The only problem with doing a self-drive experience in Iceland is that you have to actually drive. The island itself isn’t hard to get around (providing the roads aren’t snowed out). Being able to pack up and move at your leisure, having access to any of the things you brought as you need them is wonderful (we’ve taken to keeping our snowpants on hand at all times in case the weather gives us a cold shoulder). And having the freedom to choose where and when to go places makes travel awesome.
We had to stop by the waterfall we spotted the day before and get a full shot of it.
The main “problem” is that when you wake up in Skaftafell after watching the northern lights through the new-born hours of the day, and you know you have a four hour drive a head of you, part of you wishes that someone had already created that teleportation machine so that you didn’t have to worry about the actual drive.
Of course that part of you doesn’t realize that the nice thing about a four hour drive is that you get four hours of beautiful scenery and the ability to stop and take pictures anywhere you want. Our approach was to stop every 30 minutes, get out, stretch, and take a picture because, we figured, that’s about as far as you can go before it looks like you’re somewhere completely different.
After we’d been on the road for about an hour, driving for maybe thirty minutes, and stopping three times off schedule to take pictures at whim, we realized the detriment to our approach was that we really wanted to take pictures every ten minutes or so.
Be sure to pay special attention to the times in the slideshow above. We tried to take one at least every 30 minutes, and in some cases much quicker. Hopefully this gives you a sense of the drastic shifts in landscape can be over the span of just a few minutes sometimes. The gallery should be in chronological starting with our first stop at 11:30am