Despite my best intentions I didn’t get to post regular updates from my recent trip to Iceland. This was because of some long days, poor bandwidth and just needing to cook, eat and do things like, oh, take a shower.

Having been back a couple of weeks, with a weeklong business trip thrown in, I’ve been able to sort through all my images and pick out the ones I want to share. I recently posted these all up to Flickr at https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAZs2x. But those are just images, and here I also get a chance to tell the story behind the images.

So why go to Iceland in the first place? Well, it is now well known as a landscape photographers paradise, quite rightly so. But my first efforts go back 30 years when I owned a Land Rover and lived in the UK.

I had a plan to take it to Iceland via the Demark – Iceland ferry. It was an ambitious idea at the time, and I needed to be able to share the costs. And I could never get anyone else interested. These days a Facebook post would network people with a goal like that together. But in 1992? Forget it. So that plan withered on the vine and seemingly died.

That didn’t stop me doing other things, like mountaineering and white water kayaking though.

Early this year (2023) I finally realized that the time had come for me to go to Iceland, and a plan for a 10 day trip around the ring road in a campervan was hatched for October. This was perhaps a bit aggressive in terms of scheduling, but travelling in October is outside peak season, and many of the summer campsites are closed. This ends up setting how long each leg ends up being. So, in the end it all worked out quite well. I viewed the whole trip as like an Iceland sampler. A bit of everything, but nothing in depth.

I flew out on icelandair from Boston. Flights heading East are always red-eyes, leaving around 8:00 pm or so. The flight is about 6 hours, which meant I arrived at about 6:00 am local time, or about 02:00 am Boston time. Day one was going to be rough, and I figured I had about till 4:00 pm local time before I hit the wall. Wherever I was going to go, I needed to be there by then.

After waiting for rental place to open & getting picked up by the rental shuttle I hit the road, first heading towards the supermarket to stock up, and then on to Reykjavik and out towards the Skogar campsite, my first overnight stop of the trip.

Shopping didn’t quite go according to plan. I was tired, dehydrated and to be honest a bit bewildered wandering around a strange supermarket and trying to translate everything. But I did manage to get the essentials that would see me through the next few days. And coffee. Can’t live without coffee.

Of course, I hadn’t come all this way just to drive on the first day of the trip. I had a photography backpack packed with camera gear, and I was going to use it!

First stop was Gluggafoss. When I arrived, I basically had the place to myself, and it was awesome to get out in the fresh air after the being stuck in a long metal tube to get to Iceland, and then to be stuck in a metal box to get to Gluggafoss.

Despite my best laid plans to get to the campsite by 4:00 pm, I ended up not leaving Gluggafoss until 3:30 pm, and it was about an hour to the campsite.

Nonetheless, I made it in one piece. The campsite is really just the carpark for the Skogafoss waterfall, but there were clean toilets, facilities for washing dishes and all things considered it was just fine.

After cooking a pasta dinner I started getting the van sorted out for sleeping. This is when I quickly learned that the small van life requires being very organized with the limited space available. The way I had organized things for packing really didn’t work for living in the van.

For packing, I organized things by what they were, grouping like with like. In the van I quickly discovered I really needed things organized by when I needed them, like first thing in the morning and at the end of the day. It took about 5 days to finally figure out how to organize things.

I finally got to sleep around 8:00 pm, after having been on the go and basically without sleep for about 34 hours.

Stay tuned for the next exciting installment!