A few weeks ago I shared all about what we did in Iceland and in Scotland, but I left out all the nitty gritty logistics that make a trip actually work. On the off chance that you’re ever traveling to one of these countries (which I highly recommend!), I thought sharing some of these might be useful. Regardless of how you choose to spend your time in either country, I think these tips could come in handy!
First up, Iceland!
1. Picking a time of year
We went to Iceland because we were headed to Scotland for a wedding, so we really didn’t have a choice in the time of year. However, September is already pretty cold in Iceland – average temperatures in the high 40s/low 50s, and it rained pretty much the whole time.
The summer is definitely a gentler time of year to go if you want a better chance of warmer and drier weather, plus the famously-long days (in September, the day length is about the same as September in Boston). Winter really starts in October, so anytime October – May is likely to be cold and snowy. This would be really cool if you like winter hiking (and of course you may get a glimpse of the northern lights, but we didn’t because it was too overcast), but if you’re looking for a less intrepid adventure then I’d suggest aiming for June – August. It’s also more crowded then, but there’s a reason for that!
2. To red eye or not to red eye
As mentioned, we went to Iceland because of a wedding in Scotland. Icelandair was the best fare to the UK from Boston, and the airline makes a big thing out of free stopovers in Reykjavik — so that’s how we decided to add Iceland to our itinerary. Like many arriving in the country, we also decided to take advantage of cheaper red eye ticket prices, so we left Boston at 9:30pm and arrived in Reykjavik at 6:30am local time.
Bright eyed and bushy tailed at 9:30pm
In addition to being cheaper, this had the advantage of not wasting a day traveling. However, I failed to think about the fact that 1) sleeping on airplanes can be hard, and 2) the time change means that the flight is actually only 5 hours, so even if you sleep it’s not for a full night. Fortunately I sleep very well on planes – I am actually a very nervous flyer, and so I take anti-anxiety medication that puts me at ease and when I’m already tired totally knocks me out. I had gotten up at 4:45am for a doctor’s appointment and then a full day of work, and so by 9:30pm I was asleep before the plane took off, and woke up just as it was landing.
Stay cool
Poor Sam wasn’t so lucky though, and was totally exhausted when we landed. So even though it was 6:30am and we had the whole day ahead of us, we ended up spending most of it just trying to recover from the fatigue (more on how we spent our first day in my first Iceland post). Plus we couldn’t check into our Airbnb until 2pm, so we had a lot of time to kill without a place to nap.
“Maybe we could sleep in a church pew without anyone noticing?” is the kind of question we found ourselves asking
SO, if you’re booking your own trip, just be realistic about how doable a red eye is for you and any travel companions. You might also decide to just eat the cost of an extra night of hotel/Airbnb for the night before you arrive, so that once you’re off the plane in the morning you can head straight there to nap and then have the whole afternoon ahead of you.
3. Renting a car vs taking tours
If you’re based out of Reykjavik like we were, you’re likely not going to want to spend more than half a day exploring the city — it’s lovely, but isn’t big enough to keep you occupied for more than that. Plus there is so much to see and do outside of the city, and that all requires some mode of transit. You can rely on public buses, but your better bets are either renting a car or signing up for tours. This totally depends on what you like to do. We opted for renting a car because we didn’t want to be beholden to a tour schedule, it let us see more for less money, and we didn’t have to hang out with other tourists as much. However, the tours often include doing cool things that are hard to do on your own when you’re on a short timeline, like spending an hour hiking on a glacier or snowmobiling.
Ultimately we were very happy we decided to rent a car. We saw a lot of awesome places, got off the beaten path, and only paid $190 for four days including insurance (which is less than a single day tour for the two of us would have cost). Plus driving in Iceland proved to be very easy (says the designated passenger, but still Sam said it was easy). The roads are quite navigable, there’s little traffic, and they drive on the right side (which is good for us as Americans). Just be sure you specify that you need an automatic transmission when you book if you can’t drive stick, since standard transmission is much more common in Europe.
This is what driving a car looks like
Parking in the city was also quite easy – it’s free on most city streets (including right in front of our apartment) from 6pm to 9am, and very easy to find a spot. During the day you can pay 150 krona (~$1.33) per hour to park, or park for free at the parking lot next to Hallgrímskirkja (the iconic church in Reykjavik – see my first Iceland post for more). Since we were out exploring most days, we were able to pay for just a few hours of parking a day, which was just fine.
