This one goes hand in hand with being early. If you are moving an hour or two ahead of the crowds, this means that you will arrive at your next campsite before everybody else, and get your pick of where you want to stay. Some camps have some amazing views with them, and they are great places to sit, have a cocktail, and enjoy your dinner. And on nights where the weather is going to work with you, these are going to be the places where you are going to want to park. However, Iceland weather is unpredictable. There were many nights on the trip where we went to sleep with the sun shining, only to be woken up in the middle of the night under a wind storm and a torrential downpour. Of course, it worked the other way as well.
When the weather is great, traveling in a camper van is fun and exciting. When the weather is terrible, living in a camper van is a challenge. The nice thing about most of the campsites is they have facilities where you can get out of poor weather. Some of them are bigger than others, and it is not fun to make the trek there through this inclement weather. This is even worse when you wake up in the middle of the night and have to use the facilities. I would suggest trying to find that place that gives you the amazing view, but also allows you easy access to the facilities, especially if you know that weather is the going to be terrible that night. It won’t make it better, but you will have to deal with the weather for shorter amounts of time.
Run the Heat before Bed
A lot of the features of the camper vans run on batteries. In this modern age where people are always looking for ways to charge their devices, and the fact that you will want to run a refrigerator all the time to keep some of your food cold, it means that you will have limited power that you can tap into. Some of the camper vans, such as the company, Happy Camper, supply a battery that charges with the spinning of the tires. The guy that rented the car to us, told us that it should give us enough energy to keep the heat running all night long, but we discovered that this wasn’t actually necessary. This isn’t the heat that comes out of the front console of the car, instead, it is a big blower right under the bed that just cranks out hot air. It does take a little bit to warm up the whole car, but once you get the car heated up, it takes some time for it to cool down as well. Because of this, if you run the heat for an hour before bed and you get some good sleeping bags, you should have enough heat to keep you comfortable for the whole night.
The reason for this is quite simple. If the battery for your van dies, you are not moving further on your trip. Though there are a bunch of people at the campsites that could help you if this becomes a problem, this might not always be the case. We did run into a couple of people out in the middle of nowhere whose battery had died, and luckily we had some jumper cables to help them out, but in one case, they had been there for quite some time. The rental companies do give you a number to call if you do break down, but there were a couple of places where we ran out of cellular service. The bottom line is that you do not want to get stuck in the middle of some place because you wanted a toasty camper van instead of power in your battery.
Enjoy the Sun while You Get It
Part of the reason that we decided to go to Iceland is because we had a friend a couple of years who went, and the pictures she brought back with her were stunning. She had sunshine for the ten days she was there and she was smiling underneath the warmth that it brought.
This summer, we were constantly told that Iceland was experiencing the coldest summer that it has had in thirty years. We rarely saw the sun, and there were many days where we were under five different layers, including rain gear, to go see the sights in the wind and rain. We were excited when we saw the temperature reach 4 degrees Celsius, or about 40 degrees in Fahrenheit. It did not prevent us from having a great time while we were there, but it was a much different experience than the one enjoyed by my friend.
With this in mind, when the sun did come out and we had those warmer summer temperatures that Iceland usually has during the summer, it was an amazing experience. It did not always last long, so when the sun did come out, we made sure to get out of the camper van and enjoy it. Iceland is one of those places where you have to take advantage of what is given you, and when you do that, those moments will become your favorite ones on the trip.
Bring Slide Sandals
This tip goes closely with the place where you park, and enjoying the sunshine. You will spend a lot of your time in Iceland wearing hiking boots. It is the safest way to see a lot of the sights, and they do keep your feet warm. But when you get to the place where you are going to stay for the night, you are going to want to take these boots off and stretch those feet for a little bit. During these moments, you will want your feet to be as free as they possibly can. This is where slide sandals come in. They don’t necessarily need to be slide sandals, but something that you can easily slide on and off.
There are added bonuses to having shoes like this with you. If you wake up in the middle of the night, and have to go to the bathroom, it is a lot easier to slip on these sandals and run off to the facilities than spending the time putting on your shoes again. They can also be used in the showers. All of the showers that I saw were always well maintained and clean, but this did not mean that you wanted to take a shower in your bare feet. The slide sandals give you that little extra protection, and they always dry off quickly. If you bring a pair of these with you, you will find that you will use them more often than you would have thought, and you will be happy that you have them with you.
Shower When You Arrive
Anybody who has ever spent time in hostels in Europe knows how busy the showers get in the morning. People tend to line up just so they can look their best for the day ahead of them, and there are times when you will wait a good hour before you can get your turn. Iceland campsites are no different. I was really surprised at the amount of people I saw making sure that their hair was perfect, and they looked good in their hiking gear. Didn’t they know what they would be doing the whole day? They would be hiking, sometimes in bad weather. They would not look good at the end of the day, so what was the purpose of standing in line to try to look good in the morning? Also, there were not that many showers to share in the first place. Some of the campsites only had one shower to share which made the lines longer and harder to endure.
