I flew from Des Moines to Minneapolis/St. Paul and met up with Martie, a long-time friend from college, as she had a later flight from Kansas City. Flights from Wichita, Martie’s closest airport, were a few hundred dollars more than KC. We then had an uneventful flight to Reykjavik. We were given a late supper meal onboard, tried to get a little sleep, then landed at Reykjavik the following morning.

I am going to organize this blog by topic rather than each day. We stayed for two days in Reykjavik, then rented a car and spent ten days driving completely around the country on Route 1.

We absolutely loved the beautiful countryside and the friendly, helpful Icelandic people.

Each day, we had a list of things to see and places to stop, and we mostly accomplished our busy schedule. Our travel agent, Jeni Schrimsher, set up our hotel rooms for each night, but we planned what we wanted to do using Google Maps, a large paper map, a guide book, and lots of YouTube videos with suggestions.

It was more work to plan our own itinerary, but we preferred the flexibility of this to a bus excursion.