Day 9 & 10: The Last Days/Tips & Tricks

Our last two days in Iceland were spent on the west coast of the island, mostly in the small town of Stykkisholmur. We didn't get to do all of the things we planned to do along the way, as driving from Akureyri to Stykkisholmur took much longer than we expected (most of the 4.5 hour drive was on gravel roads so we had to reduce our speed, and we also had some car trouble). Once we got to town around 5pm we spent some time walking around (it was ANOTHER

beautiful day) and were able to climb up to see the Stykkishomur church, which is famous for its modern architecture. We also visited an amazing bakery, Nesbraud ehf, which we definitely recommend if you're in town!

We woke up the next morning and continued our drive down the coast, stopped into Reykjavik one last time and then headed to the airport for our flight back home. We can't believe how fast the time went, but I honestly think it was one of the best trips I've ever been on.

Some other things we had planned to do in the west but didn't get a chance to were going to see the Kirkjufell waterfall and do a few hikes in Hellnar/Snaefellsjokull National Park.

Not a very exciting blog post, so I thought this would be a good time to list some tips/tricks we learned about along the way that might help other people on their trips!

-Gas stations are WAY more frequent than we originally thought, but we definitely recommend getting a diesel car (a full tank lasted us over 900km)
-BRING LAYERS, I cannot stress this enough- sometimes on a hike you'll start off wearing a hat, mittens, sweater, rain coat and then 10 minutes later you'll be stripping off to your t-shirt (there's a saying in Iceland "if you don't like the weather, just wait 5 minutes")
-If you're a coffee drinker, bring a travel mug with you because the coffee cups at gas stations/cafes are TINY. So if you have your own to fill up you'll get much more for the same price!
-Food at restaurants is very expensive (a burger and fries is easily $25) so we would go to Bonus (a popular grocery store in most towns) and stock up on peanut butter, bread, bananas, crackers, granola bars, trail mix etc. that we could eat throughout the day and then only had one sit down meal at night
-On the same topic, the food is amazing. We were worried since we're not seafood lovers that it'd be hard to find options, but every restaurant had a wide variety of options and we were never disappointed with a meal
-Sheep are EVERYWHERE and are almost always traveling in sets of 3. So if you see one sheep on the side of the road, there's a good chance there will be two more right behind it so make sure you're careful when driving!
-If you do have some money to spend, you should definitely try to book a couple of tours. There is a LOT that you can do for free and on your own, but we had some awesome experiences doing a mixture of both
-If you only have 5-6 days in Iceland, you might want to spend most of it in the south instead of trying to do the entire ring road. There is SO much to do in the south and having to rush and skip certain things just to do the entire thing would not be ideal. We even ran out of time doing it in 10 days
-Get an Icelandic GPS with your rental car unless you are extremely confident in your abilities to read a map. It made our trip SO much easier (and definitely saved a few arguments)