When I first started on the trip, I was one of those people waiting for the shower, but as the trip progressed, I learned something. When I made it to the campsite, the showers had just been cleaned and nobody was waiting in line to take a shower. I also felt dirty from the day of running around seeing stuff, and really wanted a shower at that time. It made more sense to me to take the shower when I first arrived at the campsite instead of waiting in the morning and battling the crowd. It was not as if I was going to dirty myself while I was at the campsite, and I could wash away the grime of the day. I was also ready in the morning to move, and we beat the crowds because we were able to get out of the campsite that much quicker that everybody else. I am not saying that this is the way you should do it for other European countries, but I found that it worked best for Iceland.
Traveling Iceland in a camper van is an adventure, and the best way to see all of the sights on your own terms. It took me a little while to figure out how to make it work, and I hope these little tips help save you some time and pain as you figure out your camper van when you get to Iceland. It will give you the adventure that you are looking for without the trial.
My first major trip that I took was a fifty day exploration of Europe. My wife and I loaded up small backpacks and travelled to ten different countries in that short period of time. This was before the superfluous cellphone, so we had to hunt down internet cafes to keep in touch with people back home, and find directions to our next hotels. It was a fast-paced experience where we spent only a couple of nights in each of the many towns and cities we visited. We stayed in hostels, small hotel rooms, and even once at a grandmother’s spare bedroom. It was a great experience, but by the end of it, we were both exhausted.
This was when we were a lot younger and filled with an excess of energy. We have since gone on a lot of other adventures around the world. Some of them compared to the same pace, especially earlier on in our travels. As we grew older, we realized that this crazy pace was a great way to see a lot of things, but we could not keep it up for too long. We have since decided to take a different approach to our travels. It has been more of staying in one or two places for longer periods of time, and really getting to know what those places have to offer. But when you take a trip to Iceland, this is not the way to see it. We couldn’t just sit in one city and take small day trips if we really want to see all that it has to offer. Instead, we went for the option that more people took when visiting this faraway country, we rent a camper van and went roaming around to see the various sights while sleeping in a different camp ground every night in order to make sure we were able to cover all the ground. It forced us to go back to that go-go-go kind of travel that we left behind in our younger days, and it reminded me of the benefits and disadvantages of traveling this way.
First off, it is important to understand that there is a lot to see in Iceland, and if you stay in Reykjavik you can see a lot of cool stuff, but you will miss out on even more. Yes, many people see Iceland this way, but getting the camper van opens up those far away places that can’t be reached for on day trips, and adds the potential for more adventure. It allowed us to get off of the beaten path, and leave a lot of the tourist crowds behind. We were still able to see all of that cool stuff around Reykjavik, but go beyond that to the farther reaches where sometimes it felt like we were the only people that had seen that sight.
It also set us up for a lot more adventure. They come in various packages out in Iceland. There are the obvious ones where you go to visit one of the various sights and take the short hike to get out there, but there are those other one that only happen to you because you happen to be in the right place at the right time. Some of these adventures were fun for us; whereas, others are ones that we will look back on and laugh about. My favorite one would have had to have been being chased by an over-protective ram that was looking out for his lambs as we wandered close by in a large field of grass. It was never dangerous, but it forced us to take a longer way around so we did not disturb their grazing.
The food also offered other kinds of adventures. Most of the time, we were only able to afford fish and chips or hot dogs if we went out for a meal, but there were other times when we splurged on a good meal. My favorite had to be in the port town of Seydisfjordur where we ate at a fusion sushi restaurant which is often considered the best sushi restaurant on the island. I went thinking it would be like any other sushi restaurant that I had been to with the really fresh fish that they are able to find on the island, but they do things a little bit differently there. I was able to get a couple of great rolls, and there were some Korean dishes available on the menu, but the one item that we could not miss was the Hot Rock Sushi. A long time ago, the chef found some great volcanic rocks that they heated up with a gas torch. They then gave us some raw fish that we cooked on the heated up rock. It was different, but worked really well with the traditional soy sauce and wasabi.
Another dining adventure came outside of the town of Olfus called Ingolfsskali. It is housed in a traditional Viking longhouse and just by entering it, I felt like I was walking into the story of Beowulf. The place does not only offer great food, but it has a place outside where you can participate in axe throwing and archery. We weren’t allowed to take part in this feature the night that we were there because of the high winds at the time, but I am sure that there are enough times that you can see people throwing axes outside.
The food they serve is traditional Icelandic fare with silverware that looks as if it was recovered from the sight. They have many fish dishes as well as beef and lamb. There are definitely two types of crowds that make it to this restaurant. The earlier crowd is more of the family crowd, but things get a little more rowdy as the night progresses giving the longhouse even more atmosphere it deserves.
The influence of the Vikings is found everywhere on the Iceland as well. Some of them are authentic; whereas, some of them were created for movie sets, sometimes used, sometimes not. One was built by a movie studio next to Stokksnes black sand beach for a movie that was never completed. It still stands there and is open to the public to explore. Though I know that it has been built recently, it still feels authentic as it sits next to this otherworldly landscape.
