It is not a good idea to plan your trip to Iceland—or any trip, really—without having confirmation your itinerary actually works once you get there.
It’s an even worse idea to make these choices when tourism in Iceland is at its peak. The chances of you becoming trapped by your bad decisions grows exponentially with every hour.
But it is a thing I did anyway. Strangely, it ended up working out.
At th beginning of 2023, my wife and I agreed we should go somewhere in Europe. The COVID-19 pandemic had mostly let up, and traveling had become less dangerous. Maybe Iceland? It was a good idea. Something to think about.
Then we forgot about it. Suddenly, it was May 2023, and we had only 7 months left in which to plan an international trip.
We had decided on Iceland because it was supposed to be nice in the summer. This is how we planned our trip to South Africa and our honeymoon in Hawaii, and it seemed to be a decent constraint to use when figuring out where to go. After discussing it with some friends, we decided it would be fun to do a couples trip with them in mid-August. Iceland was on my friend’s bucket list, and a visit to a Scandanavian-adjacent country on mine. It seemed a natural fit.
Typically, I don’t travel without meticulous planning—spreadsheets, confirmation numbers, and credit card statements. This is not how it went this time.
Unfortunately, these details turned out to be pretty important when planning a trip to Iceland, especially in the summer months. It turned out we were arriving in Reykjavik the same weekend the city was holding its Pride festival, driving the Ring Road, and then returning the weekend the city was holding its cultural festival. In practice, this meant that almost every single person in Iceland would be in Reykjavik the same weekend we were—and the availability of hotels in and around the city reflected that.
Lodging and attractions can also become sparse outside of Reykjavik, the largest city. The farther east you go, the fewer people there are. There are still places for tourists to stay, but because there were so many tourists in Iceland that particular week, we were all competing for the same set of accommodations.
As we continued booking our Ring Road trip, our options dwindled. The bottleneck in booking was Vik, the largest town in the south of Iceland. With only 1,000 people living there, Vik was not suited to handle the influx of travelers, and lodging options dried up quickly.
Upon learning this, our friends questioned whether we should be booking this trip at this time. Maybe we could go next year?
I should at this point tell you that I’ve been hiding a secret about this trip. I have been lying to you, and I also lied to my friends about why we wanted to take this trip.
The fact was, we had to plan the trip in summer 2023. There was no other option. Our friends, not fully understanding why we were so adamant about planning the trip in this way, probably suspected something, but went along with the ridiculous charade of trying to make things work.
We searched for something—anything—that was open the day we would be driving through Vik, because the alternative was driving from slightly east of Reykjavik up to Egilsstaðir, a trip that would take over 12 hours. That was a little far even for us.
I finally found what looked like a place that would take four people for one night—a guesthouse in Vík run by a woman named Gudrun. I quickly booked the rooms along with the rest of the trip, shut my laptop, and went to bed. Despite the constraints we had placed around planning a drive around Iceland, we had managed to make it work.
Iceland is the America of your childhood
I had made a mistake. The next morning, I received an email from Gudrun, the owner of the guesthouse. Apparently, there had been an error on the website. She only had a room for two people available, and wanted to refund my booking. A wave of anxiety hit me as I realized this threw our entire trip in turmoil.
Luckily, Gudrun had a solution.
“I contacted a friend of mine who has a small inn called Like Vík, and she has two rooms for you,” Gudrun wrote to me in an email. “I asked her to save it for me. Would you please contact me quickly?”
Gudrun had also called me at 6 am ET and left a voicemail. I was not awake at 6 am, and woke up to what I assumed was a spam phone call left on my phone. I listened to it anyway. I learned that the guesthouse actually belongs to her neighbor across the street.
Checking the website of the new guesthouse Gudrun mentioned, I saw there were no available rooms. More anxiety. Was she just trying to pass me off to someone else who also didn’t have space?
I wrote back to Gudrun, thanking her for letting me know. Was there any chance she could confirm the room at the other guesthouse before I canceled with her? We were coming a long way.