We booked our car through Auto Europe from a company called Procar. We specified our arrival time with them, and they were there to greet us at the airport and shuttle us to the car about 5 minutes away. When telling them your pickup time, just add about 30 minutes to your flight arrival time to account for getting your bags, immigration, and customs (which are very fast). I found Auto Europe to be very good and reputable. In the lead-up to the trip I called them with a question, and they answered literally on the first ring and answered my question in less than a minute.
We got Sam an international driving permit from AAA beforehand, which was $20. I’m not sure it’s required in Iceland because they didn’t seem too interested in it when we handed it to them, but it’s definitely required in the UK so we needed it regardless.
4. Where to stay
We used Airbnb for our two main rentals in Iceland and Scotland (with hotels for just a few one-off nights when transiting between airports, plus an actual castle for the wedding we were in Scotland for).
I’ll do separate a post with more details on the places we stayed, but wanted to share a bit more generally about deciding to use Airbnb. I was nervous about using Airbnb for international travel, and also there are a lot of concerns surfacing around Airbnb’s issues of racism and displacement (this piece is an interesting start if this is news to you).
In terms of the safety/reliability piece, I only booked places that had many many positive reviews (too many to fabricate). In terms of the moral side of things, I booked these places almost a year ago before these debates started to intensify, and both our hosts only have one listing each, which means that neither are directly contributing to the multi-listing phenomenon that is most contributing to skyrocketing housing prices and displacement. However, I wish I had done more research beforehand to understand whether Reykjavik and Helensburgh are cities that are suffering from Airbnb in the ways that cities like San Francisco, New York, and Boston are. Also, my use of Airbnb is supporting the company as a whole regardless of whether these hosts and cities aren’t themselves part of the problem, so I’m not sure it totally matters if I’m being selective in where and from whom I choose to rent. I need to do some deep thinking about whether Airbnb is a company I will continue to support. (The same goes for Uber, which I love for its prices and convenience — but similarly to Airbnb, at what societal cost?)
I will say that we loved both our rentals, and purely for price and convenience Airbnb is a great option because you can get an entire house/apartment to yourself (so enough room for cooking and spending time relaxing, which is nice on a long trip), and at a really affordable price (ours were $348 for three nights in Iceland and $316 for four nights in Scotland, which is far less than any hotel would ever be plus the amenities of a kitchen etc).
So in conclusion: I found Airbnb to be a great alternative to hotels for our trip and I loved our hosts, I’m just not sold on it being a company I can really stand behind.
5. A few helpful apps
Two apps that we found very helpful were “Globe Convert Free” (which is a currency converter) and “Here” (which is a maps app that lets you navigate while offline).
The currency converter app was super helpful to avoid having to repeatedly do currency conversions in our heads – right now the exchange rate is 1 Icelandic krona for every .0087 US dollars, which is just not easy math to do all the time.
6. Printing in advance versus wifi
I made a binder of key documents before we left, including plane tickets, hotel and rental car confirmations, and ideas for things to do. This was super helpful because when we were out on the road, it let us take a look without worrying about internet connectivity (since we don’t have an international data plan).
However, pretty much everywhere has free wifi, so you don’t have to stress too much about being without data on your phone. Of course we wanted to get off the grid and disconnect a bit, but when you’re planning on the fly it’s also really helpful to be able to duck into a gas station, connect to wifi, and look up a place you remember reading about and want to visit.
7. Food is crazy expensive, but there’s no tipping
Food in Iceland is so expensive — like $20 for an average lunchtime entree, and closer to $40 for an average dinner entree. Because we rented an Airbnb, we had a kitchen. That meant we could buy some groceries for our breakfasts, and do cheaper take away meals for dinner when we wanted. We did have one incredible meal out (which I shared more about in my first post), but we didn’t go too crazy otherwise.
However, keep in mind that there’s no tipping expected or desired in Iceland, so assuming you’re a 20% tipper (which we are, unless service is bad in which case we can barely bring ourselves to do like 19%), a $20 entree is actually $16.67 — still pricey, but a bit more reasonable.
8. Speaking of food…the coffee is so tiny
The coffee in Iceland comes in incredibly tiny cups.
Our first night in Iceland we watched an episode of the documentary series Chef’s Table on Netflix where the (American) chef was remarking that American cuisine is basically poor ingredients and huge portions, and I have to agree. But switching cold turkey to tiny coffees while navigating a new country was just not going to cut it. If you are also a bit coffee-addicted, I recommend buying some coffee at the grocery store and making it yourself each morning. You could also pack a travel mug (we failed to do so) so you can take it adventuring with you. I wish we had!