It is that otherworldly landscape that is the real feature of Iceland. There are thermal-pools, waterfalls, cliffs, and beaches made from ground down volcanic rock. Everywhere I went, I felt as if I was a part of some movie set that was designed for another planet or another time. It is easy to see why so many movies and television shows are filmed out here, and the people of Iceland take advantage of it. There are many place where I felt as if I was in another story, instead of traveling around this country in the far north in nothing but a camper van.
The landscape would never take off a chance to remind me that Iceland was created from two continental plates converging together and creating a lot of volcanic activity in the process. All of the lava rock and black sand that is found everywhere forms unique formations when in hits to cold north Atlantic water. It creates these unique formations such as square columns, and lumpy fields of moss covered rocks that look like something out of Middle Earth. It makes the travels from each place just as exciting as arriving because it make you wonder what it is you will really see.
This is includes the waterfalls that are all over the place. Coming from Jordan where water is a precious commodity that should be conserved, it jarred me to see so much water. After the first day in the country where I saw waterfall after waterfall, I thought I would get tired of seeing them all of the time, but this was never the case. Just like the landscape, there are so many different kinds of waterfalls that each one that I visited was its own kind of experience. It made me think that maybe this island should have been named the land of waterfalls instead of this misnomer that it has been given.
Despite all of this amazing scenery and things to do, there is an important thing to understand about seeing Iceland from a camper van; it is not an easy experience. It is the perfect way to get from place to place and not worry about where you will be staying in the evening, but it is a small confined space. It can be hard to move around it, and with the ever changing weather, it is not always to best place to escape from it. This form of travel is for the sturdy, the romantic, and the youth of the world. It is a challenge that changed me for the experience, and one that was not always easy. My advice to anybody that wants to see this country through this kind of experience is to do it while you are young, and it will become one of those trips that you will never forget. It gets a little harder to do the older you get, and at moments, I was not having the fun I would have had in my youth.
Despite this small warning, Iceland in a camper van was a trip that forced me to transcend the simple, comfortable life that I had become accustomed to. I will always look back at this trip with fondness, and I will never forget all of the amazing things that I was lucky enough to see. It was the true adventure that I had not had for a long time, and it reminded me of what holidays could be like. I think on my next trip, I will go back to that slower pace, but every once in awhile, I think it will be important for me to get out there and try something new because these are the kinds of events that change us for the better. I am glad for this adventure, but I am also glad that I am back in a nice, warm home where I do not have to live in such a cramped space. The three weeks in a camper van made me appreciate that simple fact even more.
I wanted to test the love of my marriage, so I decided to travel around Iceland in a small van for two weeks. What could possibly go wrong?
There is a certain sense of Romanticism that is associated with this idea. You will get to share this tiny space with the one that you love. Everything you need is located in some crook or cranny, and the grassy lawn that you park next to will become your living room for the evening. During the day, you will get to travel around this amazing country, looking at the amazing landscape and enjoying the hikes while you never have to worry about where you are going to stay for the night because it is always with you.
We have both been looking forward to this experience. Our friends have done it in New Zealand, and Australia before, and Iceland is another place that was designed specifically for this kind of trip. They all said that they loved it, and we were sure that we would also enjoy the moments that we would have in the van. There were a couple of things that our friends did not tell us about traveling this way that would have given us a better start to our adventure.
It started at the company that we rented the van from. They were really friendly and gave us a lot of great tips for the trip. They even rented a couple of camping chairs, and a camping tables and some bedding gear to us to make our trip more enjoyable. This stuff went into the back of the van. We were so excited to get started that we threw our belongings in the back and took off down the road. We even stopped at a local grocery store to get food for the next couple of days, and threw that in the back as well.
We spent our first day driving to our first campsite while stopping at a couple of sights along the way. It wasn’t until we started to settle down for the night that we realized our mistake. The back of the van was a disorganized mess, and we were in the middle of a campsite with a steady drizzle going on. It took us a couple of days to get things organized, so it was no longer driving us crazy. After we got things organized, we were able to start living that Romantic ideal of traveling across a foreign country under our own terms and timeline.
So that is my advice to you if you are thinking about traveling by camper van across any of these great countries. Before you leave for your adventure, take some time to organize your van. It might take an hour or two, but it will save your sanity. Of course, the van is going to turn into a huge mess as you travel down the road, especially if you are living in it for three weeks, but you can have this moment at the beginning where it feels fresh and new like an adventure should feel like at the start. It will also help you find those little things that you need when you need them because even though it is a small space you are living in, you would be amazed at how fast those little things get lost.
It is a great way to experience a country because it adds a new element to the adventure, and I highly recommend doing it, but take that time and make sure you are doing it right. It is that little thing that will save any relationship out there.
Happy travels, and let me know which camping van companies you think are the best in the countries that you travel in. I will have a review on which one I think is best for Iceland and why at the end of this trip. I will be traveling using two different vans, and I am only in the first one right now.
John Collings 