“I’ve booked you two rooms at Like Vík,” she wrote back. Her neighbor was on vacation in Paris and would be home next week.
“Don’t worry,” she added.
Don’t worry. Gudrun doesn’t know me. How I live my life. This situation just went to the top of my list of things to worry about.
I realized I would need to call Gudrun. How would that work? I had never called Iceland before. Am I allowed to call Iceland on my phone? It didn’t matter, I had to know for sure if we actually had a place to stay.
I hit dial on Gudrun—no area code, just a country code and a seven digit number. A woman on the other end answered the phone with some hesitation. I introduced myself as the person she was having a conversation with over email about rebooking with another guesthouse.
“And you said this is your neighbor?” I asked.
“Yes. I spoke with her and she said it was okay,” Gudrun said.
This reminded me briefly of my childhood—phone numbers without area codes, close relationships with neighbors. I imagined Gudrun shouting out her front door at her neighbor to see if her guesthouse was available on the night we were staying. Her neighbor nods sagely and an accord is made.
We needed a little more than that. I asked for her name and phone number. Hrönn, she repeated. It is Icelandic for “wave,” and is a beautiful name. I could not and still cannot pronounce it for the life of me.
I asked Gudrun to spell Hrönn’s name. As she began pronouncing each individual letter in Icelandic, I immediately realized this was a waste of time for both of us.
English and Icelandic have similar alphabets, but anyone who speaks more than one language can tell you the letters will be pronounced differently. “H-r-ö-n-n” in Icelandic roughly sounds like “how-err-uhr-en-en” when said aloud. This was not helpful. I politely waited until she was done.
“Okay, thank you,” I said. I hung up with Gudrun and sighed.
Guesthouse, or literally just someone’s house
I decide I’m going to have our group spend the night in this woman’s neighbor’s house.
I managed to get Hrönn on the line, even though she was supposed to be in Paris. Hrönn was very nice, and we had an easier time conversing in English than with Gudrun. She understood the situation and sent an email to me confirming that our rooms for the night were secure, which was enough to convince my wife and friends that we would not be sleeping in the car. o
Can I really trust a woman thousands of miles away with a critical night on vacation? We really didn’t have any other option.
I told my friends and my wife the plan. They were behind it, and the idea of flying without a safety net. Also, we told our friends that my wife was pregnant. We had kept the secret because my wife was not that far along, and had not yet hit the 12-week mark when pregnancies are considered to be out of the “danger zone” where a miscarriage could occur. We lied for a socially acceptable reason. Not really, but just go with it.
Would she be okay traveling around an entire country at 20 weeks along? Were they okay with the bait and switch? Too late, we already booked everything! It’d probably be fine.
It was with that low-key dread that I spent our first few days in Iceland wondering if the rest of the trip was possible. We got to see the highlights of Reykjavik, the Golden Circle, and thousands of puffins getting ready to migrate for the winter.
As we pulled away from Reynisfjara, the black sand beach, we were a short drive away from Vík and meeting Hrönn. The moment of truth.
We pulled into a neighborhood and parked in front of the guesthouse. Which was Hrönn’s house. We were staying at her house.
It was too late to back out now. We opened the door and introduced ourselves. Hrönn, a lovely older Icelandic woman, welcomed us into her house and showed us around. She and her husband lived downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs were for her guests.
The common bathroom downstairs was also for guests, which meant each of us needed to do a walk of shame if we wanted to shower, pee, or attempt something more serious. Pooping at Hrönn’s was like pooping at grandma’s house—she knows you do it, but you don’t want her to know you did it.
We decided to make the most of it. It wasn’t bad, just unexpected. I opened the door to our bedroom and was greeted with two twin beds. In retrospect, it makes sense that she would have separate beds for her guests considering not everyone who’d stay with her is partnered or married. But in this case, it meant my wife and I had to sleep in separate beds like we were living in a 1960s American sitcom.
“Maybe we could push the two twin beds together?” I suggested. My wife shook her head no. This was not our house in which to move furniture around. This was Hrönn’s house.