9. Spend some time in advance studying Icelandic
This is something I didn’t do, and wish I’d done. Everyone in Iceland speaks English fluently so it’s not necessary to get around, but a) I always think it’s nice to try to learn the local language a little bit when you’re traveling, and b) all the place names are in Icelandic and are quite a mouthful to pronounce. That makes it harder to have a conversation with a local about directions or advice without sounding like a total idiot.
Even just spending an hour before I left learning a little pronunciation and some basics would have made me feel like less of a dumb tourist (which I totally am, but it’s fun to pretend otherwise sometimes).
10. There are a lot of helpful travel blogs
Lastly, when researching how to spend our short time in Iceland, I found a few particularly helpful travel blogs:
These were much more informative than some of the more high level travel write-ups I tended to find in DIY-focused blogs.
Those are my tips for Iceland!
Okay, now onto Scotland!
1. Picking a time of year
September is warmer in Scotland than it is in Iceland, as least in the south — more like 50s and low 60s each day. We were also lucky with a fair amount of sunshine. However, I know it can often be very rainy, so the summer months are also probably a safer bet if you want to spend a lot of time outdoors. To us it felt like a nice improvement over chillier Iceland, but if you were coming straight from early fall in the U.S. it would feel cold in comparison.
2. Getting to Scotland
There are a lot of ways to get to Scotland (for instance, we considered taking the train from London), but ultimately it seemed fastest and cheapest to just fly. However, as I wrote about in my post about Scotland, we missed our connecting flight from Heathrow to Edinburgh. We’d left 2 hours for our layover, but one big issue was that we had bought our tickets from Heathrow to Edinburgh (on British Airways) separately than our tickets from Reykjavik to Heathrow (on Iceland Air). So we actually had to go through customs when we arrived in London, reclaim our checked bag, and then try to check it again. Also because we’d booked separately, there was no one to hold responsible but ourselves when we missed our flight and so we had to pay for the unexpected hotel and would have had to pay a change fee if the BA agent hadn’t taken pity on us.
His advice was to book through a travel agent if you’re going to use multiple airlines, but that wouldn’t have worked in our case because we booked the tickets on Icelandair so much earlier than when we decided to fly from Heathrow to Edinburgh. So in conclusion, if you are taking one airline to get to London and then another to get up to Edinburgh, leave yourself plenty of time for the layover!
3. Driving in Scotland
Like in Iceland, we rented a car. However, the driving was a lot harder — driving on the left was obviously a new adventure, and the roads are also quite narrow and people drive very fast. Plus in the countryside, expect sheep-related obstacles.
We’re still glad we rented a car because it let us see more of the countryside, but it’s not as much of a no-brainer as renting a car in Iceland was.
4. Where to stay
Obviously, you should stay in a castle.
But if you can’t , Airbnb works well too. See my thoughts about Airbnb in the Iceland section above.
5. Helpful apps
See my thoughts above about the currency converter app, but unfortunately the “Here” offline map app doesn’t work in Scotland yet. Instead we paid for a GPS with our car, which added cost but was so necessary.
6. Food
Make sure to have Indian cuisine while you’re in Scotland. We ate out at Annaya’s Indian Grillhouse when we were in Helensburgh, and it was incredible.
7. Travel blogs
I didn’t find as many helpful travel blogs about the kinds of things we wanted to do in Scotland as I did for Iceland. But TripAdvisor is relatively decent, and there are a lot of decent resources online if you just google around for specific things you’re interesting in like hiking (“walking” in Scotland) or castles.
In general, we found Scotland to be much easier to navigate and more familiar than Iceland, minus the driving — so I don’t have as many helpful tips. But hopefully the ones above prove useful for any future travels!
So those are my travel tips for Iceland and Scotland! If you’ve been to either and have anything to add, I’d love to hear it!
Excellent pictures!
Thanks Poppop!
When I was driving in Ireland I found switching sides of the road was easy, and so was switching back after three weeks, and I wondered if this had to do with being left-handed and accustomed to switching instructions in my head. The sheep, though, were certainly troublesome. They think they own the road.
Ooh, very interesting hypothesis! Sam didn’t find the switch to be as hard as doing it combined with the narrow roads. Just keeping him on his toes! 🙂
I’m trying to find the post which featured all you did in Iceland, not the most recent one, which i shared. I wanted to share it with a friend. Hope you can help.
David
Thanks David! There’s a link in the first sentence of this post, hope that helps and thanks for reading!