As awesome as my trip to Iceland was—and it was awesome!—I do have a few regrets, things I could have done that would have made this amazing trip even more amazing.
Note: Links in this post may be affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission, at no extra charge to you, if you make a purchase through such a link. Learn more here.
I’m not talking about how I missed seeing the Northern Lights; that was pretty much out of my control. My pre-trip research suggested that a ten-day trip would maximize the chance of seeing them without needing to declare bankruptcy. The facts that my visit coincided with a supermoon, and that the weather turned for the second half of my trip… well, there’s nothing I could do about that. So I have no regrets there.
That said, there were a few things I could have done to improve the experience—in some cases improving the experience at the time, in others improving my memories of the trip.
1. I wish I’d reserved a room for the night I arrived.
I have said in a couple different places that I really struggled through those first several hours. The plane landed right around 4:00 a.m. on December 31, and, even taking my time—I sat down for a quiet coffee in the airport, and my rental car company’s office was off-site—I was still left with an eight-hour stretch before check-in at my first guesthouse (and, given the confusion around my arrival time, it turned out to be closer to ten hours before I got the room).
That was just too much time. For one thing, I wasn’t prepared for the long night. I knew intellectually that the sun wouldn’t rise until 10:30 or so, but it was still disorienting to be walking a park in midnight-level darkness at 8:30 in the morning. And without a specific place to go, driving around Reykjavík actually created an almost dream-like disconnection from the city. On top of that, it was both Sunday and New Year’s Eve day, so almost nothing was open. I grew progressively more tired—by the time I got my room I’d been up 26 hours or so—and that made the disorientation even worse.
I needed a specific destination and the opportunity for a quick nap. Getting a room for the night of Dec. 30, even though I’d not have arrived until 6:00 the next morning, would have allowed both.
2. I wish I’d spent more time mastering my camera before the trip.
I bought a new Canon G7 X Mark II specifically for the trip. Now that I’m home, I kind of wish I’d chosen a DSLR—I suddenly have a hankering to experiment with lenses—but the G7 X, which is basically a high-powered point-and-shoot, was perfect for the trip. Indeed, if I’d bought a DSLR, I’m sure I’d be complaining about that here.
Either way, I should have spent more time with the camera before I left.
I had worked my way through the manual, and taken a few practice shots. But the camera is complicated, and, in the heat of the moment, I couldn’t remember how to access some fairly basic things. For those who followed my Facebook feed, the most obvious issue is white balance—pretty much every photo of the snow was tinted blue. I’ve been able to adjust that in Photoshop—hooray for technology!—but I didn’t figure out the problem until I got home. Similarly, I had forgotten how to capture some fairly simple effects—for example, the fairly common effect of blurred water passing over rocks. I just needed to have practiced a bit more so that I’d be able to remember the technique when away from the manual and YouTube.
More important, though, I wish I’d spent a lot more time learning to talk into the camera. I am baffled by how self-conscious I am when filming myself. Even when I committed that no one would ever see my practice footage—even when I promised myself that I would erase it without even looking at it—I would just freeze up when I turned the camera onto my face. And so I gave up even practicing, as if I would somehow figure it out when it really mattered.
So my footage shifted as the trip went on, moving (very quickly) from video with narration, to silent panning (B roll, basically), to video out the windshield as I drove, to still photos. For my trip north, as I’m sure some have noticed, I didn’t even have enough video to put together a montage.
3. I wish I’d paid more attention to the guy with the YouTube video about crazy food prices in Iceland.
Though I saw this video about the high food prices in Reykjavík, it didn’t really click with me for some reason. I don’t think I ever got past the shock of menus with appetizers that cost more than high-priced entrees back home.
The solution was pretty easy, thankfully: buy groceries! Unfortunately, it took me a couple days to figure that out, and the cost of food on that first day—especially since so few places were even open—contributed to the disorientation I felt, perhaps even pushing it into the realm of actual fear. Indeed, of the total amount of money I spent in Iceland (not including lodging and car), I’d probably spent one-fourth to one-third of it by the time the fireworks started.
4. I should not have scheduled the two two-night stays back to back.
This is a hard one, actually, since both of the two-night stays included high points from the trip. As I wrote elsewhere, the first enabled me to see the lighthouse at Kálfshamarsvík, which is one of my favorite places; the second allowed me to spend some time with an Icelandic family, something I didn’t get to do much of since most of my Airbnbs turned out to be guesthouses (hotels-light, more or less) using the site to book rooms.
That said, I spent the fourth day in the north just sitting around the house. It was beautiful and relaxing, and perhaps I needed that relaxation. But I could have seen a little more of the country if I’d shifted a day from the north to the south.
5. I need to be more adventurous.
There are few things I could have done, were I not a self-conscious wimp:
- As I’ve noted, a lot of highway accidents in Iceland are caused by idiots stopping in the middle of the road to take pictures. There are very few turn-offs, just relatively narrow two-lane roads with narrow shoulders that slouch into deep ditches. Nonetheless, there were a few spots where the shoulder was wide enough to pull over. Invariably, I would just pass them by and then kick myself for having done so. I guess we’re really only talking about a few missed photo opportunities, but still. The roads were relatively deserted, and it wouldn’t have been that big a deal.
- At Seljalandsfoss—this was the first waterfall, which people can walk behind in the summer—there was a wooden staircase that climbed up about half the height of the falls. It was cordoned off as icy and dangerous, so I passed it by. But there were quite a few people who nonetheless climbed up for the view. I should have been one of them.
- Instead of lazing around the house on the last day in the north, I should have driven out to one of the natural hot springs. In the end, the only hot spring I went to was the Blue Lagoon, which is man made.
- I should have visited an ice cave.
- The last night—relaxed from the Blue Lagoon, a little melancholic about leaving the next day, and a little unwilling to walk in the rain—I decided not to walk the city after dinner. I was in Hafnarfjordur, a suburb of Reykjavík, but for some reason, I thought it was just another part of Reykjavík, and that there wouldn’t be that much to see. On the drive out I discovered that this was wrong—it was a beautiful port town. I would have enjoyed seeing it on foot.
Sometimes my timidity was a good thing. I had originally booked a room on a small island off the south coast—a bit northwest of the lighthouse at Dyrhólaey—but I learned that it required a ferry to get across, and that this was vulnerable to weather. I felt a bit unadventurous replacing that reservation with another—though, as it turned out, the wind was so strong that night that the ferry was canceled, as I’d feared it might be. I learned this because some of the guests with reservations at my Airbnb didn’t show up because they’d been stranded on that island.
All in all, the beauty of Iceland covers a multitude of sins. All these less-than-perfect choices aren’t really that important in the long run.
Now I just have to figure out how to get back for a summer visit.
This is one in a series of six posts about a 10-day trip I made to Iceland in early 2018. The first four describe the actual trip; the last two reflect on my experiences:
- Iceland: New Year’s in Reykjavik
- Iceland: South and back
- Iceland: A Taste of the north
- Iceland: The last leg of the journey
- Reflections on my Iceland trip, part 1: Some good choices
- Reflections on my Iceland trip, part 2: Some room for improvement