We started bringing in our luggage, removing our shoes at the front door for each trip in and out. I looked out the window and saw another house across the street. I wondered if it was where Gudrun lived, where the accord of our stay with Hrönn had taken place.
I switched my phone off the mifi device we had acquired at the car rental booth and onto the house wifi. It wasn’t good. Regardless, we had made it, and had a place to stay for the night.
Exploring Vik
My friend and I needed beer. As we took our Škoda Kodiaq into town, we found a gas station and a grocery store. At the Krónan discount store, we found clothes and groceries, but no beer. A quick internet search confirmed we would need to visit the local Vínbúðin for that. Google describes Vínbúðin as an “alcohol retail monopoly,” which sounds archaic until you realize the two of us have lived in Pennsylvania for most of our lives. Purchasing alcohol at inconvenient hours is just business as usual.
Returning with our purchases, we quizzed Hrönn and her daughter, who had come to visit, about our dinner options.
“There is a restaurant up the street,” she said. Great. “But you need to call and make a reservation.” Not so great. All our phones were on airplane mode.
“I’ll call and make a reservation for you.” Hrönn dialed the restaurant and made the reservation in Icelandic.
“It’s under my name,” she said, hanging up. She spelled it again when we asked her for a brief lesson in Icelandic pronunciation. A silence hung in the air after she finished before she added, “You’ll have to practice.”
Reflections on travel
I managed to get us seated through context clues, naming both the guesthouse we were staying in and the time of the reservation. Learning Hrönn’s name would have to come some other time.
As someone who lives lamb and/or fish, Iceland is a culinary delight. Restaurant Suður-Vík was pricey, but we had decided early on in our trip to lean into the cost and enjoy the experience for what it was. When would we have another opportunity to drive the Ring Road again? Probably never.
Returning from dinner, we ran into Hrönn and her husband watching TV in their living room. One by one, each one of us used the downstairs bathroom to shower, cognizant of the fact that anything we did in there would be immediately apparent to both of them. When it was my turn to shower, I threw my insecurities to the wind, hoping that by pooping before my shower, the smell would not creep into their living room as they were watching the nightly news.
After a few beers in our upstairs common area—since the midnight sun made it seem like it was only around 5 pm—we retired to our respective twin beds and tried to get to sleep without the aid of blackout curtains. I looked at my wife in the small bed on the other side of the room and waved goodnight to her.
The next morning, Hrönn greeted us with a beautifully presented Icelandic breakfast: meats, cheeses, eggs, fruits, vegetables, toast, waffles, and jam along with yogurt and cereal. We avoided a conversation about Donald Trump—a topic I’ve found people in other countries love to ask Americans. I never know how to explain America to people who don’t live there. There really isn’t much to say, I said. He’s not the president anymore.
Hrönn asked us where we were heading next. To Egilsstaðir, I said. She made a face. It was my pronounciation. Farther along the Ring Road, I offered.
“There is some volcanic activity in that region,” Hrönn said. She told us what website to check so we would have the latest information. We were also entering areas of the country where we would have no cell phone or internet service at all, so we should be prepared for anything, she told us.
We spent a polite amount of time talking with Hrönn, talking about her life, her retirement, and about Iceland in general, before it was time to get on the road and start our 8-hour drive to Egilsstaðir.
Packing the car up again—shoes off in the house between trips—my thoughts turned to how what could have been an awful disaster was actually an unforgettable experience in disguise. I know my travel companions would have preferred a hotel to where we stayed for the night. But Hrönn turned out to be an amazing host, and she was able to help chart a course for our next destination. In an era where travelers are prone to sticking to recommendations they found online, it was nice to switch off and have a more analog experience for a change.
Would I recommend you stay at Hrönn’s house? Absolutely. Staying in someone’s house in Vik might even bring you closer to that feeling you had as a child where everyone in your town knew everybody else.
Just do a bit more planning than we did—and maybe be more upfront with your travel companions if you’re pregnant.